Passed by the censor

by Wythe Williams

We stop the car beside a large open meadow a few miles south. The field contains the same clusters of crosses. Part of it is plowed ground and is soggy from the rains. We stumble along it, mud to our shoe tops. We stop beside the crosses. They do not mark all the graves. I suddenly feel my feet sink in the mud. I hastily free myself. My wife asks me what is the matter, and I rush away further into the field. I have accidentally stepped into a grave—the mud being so soft—and have felt my boot touch something. As I looked down I saw a couple of inches of smeared, muddy, gray cloth.

We leave the plowed ground and come into a field of stubble. We stand silent a moment at the top of a knoll. The short winter day is dying rapidly. The horizon for the moment seems lost in cold blue vapors. It seems appropriate to the place—it is like battle smoke.

I stoop over to pick up a shrapnel ball imbedded in the mud. My wife seizes me by the arm. "Listen," she whispers. The gloom of dusk is creeping about us. "Did you hear?" she asks. Then we hear. "Boom, boo-o-m, boom, boo-o-om." It is quite as faint as the opening sounds of the battle of the Marne to the early risers in Paris. But it is quite as distinct. We have just heard the guns which are still disputing the possession of the Aisne.

The chauffeur is signaling to us. The wind sweeps over the desolate field with a few drops of rain. We make a detour near a haystack. Close to the base—almost under it, I pick up torn strips of gray uniform. They are covered with blood. There is also a battered brass belt buckle, and a bent canteen—evidence of the ghastly and lonely tragedy enacted there. A few feet away looms through the dark the usual black wood cross of the field of glory.

The chauffeur has lighted the lamps on the car. We hear the sound of the engine as we hasten through the mud. We are surfeited with devastation, with horror, and with the field of glory. We tell him to hasten toward Meaux where we will take the next train for Paris. He drives us swiftly into the coming night over the hill that looks upon the "Field of Five Thousand Dead." There we stop a moment to see the last struggles of the descending sun tipping the forests on the horizon with rosy flames.

We return by a different road through another devastated village. It is not really a village—just a large farmstead—a model farm it was called before the war. Now the stone walls have crumbled. The buildings are twisted skeletons of iron bars—all that withstood the appetite of the flames. Their outlines are vivid black against the sky. They seem to writhe in the wind.

A man and a woman and little girl stand in the road. The car stops and we get out. The man is the owner of the ruin. The woman and child are his wife and daughter. They had fled when the Germans approached. After the glorious victory they returned to their home. The woman asks us to enter the broken gateway. At one end of the walled yard was the house. A broken portion of it remains. The man had boarded up the holes and the cracks in the walls and the empty window frames. He explains that the place had been taken and retaken four times before the French were finally victorious. He tells us of the toll that death had taken in the yard. The woman tells of bodies found in the house—so many in the parlor—so many in the bedroom—so many lying on the stairs.

We walked back to the road where the side lamps of the car cast flickering flames into the night. The chauffeur turns on the electric head lamps that throw a blinding light fifty feet away. The little girl dances in front of them and across the road to a mound of mud. She laughs. Her mother asks her why she is happy. "Oh, the lights," she calls back. "It's like Christmas—and folks are here." She picks up a stone and throws it toward the mound of mud. I noticed that the mound is regular in form—and oblong, about a dozen by six feet in size. Around it runs a border of flat stones. They are set on the corners and arranged in angular criss-cross lines such as a child builds with his toy wooden blocks. We watch the little girl as she kicks one of the stones loose. Her mother calls to her and she hastily puts it back in position. A tall tree casts a shadow across the center of the mound. Through the top of the tree the rising wind begins to sob, and the rain drops blow into our faces. The mother again calls to the child, who comes back across the road stubbing her toes into the mud.

The chauffeur starts the engine and turns the front of the car so that the headlights are direct on the mound, with its border of stones arranged like toy blocks. The shadow of the tall tree points in another direction. Where it had been—where I could not see before—I now see a black wooden cross. "How many under that?" I asked the man casually. "Eighteen or twenty-two," he answers, "I forget. We found them here in the road."