had been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramee and Chevreville, the whitewashed cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the German soldiers before they were driven out by shell-fire or bayonet charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin.  Here and there a house had escaped.  It stood trim and neat amid the wreckage.  A cafe restaurant still displayed its placards advertising Dubonnet and other aperitifs, peppered by shrapnel bullets, but otherwise intact.  Here and there whole streets stood spared, without a trace of conflict, and in a street away the cottages had fallen down like card-houses toppled over by the hand of a petulant child.  In other villages it was difficult to believe that war had passed that way.  It was rather as though a plague had driven their inhabitants to flight.  The houses were still shuttered as when the bourgeoisie and peasant had fled at the first news of the German advance.  It was only by the intense solitude and silence that one realized the presence of some dreadful visitation, only that and a faint odour of corruption stealing from a dark mass of unknown beastliness huddled under a stone wall, and the deep ruts and holes in the roadway, made by gun-carriages and wagons.

Spent cartridges lay about, and fragments of shell, and here and there shells which had failed to burst until they buried their nozzles in the earth.

French peasants prowled about for these trophies, though legally they had no right to them, as they came under the penalties attached to loot.  In many of the cottages which were used by the German officers there were signs of a hasty evacuation.  Capes and leather pouches still lay about on chairs and bedsteads.  Half finished letters, written to women in the Fatherland who will never read those words, had been trampled under heel by hurrying boots.

I saw similar scenes in Turkey when the victorious Bulgarians marched after the retreating Turks.  I never dreamed then that such scenes would happen in France in the wake of a German retreat.  It is a little thing, like one of those unfinished letters from a soldier to his wife, which overwhelms one with pity for all the tragedy of war.

“Meine liebe Frau.”  Somewhere in Germany a woman was waiting for the scrap of paper, wet with dew and half obliterated by mud, which I picked up in the Forest of Compiegne She would wait week after week for that letter from the front, and day after day during those weeks she would be sick at heart because no word came, no word which would make her say, “Gott sei dank!” as she knelt by the bedside of a fair-haired boy so wonderfully like the man who had gone away to that unvermeidliche krieg which had come at last.  I found hundreds of letters like this, but so soppy and trampled down that I could only read a word or two in German script.  They fluttered about the fields and lay in a litter of beef-tins left behind by British soldiers on their own retreat over the same fields.