Passed by the censor

by Wythe Williams

We saw horses lying in the fields. Their legs stuck rigidly into the air. Horses were lying along the roadside. Insects were crawling over them. Fallen trees lined the way into the town.

We turned into the main street and rattled over its cobblestones. We met no one. Crossing an open square we saw that over half the trees were down. Up a side street a house had fallen forward from its foundations and settled in a crumbled heap in the center of the road. The sun which had been shining brightly went behind a cloud. We stopped for a moment. We could hear the wind sighing in the tops of the remaining trees. Some one asked, "Is this Sunday?" and was answered, "No. It's Friday. Why?" He replied, "Because it is so still. Did you ever see a place where people live that is so completely silent?" "It reminds me of London on Good Friday—everybody gone to church," said another.

We drove on. A block along the main street a soldier in the French uniform of the line lounged in a doorway. His long blue overcoat flapped desolately over his baggy red trousers. His rifle leaned in the corner. We asked if any hotel remained open. He replied, "I don't know. Have you a cigarette?" I drew out a box and he ran to the car, seizing it as a hungry animal snatches food. He settled back into his doorway, smiling; then said in French argot which translated into American best reads: "Do you guys know you ain't safe here?" We smiled and waited explanation. But he merely shrugged his shoulders. We started the car.

More French soldiers lounged in doorways. Once we saw the white and frightened face of a woman peering at us from a window. She was entirely incurious. Her gaze was dispassionate. She appeared to have not the slightest interest either in us or our big car, which surely was a rare sight in the streets of that town on that day. But the fright upon her face was stamped.

Several villagers stood at the next corner. They exhibited interest. We again asked about a hotel and one pointed to a building we had just passed. We noted that its doors and windows were barred; but we thought they might open up.

We asked, then, when the firing on the town had ceased. The man laughed. Anything so normal as a laugh seemed out of place in that ghastly silence. It grated. But it seemed that after all one might observe the function of laughing even during war. He informed us that the German gunners were probably at lunch. We asked the position of the French batteries, and as he pointed vaguely toward the south we realized that we were then in an advance position on the firing line—that the force of soldiers was only an outpost. The same man told us that the town had been under fire for eight days, that the French had shifted the position of their heavy guns and that the Germans were now trying to locate them. We returned to the hotel, stabled our automobile and ordered luncheon, which the landlord informed us would be ready in half an hour. So we continued the exploration of the town on foot.

The chauffeur did not accompany us, for there was a captured German automobile in the barn that interested him greatly. Under the seat he found the army papers of the German driver. He advised us not to touch them. They were dangerous. If found in our possession we might be arrested as spies. So we dropped them back under the seat, and went out into the market place.

As is usual in small French cities the market consisted of a large building entirely open at the ends and fronting on a large square paved with cobbles. We walked into the building; it was deserted and our footsteps echoed. In the center was a pile of masonry, beneath a large hole in the roof torn by a shell. The explosion had cracked the side walls. In one of the cracks was jammed the top of a meat table, forcibly caught up from the floor and hurled there. A little further on a shell had passed through both side walls, leaving clean holes large enough for a man to stand.

I stood in one of them and saw where the shell had spent its force on a residence across the square. It had caught the house plumb on a corner and at the floor of the second story, so that the floor sagged down into the room below. The room above had been a bedchamber. The entire side wall was gone, so all that remained of the intimacies of the room were exposed. The bed with the covers thrown back as though the occupant quitted it hurriedly had slipped forward until stopped by a broken bit of the wall. From another jagged piece of masonry that formed part of the wall the blue skirt of a child flapped desolately over the sidewalk. We left the market building and stood in the center of the square looking down the six streets that emptied into it. They were narrow, winding streets, and we could not see far. But in all we could see the ruin—the crumbled masonry and walls blackened by fire.

We looked at our watches and hurried toward the hotel. Entering the street, about half a block distant, we stopped to look down a side alley. As we looked we heard what seemed to be a shrill whistle, pitched high and very prolonged. It seemed like the shriek of a suddenly rising wind; but it was followed by a dull boom and the crash of falling masonry. We looked behind us and saw clouds of smoke and dust rising a short distance beyond the market place. We ran toward the hotel. At the entrance we again heard the high-pitched screaming whistle, ending in a crash much more acute. "That struck nearer," one of us observed. But we did not wait to see. As we entered the hall, the landlord remarked, "Ça commence encore."