But a week or so ago I stood up and cheered the grand old Bishop of Meaux, when, as one of the first civilians to get into Meaux after the battle of the Marne, I found him, in violet robes, still going gently round, looking after his few surviving flock. He, almost alone, had refused to leave the town, and endured all the risks of the encircling battles and the indignities of the German occupation.
The Germans have made no exception of priests and professors in their "disciplinary executions," and now that they have started on the cathedrals—first Louvain, then Malines, then Rheims, and now Soissons—a bishop who stayed to face them showed a good man's courage.
Wednesday.
In a village south of Rheims this morning I was delayed for some time by the passing of a column of German captives, being brought down from Craonne by the French. There must have been more than a thousand in this single division. Some of them were big fine fellows; a number quite lads; all looked pallid and with the strained look of fatigue and hunger. A few were allowed to sit a while by the road, to rest sore feet.
Those to whom I spoke, allowing for the fact that they were frightened and probably anxious to propitiate, confirmed the impression that the Germans have lost very heavily and are in sore straits for food. They spoke of the practical destruction of whole regiments, more especially in the assaults round Soissons and Rheims. To the audacity and omnipresence of our airmen, and to the accuracy of our shell-fire on their trenches, their accounts bore constant witness.
One lad, a "Sextaner" in an Ober-Realschale, was allowed to rest for some time, and soon began to talk quite cheerfully. He showed me his pocket diary, a strange little document. It contained chiefly the notices of his messing together with six or more of his chums, and of the rare additions of food other than rations. On later pages came the little notes of someone missing in the evening. A few new names were added. These, too, disappeared. Finally, almost the last entry, of four days ago, came the sentence, "Remains only Max and me." But Max was not with the prisoners.
At certain of the base villages as I followed the line south of the Aisne, I saw other prisoners, active and willing as ambulance orderlies. They were already moving about cheerfully—the French are most kindly captors—but none of them had lost the stamp of pallor imprinted by the exhaustion and strain of that prolonged fighting march. Not one but was tired of the "useless war." It is only the stay-at-homes who have not lived in a war atmosphere, for whom it retains its colour of heroics after a few weeks of its squalid realities.
I crossed the Vesle, on a pontoon bridge, and visited two of the seven bridges which the Germans destroyed as they retired before the British over the Aisne near Soissons. A south country Briton told me the story of that first crossing.
"We were the advance division. We got there at nightfall, a desperate long march. The Germans had dynamited seven out of the eight bridges, but one just stood. We were ordered to shuffle across it singly, at ten yards intervals. It began at midnight, in the dark, a queer, nervous job; and we weren't all over, quite, by five in the morning. Two of the chaps slipped in, astray in the dark, one just ahead of me. I thought it was the bridge going up—the sort of 'plump' he went!"
I have had that feeling several times these last weeks, the stealthy crawl across the bridge with dynamite already laid below it.