built centuries ago by men of art and craft, and chiselled by Time itself, so that the stones told tales of history to the villagers.  It would be difficult to patch up the grey old tower of Huiron Church, through which shells had come crashing, or to rebuild its oak roof whose beams were splintered like the broken ribs of a rotting carcase.  A white-haired priest passed up and down the roadway before the place in which he had celebrated Mass and praised God for the blessings of each day.  His hands were clenched behind his bent back, and every now and then he thrust back his broad felt hat and looked up at the poor, battered thing which had been his church with immense sadness in his eyes.

There was an old chateau near Huiron in which a noble family of France had lived through centuries of war and revolution.  It had many pointed gables and quaint turrets and mullioned windows, overlooking a garden in which there were arbours for love-in-idleness where ladies had dreamed awhile on many summer days in the great yesterday of history.  When I passed it, after the Germans had gone that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls.  The gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion.  A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the chateau of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed, murderously, by outrageous hands.

In one of these villages of Champagne—­I think it was at Blesmes—­I saw one relic which had been spared by chance when the flames of the incendiaries had licked up all other things around, and somehow, God knows why, it seemed to me the most touching thing in this place of desolation.

It was a little stone fountain, out of which a jet of water rose playfully, falling with a splash of water-drops into the sculptured basin.  While the furnace was raging in the village this fountain played and reflected the glare of crimson light in its bubbling jet.  The children of many generations had dabbled their hands in its basin.  Pretty girls had peeped into their own bright eyes mirrored there.  On summer days the village folk had sauntered about this symbol of grace and beauty.  Now it was as though I had discovered a white Venus in the dust-heap of a burying-place.

12

The great horror of Invasion did not reach only a few villages in France and blanch the hair of only a few poor women.  During the long months of this stationary war there was a long black line on all the maps, printed day after day with depressing repetition in all the newspapers of the world.  But I wonder how many people understood the meaning of that black line marking the length of the German front through France, and saw in their mind’s eye the blackness of all those burnt and shattered villages, for ten miles in width, on that border-line of the war trail?