Soon after passing Claye we left the high road, and turned north into a labyrinth of byways. The weather was superb; it was one of those blue days of late September, which are apt to collect to themselves all the best beauty of the year in France. From dawn to sunset not a cloud rose in the sky; there reigned a soft continual radiance in which the colour of every object took peculiar intensity. The first hamlet we reached, Charny, brought us to the only disappointment of our day; for we failed, after much inquiry, to find the place of death, or even of burial, of the poet Charles Péguy, who has been the intellectual mascot of this war to France. His gallant death opened the battle of the Marne. Under the shelter of a slope, he and his men fought until they were driven into the open. The officer who led them, and his lieutenant, were soon killed; Péguy then had no sooner taken the command than a ball struck him full in the forehead. His death marked the moment of transition between France in danger and France redeemed. We endeavoured to follow his track, and we drove through Villeroy, where there is little or nothing left to see. The rustic calm of these grey hamlets is unbroken, and at first all that tells us of the tragedy is the appearance from this point onwards of the flags which mark where the French soldiers lie.
The dominant feature of these rural battlefields, as we saw them in the full upland sunshine on that long splendid September day, was the scattered profusion of little tricolor flags. A long blue horizon, broken by golden haystacks against the sky, gave a general tone of greyness to the earth, which, green with oats, livid with beetroot, brown with parched lucerne, rolled beneath that vast expanse. In the midst of this harmony of tender hues there stood out sharply the hard red, white, and blue of the little flags, planted now solitary and now in clusters, without arrangement or system—the bright flags flapping and fluttering in the wind as far as the eye could reach, like charming indigenous flowers, like brilliant ixias on some pale South African veldt; and each marking the spot where a hero fell. At first, a stick with a képi on the top of it, or even a cravat or a medal, had to serve for a provisional mark, but now the little splendid flag seems to be a permanent memorial. It leaps from a corner of the beetroot field, from a slope of the harvest, from the turn of an apple-orchard, from the edge of the road, and in its singleness and in its multitude alike, it marks this district of the Brie a holy land for ever.
But this is to anticipate a little. We passed north through Iverny, where there was a great deal of fighting, and then eastwards, skirting Montyon, where the Germans, pressed hard in their retreat, threw nine hundred bombs into a duckpond. It was only in the neighbourhood of the graceful hill of Montyon that the flags began to be noticed. In Montyon we observed the first ruined cottage; but it is at Barcy, the next hamlet to the north-east, that the vestiges of war begin to be numerous. Barcy was the centre of the enemy’s line on September 6, and this village has not made much effort to recover from its heavy devastation. These little communes of the Ile de France possess nothing of the architectural charm which gives so exquisite and tender a beauty to many a village of Southern England, but most of them have a single feature, the church. In the case of Barcy, the broad village street forms an avenue closed, at its northern end, by the graceful parish church, with its short pointed spire. This building is violently injured by the bombardment, and looks as though some monster had bitten large pieces out of it; while no attempt has yet been made to restore it.
Other buildings at Barcy have been patched or mended. It is probable that this work of restoration has been delayed by the uncertainty which has prevailed as to the part which the State was prepared to take in this rehabilitation. Only ten days after my visit the French Government, for the first time, assumed the full responsibility for the rebuilding of private property destroyed in the war, and now, therefore, so soon as labour is forthcoming, the work may be expected to go merrily forward. What is involved is so enormous that the imagination fails to follow the course which it must take. Up to the present time it has been left to private enterprise, and as regards these villages of the Marne and Ourcq, except where the owner has been in a hurry to resume his normal life, the bombarded villages have been left in a deplorable disarray.
On the open down above Barcy, and quite close to the road, a peasant was loading a hay-cart with the help of two sullen-looking men in rough white clothes. These were German prisoners, and we were moved by curiosity to stop and talk to the peasant. He, from his half-built rick, replied with stolidity to our questions. ‘He had no complaints to make of the prisoners,’ he said; ‘that one’, indicating a burly captive, ‘really works quite well.’ ‘Had they learned to speak French?’ we asked. ‘Oh no!’ ‘How, then, did the work get on?’ ‘Ah,’ said the master, ‘we show them what they have to do, and they point at what they want.’ During this, and more, conversation the prisoners pursued their slow labour, not glancing at us or taking more notice than cattle would. Strange it seemed, and almost inhuman, that these Germans should have lived two years in this sequestered French village and that neither on the one side nor on the other should there have been the smallest approximation of language. The peasant ‘had no complaints to make,’ and that was the sum of their relations.
It was beyond Barcy that the bright flags began to be abundant. The eye had no longer any need to seek for them; the garden of death was now lavish of its bouquets of flowers. They were difficult to distinguish among the beetroot, easy among the oats, insistent on the grey expanse of stubble. Soon after leaving Barcy, at the corner where the road turns abruptly south, there is a great cluster of them, and, always at a little distance off, the plain black crosses which mark the spots where Germans are buried. Presently we paused to examine the great monument raised to the memory of officers and men who fell in the battle of the Ourcq. It is garish in colour, and too much adorned with symbols in silvered cardboard and wreaths of arsenical green. No doubt it is provisional; a memorial in severer taste will ultimately testify to the riper genius of France. We descend to Chambry, another tiny village of Brie, and here we meet with a feature of poignant importance. In the great ‘push,’ the retiring Germans occupied the cemetery of Chambry, a walled enclosure at the summit of the village; this was a position of great strength, commanding the countryside in every direction.
