But do not think that destruction for destruction’s sake was done in all houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the glass tops of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.
To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big, conical haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.
It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open. Occasionally one saw the hastily made shelter trenches of a skirmish line; and again, the emplacements for batteries—hurried field emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then, pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.
Swift marching and quick manœuvres of the type which gave war some of its old sport and zest; the advance, all the while gathering force, like the deep tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested wheat-field or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day’s rain will wash away the blood stains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by his murderous wrath.
The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order. Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the rifles and guns and hell-fire, were moving across the fields with spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that were war’s victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and sometimes, when the burying was unfinished—well, one draws the curtain over scenes like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to take Paris.
Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came running across the street at sight of him.
“Son of an old friend of mine, from my town,” said our statesman. Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.
Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of victorious France—France after forty years’ waiting throwing back a foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling landscape, basked in victory. Dead the spirit of any one who could not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a Frenchman. Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages which had saved Paris and France.
The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead. Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete!
Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, the firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of parklike country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see against the background of the foliage throwing it into relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shrapnel shells, renewed with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.