Then I come to a wooden barraque, a hive buzzing with children.  They are clambering at the windows and playing in the dirt before the door, all clad in a many-colored collection of scraps which an ingenious mother has pieced together.  A little boy, wearing the blue callot of a poilu on the back of his head, sits on the doorsill.  He smiles and stands up, and tells me his mother is inside.  Within I find the mother seated in a room of good-natured disorder, nursing her latest born.  Her lavish smile of welcome lights her broad sunburned face framed in tawny braids, and she indicates a bench for me with the ease and authority of a long practiced hostess.  She sits there with the infant at her ample breast, and on her face is written unquestioning satisfaction with her part in life.  A swift laughing tale I hear, of little frocks outgrown and of sabots worn through, and no place to buy anything, and little Jean so thin and nervous, “but no wonder, Mademoiselle, for he was born during the evacuation, and only Cecile to take care of me, and she just sixteen years old, and I had to be carried in a wheelbarrow.”  I picture the flight, the father away at the front, the mother unable to walk, yet marshalling her little ones, comforting, cajoling, scolding, and feeding them through it all.  The baby finishes with a little contented sigh and the proud mother exhibits him.  “It’s a boy, Mademoiselle,” as exuberantly as though it were her first instead of her ninth. “C’est un petit garcon de l’Armistice” with a happy blush.

“Ah, let us hope that he will always be a little child of peace.”  But in another moment she is playing with him, chucking him under the chin. “Tiens, mon coco!  Viens, mon petit soldat—­you must grow up strong and big, for you are another little soldier for France.”

Little Vauchelles, far away in the hills of the fertile Oise, I think of you.  I hope I may again visit you.  And I wonder.  What ripples from the seething capitals will stir the placid thoughts of your stouthearted peasants?  And will your broad-browed women wait with age-old resignation for the next wave of war, or will they catch the echo that is rebounding through all the valleys of the world and join their voices in the swelling chord for brotherhood?

In your midst, where the three roads meet, still stands the image of Christ on the Cross.