All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines, stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon and Soissons, where for six days without an hour's pause one of the greatest battles in history had continued.
As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crépy-en-Valois, which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked the air with thunderous reverberations.
Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease. In those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature—the spirit of these woods and hills—listened with strained ears and a frightened hush for the next report. It came louder as I advanced nearer to the firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills were falling into the deepest valleys. They were answered by vague, distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the enemy's guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they could not find the range of our own artillery.
Presently, as I tramped on, splashing through water-pools and along rutty tracks ploughed up by the wheels of gun carriages, I heard the deeper, more sonorous booming of different guns, followed by a percussion of the air as though great winds were rushing into void spaces. These strange ominous sounds were caused by the heavy pieces which the enemy had brought up to the heights above the marshlands of the Aisne—the terrible 11-inch guns which outranged all pieces in the French or British lines. With that marvellous foresight which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris. The Germans even then were preparing a safe place of retreat for themselves in case their grand coup should fail, and our British troops had to suffer from this organization on the part of an enemy which was confident of victory but remembered the need of a safe way back.
I have been for many strange walks in my life with strange companions, up and down the world, but never have I gone for such a tramp with such a guide as on this Sunday within sound of the guns. My comrade of this day was a grave-digger.
His ordinary profession is that of a garde champêtre, or village policeman, but during the past three weeks he had been busy with the spade, which he carried across his shoulder by my side. With other peasants enrolled for the same tragic task he had followed the line of battle for twenty kilometres from his own village, Rouville, near Levignen, helping to bury the French and British dead, and helping to burn the German corpses.
His work was not nearly done when I met him, for during the fighting in the region round the forest of Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield, as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops. Dig as hard as he could my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those brothers-in-arms who lay out in the wind and the rain.
I walked among the fields where they lay, and among their roughly piled graves, and not far from the heaps of the enemy's dead who were awaiting their funeral pyres.
My guide grasped my arm and pointed to a dip in the ground beyond the abandoned village of Levignen.
"See there," he said; "they take some time to burn."