7

The retreat of the Germans to the Marne, when those columns of men turned their backs on Paris and trudged back along many roads down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony fields strewn already with the debris of fighting, on through villages where they burned arid looted as they passed, left a trail of muck and blood and ruin.  Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of beauty dwelt in it.  Those fields, without any black blotches on grass nibbled short by flocks of sheep, were fresh and green in the sunlight.  Wild flowers spangled them with gold and silver.  No horrors lurked in the woods, where birds sang shrill choruses to the humming undertone of nature’s organists.  Little French towns stood white on the hillsides and in villages of whitewashed houses under thatch roofs, with deep, low barns filled with the first fruits of the harvest, peasant girls laughed as they filled their jugs from the wells, and boys and girls played games in the marketplaces; and old men and women, sitting in the cool gloom of their doorways, watched the old familiar things of peaceful life and listened to the chimes of the church clocks, without any terror in their hearts.  War had been declared, but it seemed remote in its actual cruelty.  There was only the faint thrill of unaccustomed drama in the scenes which passed through these village streets as guns rattled over the cobble-stones, or as a squadron of light blue cavalry streamed by, with bronzed men who grinned at the peasant girls, and horses still groomed and glossy.  It is true that in some of these villages mothers of France had clasped their sons to their bosoms and wept a little over their nestling heads and wept still more in loneliness when the boys had gone away.  The shadow of the war had crept into all these villages of France, but outwardly they were still at peace and untroubled by the far-off peril.  Nature was indifferent to the stupid ways of men.  Her beauty had the ripeness of the full-blown summer and the somnolence of golden days when the woods are very still in the shimmering heat and not a grass-blade moves except when a cricket stirs it with its chirruping.

Now, along the line of the retreat, nature itself was fouled and the old dwelling-places of peace were wrecked.  Fighting their way back the enemy had burned many villages, or had defended them against a withering fire from the pursuing troops, so that their blackened stumps of timber, and charred, broken walls, with heaps of ashes which were once farmhouses and barns, remained as witnesses of the horror that had passed.  Along the roadways were the bodies of dead horses.  Swarms of flies were black upon them, browsing on their putrefying flesh, from which a stench came poisoning the air and rising above the scent of flowers and the sweet smell of hay in eddying waves of abominable odour.  In villages where there