We turned back toward Crepy, passing again through the shattered village of Betz.  For three days it had been the centre of a battle, the two forces lying outside it and shelling each other across the town.  The main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on the edge of the ravine smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over and over again what they had seen.

Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked and thrashed, past the carcasses of horses sprawled stiff-legged in the ditch or in the stubble, we tramped on to Crepy-en-Valois.  The country was empty, scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled back again, and now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon to the north.  The little hotel across from the railroad station in Crepy had kept open through it all.  It was the typical Hotel de la Gare of these little old towns—­a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets and under a feather bed.  They were used to change, and the mere coming of armies could not be permitted to derange them.

Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs had been crowded with English soldiers in retreat; then with Germans—­stern, on edge, sure of being in Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans falling back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing French.  And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that kept pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could hobble over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down.

Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go galloping away, leaving a laugh and a few sous behind.  Madame would come in from the kitchen, raise her arms and sigh something about closing their doors, but, after all, they knew they should keep right on giving as long as they had anything to give.  One of their daughters, a strapping, light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things they had seen as she paused in the hall after preparing our rooms.  Her sister stood beside her, and together they declaimed in an inimitable sort of recitative.

How the English soldiers had come in, all laughing, and the young officers so handsome; but the German soldiers were all like this—­and the young woman gave a quick gesture as of one taking nose and mouth in her hand and pulling it stiffly down a bit.  The French officers and their men were like fathers and sons, but the Germans had a discipline you would not believe—­she had seen one officer strike a man with his whip, she said, because he was not marching fast enough, and another, when a soldier had come too near, had kicked him.  And they all thought surely they were going into Paris—­“Two days more,” they had laughed as they drank down-stairs, “Paris, and then—­kaput!”