Who was far, far away.”
“Winnie” Wertz, the French cook, sang a pastoral song of peaceful life on the farm after the war was over. One or two men tried to make speeches but received scant encouragement. The singing continued till late in the evening, when we wended our way back to the open field for a night of peaceful sleep under the trees. As we walked through the city on the way a quartette was lustily singing:
“Far away, far away,
She wore it for her lover,
Who was far, far away.”
No doubt the French inhabitants awoke to shrug a shoulder and patiently mutter: “Oh, those terrible Americans.”
The next morning we were on our way to Bar le Duc, a picturesque city nestled between high hills. At the top of one of these hills, as we started the steep descent into the city, we passed a large convent almost totally destroyed by avion bombs. Bar le Duc is always subject to air raids and shows many marks of the war on its principal streets. Again we stopped for the night and here I slept on the sidewalk with my head against a sentry box so that no one would fall over me.
On to the town of Evres through a country, as we advanced, showing more and more plainly the desolation and waste of the war. Through towns deserted of all civilians, over roads dry in the midsummer sun and unspeakably dusty from the continual travel toward the front. One afternoon in Evres, Curtis and I dropped into the home of an elderly French peasant woman for a lunch of delicious cottage cheese and a jug of fresh milk. The peasant woman had a sad story to tell. Her husband was dead; her son’s home in the village had been destroyed; he had been taken prisoner and his wife had fallen victim to the advance of Prussian kultur.
At Evres we waited to move on to Verdun and there we learned of the great offensive that was soon to take place and we watched the preparations for it on a vast scale. We were deeply impressed.