With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

Near Feret Milton there was a château with a lawn that ran to meet the Paris road. It had been used as a German emergency hospital, and previously by them as an outpost. The long windows to the terrace had been wrecked, the terrace was piled high with blood-stained uniforms, hundreds of boots had been tossed from an upper story that had been used as an operating-room, and mixed with these evidences of disaster were monuments of empty champagne-bottles.

That was the picture I remembered. Yesterday, like a mantle of moss, the lawn swept to the road, the long windows had been replaced and hung with yellow silk, and, on the terrace, where I had seen the blood-stained uniforms, a small boy, maybe the son and heir of the château, with hair flying and bare legs showing, was joyfully riding a tricycle.

Neufchelles I remembered as a village completely wrecked and inhabited only by a very old man, and a cat, that, as though for company, stalked behind him.

But to-day Neufchelles is a thriving, contented, commonplace town. Splashes of plaster, less weather-stained than the plaster surrounding them, are the only signs remaining of the explosive shells. The stone-mason and the plasterer have obliterated the work of the guns, the tiny shops have been refilled, the tide of life has flowed back, and in the streets the bareheaded women, their shoulders wrapped in black woollen shawls, gather to gossip, or, with knitting in hand, call to each other from the doorways.

There was the stable of a large villa in which I had seen five fine riding-horses lying on the stones, each with a bullet-hole over his temple. In the retreat they had been destroyed to prevent the French using them as remounts.

This time, as we passed the same stable-yard, fresh horses looked over the half-doors, the lofts were stuffed with hay; in the corner, against the coming of winter, were piled many cords of wood, and rival chanticleers, with their harems, were stalking proudly around the stable-yard, pecking at the scattered grain. It was a picture of comfort and content. It continued like that all the way.

Even the giant poplars that line the road for four miles out of Meaux to the west, and that had been split and shattered, are now covered with autumn foliage, the scars are overgrown and by doctor nature the raw spots have been cauterized and have healed.

The stone bridges, that at Meaux and beyond the Château Thierry sprawled in the river, again have been reared in air. People have already forgotten that a year ago to reach Soissons from Meaux the broken bridges forced them to make a détour of fifty miles.

The lesson of it is that the French people have no time to waste upon post mortems. With us, fifty years after the event, there are those who still talk of Sherman’s raid through Columbia, who are so old that they hum hymns of hate about it. How much wiser, how much more proud, is the village of Neufchelles!