The violins mixed with the voices of the market-women, crying their artichokes and haricots, and above them rang—­“Ardent!  Vaillant! ...”  Audit might have been the voice of Paris itself, lying down there in her mist, Paris of lost Alsace and hopeless revanche, of ardor and charm crushed once, as they might be again, as the voice of that pale girl in black, with her air of coming from lights and cigarette smoke, and of these simple mothers rose above the noise of the street, half dirge, half battle-cry, while out beyond somewhere the little soldiers in red breeches were fighting, and the fate of France hung in the balance, that morning.

Chapter III

After The Marne

At the end of the village the road climbed again from the ravine and emerged on open fields.  A wall of timber, dark and impenetrable as the woods round an old chateau, rose at the farther end of these fields—­the road cutting through it like a tunnel—­and on the brow of the ravine, commanding the road and the little plain, was a line of trenches.  Here evidently they had fought.

We walked on down the road.  Below the northern horizon, where they were fighting now along the Aisne, rolled the sullen thunder of artillery, as it had been rolling since daylight.  And the autumn wind, cold with the week of equinoctial rain, puffing out of thickets and across ravines, brought, every now and then, the horrible odor of death.

Ahead, to the right, one caught the glint of a French infantry’s red trousers.  A man was lying there, face downward, on the field.  Then across the open space appeared another—­and another—­they were scattered all over that field, bright as the red poppies which were growing in the stubble and as still.  They were in various positions.  One lay on his back, with one knee raised like a man day-dreaming and looking up at the sky.  Another was stretched stiff, with both hands clinched over his chest.  One lay in the ditch close beside us, his head jammed into the muddy bank just as he had dived there in falling; another gripped a cup in one hand and a spoon in the other, as if, perhaps, he might have tried to feed himself in the long hours after the battle rolled on and left them there.

All these were French, but just at the edge of the thick timber was a heap—­one could scarcely say of Germans, so utterly did the gray, sodden faces and sodden, gray uniforms merge into anonymity.  A squad of French soldiers appeared at a turn in the road.  Two officers rode beside them, and they were just moving off across the fields carrying shovels instead of rifles.  Looking after them, beyond the belt of timber, one could see other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to the left, and here and there smoke.  Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms.  With the boyish good nature which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue, they stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges.  They were burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans.  The dead had been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while the battle line rolled northward, clear across France.