Claude thought he would stroll about to look at the town a little.  It had been taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1914, after their retreat from the Marne, and they had held it until about a year ago, when it was retaken by the English and the Chasseurs d’Alpins.  They had been able to reduce it and to drive the Germans out, only by battering it down with artillery; not one building remained standing.

Ruin was ugly, and it was nothing more, Claude was thinking, as he followed the paths that ran over piles of brick and plaster.  There was nothing picturesque about this, as there was in the war pictures one saw at home.  A cyclone or a fire might have done just as good a job.  The place was simply a great dump-heap; an exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of American towns.  It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned brick and broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered beams and rafters, stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy water.  An American soldier had stepped into one of those holes a few nights before, and been drowned.

This had been a rich town of eighteen thousand inhabitants; now the civilian population was about four hundred.  There were people there who had hung on all through the years of German occupation; others who, as soon as they heard that the enemy was driven out, came back from wherever they had found shelter.  They were living in cellars, or in little wooden barracks made from old timbers and American goods boxes.  As he walked along, Claude read familiar names and addresses, painted on boards built into the sides of these frail shelters:  “From Emery Bird, Thayer Co.  Kansas City, Mo.”  “Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colo.”  These inscriptions cheered him so much that he began to feel like going up and calling on the French ladies.

The sun had come out hot after three days of rain.  The stagnant pools and the weeds that grew in the ditches gave out a rank, heavy smell.  Wild flowers grew triumphantly over the piles of rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the Germans did to it.

Claude paused before a little shanty built against a half-demolished brick wall.  A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with a canary, singing beautifully.  An old woman was working in the garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster the rain had washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops and neat lettuce heads.  Claude approached her, touched his helmet, and asked her how one could find the way to the Red Cross.

She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow.  “Vous savez le tank Anglais?  Non?  Marie, Marie!”

(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way or that from a disabled British tank that had been left on the site of the old town hall.)