In a small château in France an English friend of mine serving with a volunteer ambulance column with the French troops on the Meuse was sitting at ease one night with some of his comrades and fellow- countrymen. The conversation turned to England, because April was there, and after ten months of war the thoughts of these men yearned back to their homes. They spoke of their mothers and wives and children. One man had a pretty daughter, and read a piece of her latest letter, and laughed at her gay little jests and her descriptions of the old pony and the dogs and the antics of a black kitten. Other men gave themselves away and revealed the sentiment which as a rule Englishmen hide. In the room was a French officer, who sat very still, listening to these stories. The candles were burning dim on the table when he spoke at last in a strange, hard voice:
"It is good for you Englishmen when you go back home. Those who are not killed out here will be very happy to see their women again. You do not want to die, because of that. … If I were to go home now, gentlemen, I should not be happy. I should find my wife and my daughter both expecting babies whose fathers are German soldiers… England has not suffered invasion."
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The most complete destruction I saw in France was in Champagne, when I walked through places which had been the villages of Sermaize, Heiltz-le-Maurupt, Blesmes, and Huiron. Sermaize was utterly wiped out. As far as I could see, not one house was left standing. Not one wall was spared. It was laid flat upon the earth, with only a few charred chimney-stacks sticking out of the piles of bricks and cinders. Strange, piteous relics of pretty dwelling-places lay about in the litter, signifying that men and women with some love for the arts of life had lived here in decent comfort. A notice-board of a hotel which had given hospitality to many travellers before it became a blazing furnace lay sideways on a mass of broken bricks with a legend so frightfully ironical that I laughed among the ruins: "Chauffage central"—the system of "central heating" invented by Germans in this war had been too hot for the hotel, and had burnt it to a wreck of ashes. Half a dozen peasants stood in one of the "streets"—marked by a line of rubbish-heaps which had once been their homes. Some of them had waited until the first shells came over their chimney-pots before they fled. Several of their friends, not so lucky in timing their escape, had been crushed to death by the falling houses. But it was not shell-fire which did the work. The Germans strewed the cottages with their black inflammable tablets, which had been made for such cases, and set their torches to the window- curtains before marching away to make other bonfires on their road of retreat. Sermaize became a street of fire, and from each of its houses flames shot out like scarlet snakes, biting through the heavy pall of smoke. Peasants hiding in ditches a mile away stared at the furnace in which all their household goods were being consumed. Something of their own life seemed to be burning there, leaving the dust and ashes of old hopes and happiness.
"That was mine," said one of the peasants, pointing to a few square yards of wreckage. "I took my woman home across the threshold that was there. She was a fine girl, with hair like gold, Monsieur. Now her hair has gone quite white, during these recent weeks. That's what war does for women. There are many like that hereabouts, white-haired before their time."
I saw some of those white-haired women in Blesmes and Huiron and other scrap-heaps of German ruthlessness. They wandered in a disconsolate way about the ruins, watching rather hopelessly the building of wooden huts by a number of English "Quakers" who had come here to put up shelters for these homeless people of France. They were doing good work—one of the most beautiful works of charity which had been called out of this war, and giving a new meaning to their name of the Society of Friends. But though they were handy in the use of the wood given them by the French Government for this purpose, not all their industry nor all their friendliness could bring back the beauty of these old-world villages of Champagne, built centuries ago by men of art and craft, and chiselled by Time itself, so that the stones told tales of history to the villagers. It would be difficult to patch up the grey old tower of Huiron Church, through which shells had come crashing, or to rebuild its oak roof whose beams were splintered like the broken ribs of a rotting carcase. A white-haired priest passed up and down the roadway before the place in which he had celebrated Mass and praised God for the blessings of each day. His hands were clenched behind his bent back, and every now and then he thrust back his broad felt hat and looked up at the poor, battered thing which had been his church with immense sadness in his eyes.
There was an old château near Huiron in which a noble family of France had lived through centuries of war and revolution. It had many pointed gables and quaint turrets and mullioned windows, overlooking a garden in which there were arbours for love-in-idleness where ladies had dreamed awhile on many summer days in the great yesterday of history. When I passed it, after the Germans had gone that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls. The gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion. A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the château of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed, murderously, by outrageous hands.
In one of these villages of Champagne—I think it was at Blesmes—I saw one relic which had been spared by chance when the flames of the incendiaries had licked up all other things around, and somehow, God knows why, it seemed to me the most touching thing in this place of desolation.
It was a little stone fountain, out of which a jet of water rose playfully, falling with a splash of water-drops into the sculptured basin. While the furnace was raging in the village this fountain played and reflected the glare of crimson light in its bubbling jet. The children of many generations had dabbled their hands in its basin. Pretty girls had peeped into their own bright eyes mirrored there. On summer days the village folk had sauntered about this symbol of grace and beauty. Now it was as though I had discovered a white Venus in the dust- heap of a burying-place.
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