till the sergeants and corporals returned to lead them to the barns and out-houses that had been assigned to them, the houses still habitable being mostly reserved for the officers.  Like those of most French villages, they were drab, plaster-covered buildings without gardens; but some of them were covered with vines, hiding their ugliness; and the village as a whole, with its groups, here and there, of fine sycamore trees and its great stone fountain in the centre, was picturesque enough.  It had twice changed hands, and a part of it was in ruins.  From one or two of the more solidly built houses merely the front had fallen, leaving the rooms just as they had always been:  the furniture in its accustomed place, the pictures on the walls.  They suggested doll’s houses standing open.  One wondered when the giant child would come along and close them up.  The iron spire of the little church had been hit twice.  It stood above the village, twisted into the form of a note of interrogation.  In the churchyard many of the graves had been ripped open.  Bones and skulls lay scattered about among the shattered tombstones.  But, save for a couple of holes in the roof, the body was still intact, and every afternoon a faint, timid-sounding bell called a few villagers and a sprinkling of soldiers to Mass.  Most of the inhabitants had fled, but the farmers and shopkeepers had remained.  At intervals, the German batteries, searching round with apparent aimlessness, would drop a score or so of shells about the neighbourhood; but the peasant, with an indifference that was almost animal, would still follow his ox-drawn plough; the old, bent crone, muttering curses, still ply the hoe.  The proprietors of the tiny epiceries must have been rapidly making their fortunes, considering the prices that they charged the unfortunate poilu, dreaming of some small luxury out of his five sous a day.  But as one of them, a stout, smiling lady, explained to Joan, with a gesture:  “It is not often that one has a war.”

Joan had gone out in September, and for a while the weather was pleasant.  The men, wrapped up in their great-coats, would sleep for preference under the great sycamore trees.  Through open doorways she would catch glimpses of picturesque groups of eager card-players, crowded round a flickering candle.  From the darkness there would steal the sound of flute or zither, of voices singing.  Occasionally it would be some strident ditty of the Paris music-halls, but more often it was sad and plaintive.  But early in October the rains commenced and the stream became a roaring torrent, and a clammy mist lay like a white river between the wooded hills.