Eighteen hundred bottles of champagne—they would have no other wine—were looted from the cellars. Double them, and you will not be able to account for the ankle-deep litter of glass in the streets. Hardly a house of importance is left with roof or floor. And how do you think it was done? Straw was piled. The tapers were stolen from the shrines and cathedral, and the soldiers amused themselves by throwing the lighted candles in at the windows of the houses. No wonder the small, crêpe-covered population is all in the streets. Here and there I saw a woman scraping in the burnt ashes, to clear a kitchen hearth, or look for some remnants. The station is a bleak ruin. Only the Cathedral tower, exquisite and light, protests against the sunlit sky.
But they were finely caught. The Zouaves, Chasseurs d'Afrique, who are pouring up through this country, arrived in trains of taxi-cabs between four and five a.m. The officer—no matter how he was occupied—fled out in his shirt; could not find his regiment; and was shot. The rest decamped—those who escaped. The prisoners I saw being sent back.
Not a crust is left in the neighbouring villages. At Mont l'Evigne the few surviving men snarled at the mention of bread.
You will hear with the less revolt of the horror I passed earlier in the day—some two hundred and forty Prussians, dead in one farm together, black and unburied, for want of peasants to bury them. They were killed by shell-fumes possibly, but had been bayoneted for double security.
It would be easy to amplify the details—the utter destruction of the houses, the stories of the insolence of the invading horde. The inhabitants, poor folk! are taking it with the quiet, deep indignation of a civilised people. Wagons of the wounded, of the American ambulance, passed in long train through the town, back from the front.
It was a relief to escape again into the broad green drives of the forest of Compiègne; to see only the abandoned German lorries, the scattered brown graves in the fields, where the horde were hunted back. In the forest we passed through miles of fierce brown Turcos, marching and resting. Their gorgeous colours and turbans, and fierce faces, a strange contrast to the deep shadowy avenues of the green forest. It was a greater satisfaction to follow the pursuit; to be the first from the outside world to greet the oppressed villagers and townsfolk; to hear in Compiègne the welcome "des Anglais!"; to listen to the women disputing whether "the Crown Prince" had really been there, and if it was he who escaped in half a uniform, and shot the French Dragoon officer (who is lying in the hospital), when his pursuing cavalry arrived almost in time to save the bridge.
We followed them back, by the Oise, to the Aisne. The ambulances of our wounded kept on passing us. The fresh troops poured up in pursuit. But "one can breathe again now" was the word of the day, in village and town. We were barely an hour or two behind that hurried retreat. And there was no fighting. They had not stopped, or combined, to fight again—yet.
Paris, Tuesday.
As an instance of the working of the Machine the retreat of the German western army, with tired troops, has been almost as remarkable a feat as the great advance.