I wanted the right words so much that it was pain when they wouldn't answer my wish, for I seemed to hear only a faint, far-off echo of some fine strain of music, whose real notes I failed to catch.
Always forests have fascinated me; sweet, fairy-peopled groves of my native island, and emerald-lit beech woods of England. But I never felt the grand meaning of forests as I felt them to-day, in this ravaged and tortured land. I could have cried out to them: "Oh, you forests of France, what a part you've played in the history of wars! How wise and brave of you to stand in unbroken line, a rampart protecting your country's frontiers, through the ages. Forests, you are bands of soldiers, in armour of wood, and you, too, like your human brothers, have hearts that beat and veins that bleed for France! You are soldiers, and you are fortresses—Nature's fortresses stronger than all modern inventions. You are fortresses to fight in; you are shelters from air-pirates, you hide cannon; you give shelter to your fighting countrymen from rain and heat. You delay the enemy; you mislead him, you drive him back. When you die, deserted by the birds and all your hidden furred and feathered children, you give yourselves—give, give to the last! Your wood strengthens the trenches, or burns to warm the freezing poilus. Brave forests, pathetic forests! I hear you defy the enemy in your hour of death: "Strike us, kill us. Still you shall never pass!"
We had felt that we knew something of the war-zone after Lorraine; but there the great battles had all been fought in 1914, when the world was young. Here, it seemed as if the earth must still be hot from the feet of retreating Germans.
The whole landscape was pitted with shell-holes, and spider-webbed with barbed wire. The three lines of French trenches we passed might, from their look, have been manned yesterday. Piled along the neat new road were bombs for aviators to drop; queer, fish-shaped things, and still queerer cages they had been in. There were long, low sheds for fodder. At each turn was the warning word, "Convois." The poor houses of such villages as continued to exist were numbered, for the first time in their humble lives, because they were needed for military lodgings. Notices in the German language were hardly effaced from walls of half-ruined buildings. They had been partly rubbed out, one could see, but the ugly German words survived, strong and black as a stain on one's past. Huge rounds of barbed wire which had been brought, and never used, were stacked by the roadside, and there were long lines of trench-furniture the enemy had had to abandon in flight, or leave in dug-outs: rough tables, chairs, rusty cooking-stoves, pots, pans, petrol tins, and broken dishes: even lamps, torn books, and a few particularly ugly blue vases for flowers. They must have been made in Germany, I knew!
Wattled screens against enemy fire still protected the road, and here and there was a "camouflage" canopy for a big gun. The roofs of beautiful old farmhouses were crushed in, as if tons of rock had fallen on them: and the moss which once had decked their ancient tiles with velvet had withered, turning a curious rust colour, like dried blood. Young trees with their throats cut were bandaged up with torn linen and bagging on which German printed words were dimly legible. It would have been a scene of unmitigated grimness, save for last summer's enterprising grass and flowers, which autumn, kinder than war, had not killed.
Late roses and early chrysanthemums grew in the gardens of broken, deserted cottages, as if the flowers yearned to comfort the wounded walls with soft caresses, innocent as the touch of children. On the burned façades of houses, trellised fruit-trees clung, some dead—mere black pencillings sketched on brick or plaster—but now and then one was living still, like a beautiful young Mazeppa, bound to a dead steed.
So we arrived at Noyon, less than two hours by car from Compiègne. The nearness of it to the heart of France struck me suddenly. I could hear the echo of sad voices curbing the optimists: "The Germans are still at Noyon!"
Well—they are not at Noyon now. They've been gone for many moons. Yet there's a look on the faces of the people in the town—a look when they come to the windows or doors of their houses, or when they hear a sudden noise in the street—which makes those moons seem never to have waned.
Washington has adopted Noyon, so the Becketts could not offer any great public charity, but they could sprinkle about a few private good deeds, in remembrance of Jim, who loved the place, as he loved all the Île-de-France. One of Mother Beckett's most valued letters from "Jim-on-his-travels" (as she always says) is from Noyon, and she was so bent on reading it aloud to us, as we drove slowly—almost reverently—into the town, that she wouldn't look (I believe she even grudged our looking!) at the façade of the far-famed Hôtel de Ville, until she'd come to the end of the last page. She seemed to think that to look up prematurely would be like wanting to see the stage before the curtain rose on the play!
I loved her for it—we all loved her—and obeyed as far as possible. But one couldn't shut one's eyes to the Stars and Stripes that flapped on the marvellously ornate front of the old building—flapped like the wings of the American Eagle that has flown across the Atlantic to help save France.