The most complete destruction I saw in France was in Champagne, when I walked through places which had been the villages of Sermaize, Heiltz-le-Maurupt, Blesmes, and Huiron.  Sermaize was utterly wiped out.  As far as I could see, not one house was left standing.  Not one wall was spared.  It was laid flat upon the earth, with only a few charred chimney-stacks sticking out of the piles of bricks and cinders.  Strange, piteous relics of pretty dwelling-places lay about in the litter, signifying that men and women with some love for the arts of life had lived here in decent comfort.  A notice-board of a hotel which had given hospitality to many travellers before it became a blazing furnace lay sideways on a mass of broken bricks with a legend so frightfully ironical that I laughed among the ruins:  “Chauffage central”—­the system of “central heating” invented by Germans in this war had been too hot for the hotel, and had burnt it to a wreck of ashes.  Half a dozen peasants stood in one of the “streets”—­marked by a line of rubbish-heaps which had once been their homes.  Some of them had waited until the first shells came over their chimney-pots before they fled.  Several of their friends, not so lucky in timing their escape, had been crushed to death by the falling houses.  But it was not shell-fire which did the work.  The Germans strewed the cottages with their black inflammable tablets, which had been made for such cases, and set their torches to the window-curtains before marching away to make other bonfires on their road of retreat.  Sermaize became a street of fire, and from each of its houses flames shot out like scarlet snakes, biting through the heavy pall of smoke.  Peasants hiding in ditches a mile away stared at the furnace in which all their household goods were being consumed.  Something of their own life seemed to be burning there, leaving the dust and ashes of old hopes and happiness.

“That was mine,” said one of the peasants, pointing to a few square yards of wreckage.  “I took my woman home across the threshold that was there.  She was a fine girl, with hair like gold, Monsieur.  Now her hair has gone quite white, during these recent weeks.  That’s what war does for women.  There are many like that hereabouts, white-haired before their time.”

I saw some of those white-haired women in Blesmes and Huiron and other scrap-heaps of German ruthlessness.  They wandered in a disconsolate way about the ruins, watching rather hopelessly the building of wooden huts by a number of English “Quakers” who had come here to put up shelters for these homeless people of France.  They were doing good work—­one of the most beautiful works of charity which had been called out of this war, and giving a new meaning to their name of the Society of Friends.  But though they were handy in the use of the wood given them by the French Government for this purpose, not all their industry nor all their friendliness could bring back the beauty of these old-world villages of Champagne,