The highway and the railway, these are the two most coveted goals of the German bombs. For over them go up the trains of ammunition and of soldiers and supplies. Both we cross on the way to Canizy. The railroad, running between well defined hedges, would seem almost as conspicuous an object as the tree-sentinelled road. But, so far, both have escaped harm. Trains whistle and puff as usual up and down from Amiens to Ham. Often I halt at the crossing, to wave to soldiers, who fill the cars; sometimes I pass through companies of red-turbaned, brown Moroccans, who are brought here by the Government to rebuild bridges and keep the roadbed in repair. Over the track the footpath carries one, on over brown stubble, to the Calvary and Canizy.
As I have said, at the Cross one is awaited. Sometimes it is only one little figure in black apron and blue soldier’s cap that stands beside it to give the signal; sometimes from the wall on the other side of the road, a half dozen girls start up, like a covey of quail. The boys usually ran away, but the girls advanced to surround one, and dance hand in hand down the street. But always before the Calvary there was a pause. Brown hands, none too clean, were raised to forehead and breast with the quick sign of the cross. One caught a whispered invocation. “But you do not do it,” five-year-old Flore protested to me one day, with troubled eyes. “Why do you not salute the Calvary?” “Teach me,” I replied; and in chorus I learned the words which on the lips of the war-orphaned children are infinitely pathetic: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.”
—Il est déjà grand!...
—Ben ... il a l’âge de la guerre.
[He is big already!
Well ... he is as old as the war.]
It is not alone at Canizy that one finds the Cross, though by its aloofness above the plain this one became impressive. By every roadside stands a Calvary, sometimes embowered in trees, but more often stark and naked, with the wantonly felled trunks about its base bearing mute Witness to a desecration which respected the form, but not the spirit, of the Christ. At Hombleux, three such crucifixes marked the intersections of the village lanes, flanked by stenciled guide-posts: A Nesle, A Athies, or A Roye. They cluster in the cemeteries, above well-remembered graves; Where even the dead no longer rest inviolate, since the Germans, to their unspeakable shame, have blasted open many a tomb. Day by day, the obsession grows on one that these uplifted symbols of suffering, stripped and mocked and defiled by the invader, typify the crucifixion of Picardy.