“How can I describe it?  Where to begin?  Abandoned farms, on hills of death!  The grain-giving earth, empty of human beings.  No labourers—­no household smoke.  The fire of the burning villages has smouldered out, and round the houses, and in the courtyards, lie the debris of their normal life, trampled, dirty and piecemeal, under foot.  Poor farms of the Ile-de-France!—­dwellings of old time, into whose barns the rich harvests of the fields had been joyously gathered year by year—­old tiled roofs, clothed with ancestral moss—­plain hospitable rooms where masters and servants met familiarly together:—­you are no more than calcined and blackened stones!  Not a living animal in the ruined stalls, not an ox, not a horse, not a sheep.  One flies from the houses, only to find a scene more horrible in the fields.  Corpses everywhere, of men and horses.  And everywhere in the fields unexploded shells, which it would be death to touch, which have already made many unsuspecting victims.

“Sometimes, as the motor draws near, a man or a woman emerges from a building, having still on their faces the terror of the hours they have lived through.  They scarcely look at us.  They are absorbed in their losses, in the struggle to rescue something from the wreck.  As soon as they are sure it is not the Germans come back, they turn away, with slow steps, bewildered by what they have suffered.”

The small party in the motor includes a priest, and as it passes near Betz, at the northern end of the battle-field, they see a burying-party of French Territorials at work.  The officer in charge beckons to the priest, and the priest goes to speak to him.

“Monsieur l’Abbe, we have just buried here twenty-two French soldiers.”  He points to a trench freshly dug, into which the earth has just been shovelled.

“They are Breton soldiers,” the officer explains, “and the men of my burying company are Bretons too.  They have just discovered that these dead men we have gathered from the fields were soldiers from a regiment recruited in their own district.  And seven of them have recognised among these twenty-two dead, one a son, one a son-in-law, one a brother.  Will you come, Monsieur l’Abbe, and say a few words to these poor fellows?”

So the Abbe goes to the new-made grave, reads the De Profundis, says a prayer, gives the benediction, and then speaks.  Tears are on the strong, rugged faces of the bare-headed Bretons, as they gather round him.  A group, some little distance off, which is writing the names of the dead on a white cross, pauses, catches what is going on, and kneels too, with bent heads....

It is good to linger on that little scene of human sympathy and religious faith.  It does something to protect the mind from the horror of much that has happened here.

* * * * *