Then Brent went for a stroll. He wandered down to Beckett’s grave and found it as a low mound of weedy earth. The broken apple tree had been cut up and burnt. Brent stood there for some minutes, bare-headed, eyes looking back into the past, a sturdy, square-shouldered man with a fresh-coloured face, and a youthful moustache and beard. He looked like a peasant,—brown, blue-eyed, thoughtful.
Then he went back to Beaucourt.
Beaucourt surprised him. He walked down the Rue de Picardie to the Place de l’Eglise, and saw nothing that lived, not even a half wild cat. The Post Office, the Hospice, and the Hôtel de Paris were respectable and voiceless ruins. The école was a little less desolated. But Brent had expected to find a few people in Beaucourt, a few of those indomitable French folk who had won the war. The village lay less than ten miles from the undevastated country, yet Beaucourt seemed to have been side-tracked, forgotten.
There was one live thing in Beaucourt and Brent discovered it sitting on a fallen block of stone by the church, a grey old man, grey as the jumble of broken buttresses and fallen pinnacles, but far more sad. He seemed just a bit of the broken stone. Brent went and spoke to him, and the old man looked at Brent with eyes that seemed dead.
“Good day, monsieur. You are all alone here?”
“Yes, I am all alone,” said the old man.
His voice was flat—toneless and empty of all emotion. It seemed to Brent that the old Frenchman was beyond feeling things. He sat and munched a piece of bread; he was not interested in Brent; he was not interested in anything. When Brent spoke to him he answered like a man who had been mesmerized.
“You have come back, monsieur?”
“I walked twenty kilomètres this morning to see—that.”
He pointed quite calmly to a little house over the way, a house that had had its face smashed in, a house that was almost unrecognizable. Brent felt a pang of pity, yet there was nothing to be said.