That was all he had to say about it, and many of these peasants were like him, repeating some trivial detail of their experience, the loss of a dog or the damage to an old teapot, as though that eclipsed all other suffering.  But little by little, if one had the patience, one could get wider glimpses of the truth.  Another old man from the village of Soupir told a more vivid tale.  His dwelling-place sheltered some of the Germans when they traversed the district.  The inhabitants of Soupir, he said, were divided into two groups.  Able-bodied prisoners were sent off to Germany, and women and children who were carried off in the retreat were afterwards allowed to go back, but not until several poor little creatures had been killed, and pretty girls subjected to gross indignities by brutal soldiers.  Upon entering Soupir the French troops found in cellars where they had concealed themselves thirty people who had gone raving mad and who cried and pleaded to remain so that they could still hear the shells and gibber at death.  “War is so bracing to a nation,” says the philosopher.  “War purges peoples of their vanities.”  If there is a devil—­and there must be many old-time sceptics who believe now not in one but in a hundred thousand devils—­how the old rogue must chuckle at such words!

13

It was astounding to any student of psychology wandering in the war zone to see how many of the peasants of France clung to their houses, in spite of all their terror of German shells and German soldiers.  When in the first month of 1915 the enemy suddenly swarmed over the ridges of Cuffies and Crouy, to the north of Soissons, and with overwhelming numbers smashed the French back across the Aisne at a time, when the rising of the river had broken many pontoon bridges, so that the way of escape was almost cut off, they drove out crowds of peasant folk who had remained along this fifteen miles of front until actually shelled out in that last attack which put the ruins of their houses into the hands of the Germans.  As long as three months before Crouy itself had been a target for the enemy’s guns, so that hardly a cottage was standing with solid walls.

Nevertheless, with that homing instinct which is the strongest emotion in the heart of the French peasant, many of the inhabitants had been living an underground life in their cellars, obtaining food from French soldiers and cowering close together as shells came shrieking overhead, and as the shattered buildings collapsed into greater ruin.

So it was in Rheims and Arras and other towns which were not spared in spite of the glories of an architecture which can never be rebuilt in beauty.  Only a few days before writing these lines, I stood on the edge of the greatest battlefield in France and from an observation post perched like an eyrie in a tree above the valley, looked across to the cathedral of Rheims, that shrine of history, where the bones of kings lie, and where every stone speaks of saints and