As we drew near to Nesle we saw a sign by the road in English! Near a little bridge the warning, “Look Out—no truck over 17 tons,” was posted. Magic language! There were only one or two Tommies about, but it was thrilling to be in a town that had been captured and occupied by the English. Along the road I had seen in several places signs reading, “Sens obligatoire”; translated literally this means “direction obligatory.” We should say, “one-way street.” On a house standing in the middle of a trim field was painted, “Tipperary—Sens Obligatoire!”
We walked through the graveyard at Nesle, where French, English, and Germans are buried side by side. The soldiers’ graves of all nations are nearly alike—plain wooden crosses bearing the name and regiment in black paint. They contrast strangely with the marble tombs and mausoleums decorated with colored bead wreaths, erected before the war.
A few of the German graves are more elaborate, flamboyant even. One monument in particular was a large sculptured plaster affair, depicting a German soldier against a background of burning houses, being crowned by an angel. Across the burning village scene a scornful French hand has scratched the words, “Camelotte Boche!” (Boche rubbish!)
It is amusing to see German prisoners at work repairing the damage they have done, rebuilding roads and bridges and canals. They make excellent workmen and seem content with their lot. A gray-clad figure, wearing the round fatigue cap with the red band around it, was mending a roof as we passed. He may well have set the bomb that was meant to level the house to the ground; but all the same he never turned his round face towards us, or missed a stroke of his hammer in his apparent effort to make it bomb-proof in the future.
The city of Roye presents a new phase of destruction. Outwardly it looks normal enough, with the exception of the fine church and a few important buildings which are in ruins. But it is all a brick shell of what was once a city. The Germans have played a grisly joke on the inhabitants, who, when they return to their houses, discover the same old outside but the inside gone.
Each house has been systematically denuded of everything—furniture, decorations, glass, metals, tools, etc., and then the interior blown up. In the shops all the goods were emptied from the shelves on to the floor and then the roof exploded. Not a pane of glass, not a lighting fixture, not a lock or key, remains. The cost to the Germans in time and money alone must have been enormous.
I wandered around by myself exploring further these streets of hollow mockery. A woman was standing in the doorway of a shop, gazing curiously to see an untamed American behaving as if at home. We exchanged “Bon jours,” and I begged permission to step into her shop while I changed a film in my kodak. The place was bare, save for a few bicycle tires and tools piled on the counter, and these the woman told me she and her husband had buried when they were driven out nearly three years ago. The husband had been mobilized, and she, fortunately, had been able to go to relatives in the Midi.
“Goo!” came to me from the dark recesses of a perambulator, and there was a bouncing baby, born since the war. The woman came back six weeks ago, having heard that her shop was safe. She did not seem to be disheartened by the mutilation of her property and the loss of her stock, and has already tried to start in business again by selling odds and ends to the soldiers and few civilians who have returned like herself. “Mais que voulez-vous? Business doesn’t go very well these days.” I smiled. Competition may be the life of trade, but customers are pretty handy to keep it going.
I wished her au revoir, and told her I’d come back some day when her shop is rebuilt and she is doing more flourishing business than ever before.
Beyond Roye about eight kilometres, “as the shell flies,” the old first-line German trenches can be seen from the road. Barbed-wire entanglements stretch away to left and right, half hidden in the grass, and dug-outs covered by heavy logs occur at intervals. Where the trenches began to run along close to the road, we left the motors and climbed down among the narrow, rustic walks that are trenches. The floors and walls are made of small boughs nailed nearly one inch apart, and the depth of the trenches is a little over six feet. They turn and twist unbelievably—apparently following the track of a spotted snake with a tummy-ache; and communication trenches, “boyaux,” fork off every fifty feet or so, making a network of passages.