Yesterday, coming back to Paris from the trenches that guard Rheims, I covered the same road. But it was not the same. It seemed that I must surely have lost the way. Only the iron signs at the crossroads, and the map used the year before and scarred with my own pencil marks, were evidences that again I was following mile by mile and foot by foot the route of that swift advance and riotous retreat.
A year before the signs of the retreat were the road itself, the houses facing it, and a devastated countryside. You knew then, that, of these signs, some would at once be effaced. They had to be effaced, for they were polluting the air. But until the villagers returned to their homes, or to what remained of their homes, the bloated carcasses of horses blocked the road, the bodies of German soldiers, in death mercifully unlike anything human and as unreal as fallen scarecrows, sprawled in the fields.
But while you knew these signs of the German raid would be removed, other signs were scars that you thought would be long in healing. These were the stone arches and buttresses of the bridges, dynamited and dumped into the mud of the Marne and Ourcq, châteaux and villas with the roof torn away as deftly as with one hand you could rip off the lid of a cigar-box, or with a wall blown in, or out, in either case exposing indecently the owner’s bedroom, his wife’s boudoir, the children’s nursery.
Other signs of the German were villages with houses wrecked, the humble shops sacked, garden walls levelled, fields of beets and turnips uprooted by his shells, or where he had snatched sleep in the trampled mud, strewn with demolished haystacks, vast trees split clean in half as though by lightning, or with nothing remaining but the splintered stump. That was the picture of the roads and countryside in the triangle of Soissons, Rheims, and Meaux, as it was a year ago.
And I expected to see the wake of that great retreat still marked by ruins and devastation.
But I had not sufficiently trusted to the indomitable spirit of the French, in their intolerance of waste, their fierce, yet ordered energy.
To-day the fields are cultivated up to the very butts of the French batteries. They are being put to bed, and tucked in for the long winter sleep. For miles the furrows stretch over the fields in unbroken lines. Ploughs, not shells, have drawn them.
They are gray with fertilizers, strewn with manure; the swiftly dug trenches of a year ago have given way to the peaked mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. Where there were vast stretches of mud, scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with stale, ill-smelling straw, the carcasses of oxen and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a smiling landscape, with miles of growing grain, green vegetables, green turf.
In Champagne the French spirit and nature, working together, have wiped out the signs of the German raid. It is as though it had never been. You begin to believe it was only a bad dream, an old wife’s tale to frighten children.
The car moved slowly, but, look no matter how carefully, it was most difficult to find the landfalls I remembered.