The Germans used this cemetery as a citadel, and the holes which they made for their guns in the wall, and the breaches in the parapet, are still untouched. As their army retired the enemy were obliged to withdraw from this position, and there was a violent struggle, in the course of which the French regained the enclosure, and used it in their turn. They fired with full effect from behind the granite tombstones. After the battle the whole cemetery was a scene of ruin and confusion, but of this nothing remains now, except the gun-holes and breaches in the wall, which have not been repaired. All the monuments of the dead, on the other hand, have been replaced with extreme piety, and, the cemetery not having been nearly full before, its free spaces have been used to hold the tombs of officers and men who fell in the battle. I noted, among many of pathetic interest, the stone erected in memory of Lieut. Quiliquini, who brought his Tunisian troops, the 8th Tirailleurs, from Sfax. There seemed something which moved the fancy sorrowfully in the idea of these loyal Africans who fell to ward off the barbarians’ blow at Paris. Outside the cemetery local patriotism has fitted up, in a barn, a sort of rough museum of objects found on the battlefields. No doubt this will be a great attraction when once the tourist reassembles in his myriads. At present the solitude is broken only by occasional privileged mourners, ‘brisés d’émotion et de tristesse.’
Proceeding south, we were soon out of the battlefield of the Ourcq, the frontier being marked at Penchard by another rather garish monument to the fallen officers. This is the place where three thousand Morocco troops dashed with memorable fury of attack up the Penchard hill. At this point the road turns, revealing, far below, to the left, the clustered houses of Meaux, with its cathedral, seated in a rich glade across a curve of the silver Marne. The first stage of our pilgrimage was over, and we paused an hour in the exquisite city of which Bossuet was the Eagle-bishop. Meaux is celebrated for the miracle which snatched it from the very jaws of the dog, and prevented it from becoming another Arras, another Reims. The catastrophe seemed inevitable, when at six o’clock on September 5 a patrol of Uhlans appeared in the city. All day long they were close to Meaux, the population of which had given themselves up for lost three days before. The bombardment of the cathedral actually began, but, as by the direct interposition of God, no shell touched the building, and then, under the pressure of the English army, the Germans retired altogether. The situation of Meaux, with its row of great seventeenth-century mills on a stone bridge spanning the river—mills which still produce immense quantities of flour for Paris—is as picturesque as that of any provincial city in France, and on the occasion of our recent visit, with its brimming river, its ancient russet mills, its noble church, all bathed in the liquid gold of September, it seemed lovelier than ever before. The only sign of disturbance is the modern bridge, which the English blew up for strategical purposes, without hurting the old town in any respect.
In leaving Meaux to return to the battlefields we took a northward road almost parallel with that by which we had entered, but somewhat to the east of it, thus crossing the battlefields at a point a couple of miles farther on in the German retreat. There is little to see close to Meaux, but presently the graves begin, many of them gay with dahlias and chrysanthemums. We descended to the village of Varreddes, which takes a prominent place in the chronicle of the fighting. The struggle here was very heavy. Varreddes is a rather large village, built a little distance to the south of the canal of the Ourcq, which makes at this place a great bend, surrounding the village on three sides, while the Marne nearly isolates it on the fourth. Hence it was held by the enemy with determination as long as possible. At Varreddes the Germans did dreadful things. They ordered the population of the village to leave it at once, and a group of seventeen very old men, who were too infirm to move quickly, they set up against a wall and shot in cold blood. The priest, a venerable man of seventy-six years, they seized as a hostage, and killed in their retreat.
Many bright new roofs and walls testify in the village of Varreddes to the enterprise of the inhabitants, who have ventured to rebuild their ruined houses. The church, which has some good thirteenth-century features, seems to be intact. And yet it is precisely at Varreddes that the scheme of the battle, as it swept from west to east, is most intelligible to a civilian. The intensity of the fighting is proved by the profusion of graves, whose flags glitter and shimmer, with their petals of red, white, and blue, in every direction. Farther on, above Etrépilly, a large turfed reservoir, perched on a hillock, forms a landmark, from which the eye explores in every direction the rolling country, intersected by scarcely visible glens or trenches, through which the rivers wind. On the summit of this commanding height we found a curious monument, which called for an explanation which no one seemed competent to give. It consists of a metal shield of brilliant vermilion and azure, surmounted by seven flags—one of them the American flag—and addressed in large letters, ‘Les Prisonniers de Guerre aux Héros de la Marne.’ What prisoners these were we asked one another in vain. But it made our hearts, with a touch of added mystery, thrill in fresh response to those myriads of memorial flowers that twinkled and sparkled on the circle of brown fields around us. There is one object of horror that attracts attention here. It was a great barn or hangar, in which the bodies of the fallen Germans were heaped up after the battle, and then burned by their comrades. It is now nothing but a huge skeleton of twisted iron, grimacing at the sky.