"They snipe us with five-point-nines," said a young officer, smoking a cigarette, with his back to a broken wall in a heap of ruins. "They scatter 'em about on the off-chance of hitting some one, and you never can tell where they are likely to drop."
Some of them came whirring across to the Holnon Wood and down into the village of Francilly as I stood looking across to Savy Wood, but not close enough to hurt any one. It is the queerest thing to be in this part of our Front. Go a little too far down a road, mistake one village for another—and it is quite easy, for they all look alike in ruin—and if you are an absent-minded man you can get into the enemy's lines without realizing your danger. Yesterday only occasional shell-bursts and short spasms of machine-gun fire from the edge of Savy Wood came to prove that here masses of men are watching out to kill each other. Pigeons cooed in the woods. The ground at my feet was spangled with anemones, and the sunlight chased shadows across the fields of spring below the city, where soon the streets may be noisy with battle. Our men, living amidst ruin this side of St.-Quentin, have settled down to this life of open warfare as though they had known nothing else. Whether the tragedy of it all sinks into them I do not know, but they whistle music-hall tunes in the vast rubbish-heaps which were once old châteaux of France, and sleep and stack their rifles in ancient crypts among the coffins of French aristocrats who died before, or just a little after, the French Revolution, and find shelter from wind and rain in poor little sacristies filled with statues of saints adjoining churches wrecked by explosive charges before the German soldiers went their way.
One sees the strangest contrasts of life and death in all this countryside, as when yesterday I came across a Highlander playing his pipes in a wild and merry way on an avalanche of old red bricks which once formed part of the mansion of Caulaincourt, with many terraces lined with white statues of Greek goddesses now lying maimed and mutilated among the great rubbish-heaps.
By the roadside on my way I saw some English soldiers resting, and close to them was a marble tablet stuck up in a heap of earth. I read the words carved on the stone, and it told me that here was the heart of Anne-Joséphine Barandier, Marquise de Caulaincourt, who died in Paris on January 17, 1830.
Poor dead heart of Madame la Marquise! In a vault near by all the tablets of her family had been smashed, and the coffins laid bare, but there was no little niche to show where the lady's heart had been.
Outside in the churchyard there was a great tomb to the memory of the French soldiers who fell in 1871, and next to them the graves of German soldiers killed in this war, and a wooden cross to Second Lieutenant Nixon, of the Royal Flying Corps, killed here behind the German lines on July 19, 1915.
VI
THE OLD WOMEN OF TINCOURT
March 29