IN THE CATHEDRAL

“Nonsense,” said an officer.  “Who should be singing here?” We circled the cathedral again, and saw what pavement-stones can do against their own city, when the shell jerks them upward.  But there was singing after all—­on the other side of a little door in the flank of the cathedral.  We looked in, doubting, and saw at least a hundred folk, mostly women, who knelt before the altar of an unwrecked chapel.  We withdrew quietly from that holy ground, and it was not only the eyes of the French officers that filled with tears.  Then there came an old, old thing with a prayer-book in her hand, pattering across the square, evidently late for service.

“And who are those women?” I asked.

“Some are caretakers; people who have still little shops here.  (There is one quarter where you can buy things.) There are many old people, too, who will not go away.  They are of the place, you see.”

“And this bombardment happens often?” I said.

“It happens always.  Would you like to look at the railway station?  Of course, it has not been so bombarded as the cathedral.”

We went through the gross nakedness of streets without people, till we reached the railway station, which was very fairly knocked about, but, as my friends said, nothing like as much as the cathedral.  Then we had to cross the end of a long street down which the Boche could see clearly.  As one glanced up it, one perceived how the weeds, to whom men’s war is the truce of God, had come back and were well established the whole length of it, watched by the long perspective of open, empty windows.

II

THE NATION’S SPIRIT AND A NEW INHERITANCE

We left that stricken but undefeated town, dodged a few miles down the roads beside which the women tended their cows, and dropped into a place on a hill where a Moroccan regiment of many experiences was in billets.

They were Mohammedans bafflingly like half a dozen of our Indian frontier types, though they spoke no accessible tongue.  They had, of course, turned the farm buildings where they lay into a little bit of Africa in colour and smell.  They had been gassed in the north; shot over and shot down, and set up to be shelled again; and their officers talked of North African wars that we had never heard of—­sultry days against long odds in the desert years ago.  “Afterward—­is it not so with you also?—­we get our best recruits from the tribes we have fought.  These men are children.  They make no trouble.  They only want to go where cartridges are burnt.  They are of the few races to whom fighting is a pleasure.”

“And how long have you dealt with them?”

“A long time—­a long time.  I helped to organize the corps.  I am one of those whose heart is in Africa.”  He spoke slowly, almost feeling for his French words, and gave some order.  I shall not forget his eyes as he turned to a huge, brown, Afreedee-like Mussulman hunkering down beside his accoutrements.  He had two sides to his head, that bearded, burned, slow-spoken officer, met and parted with in an hour.