Oh, that poor town—­when we reached it, along a road ploughed with fresh obus-holes, I didn’t want to stop the motor; I wanted to hurry on and blot the picture from my memory!  It was doubly sad to look at because of the fact that it wasn’t quite dead; faint spasms of life still quivered through it.  A few children played in the ravaged streets; a few pale mothers watched them from cellar doorways.  “They oughtn’t to be here,” our guide explained; “but about a hundred and fifty begged so hard to stay that the General gave them leave.  The officer in command has an eye on them, and whenever he gives the signal they dive down into their burrows.  He says they are perfectly obedient.  It was he who asked that they might stay...”

Up and up into the hills.  The vision of human pain and ruin was lost in beauty.  We were among the firs, and the air was full of balm.  The mossy banks gave out a scent of rain, and little water-falls from the heights set the branches trembling over secret pools.  At each turn of the road, forest, and always more forest, climbing with us as we climbed, and dropped away from us to narrow valleys that converged on slate-blue distances.  At one of these turns we overtook a company of soldiers, spade on shoulder and bags of tools across their backs—­“trench-workers” swinging up to the heights to which we were bound.  Life must be a better thing in this crystal air than in the mud-welter of the Argonne and the fogs of the North; and these men’s faces were fresh with wind and weather.

Higher still ... and presently a halt on a ridge, in another “black village,” this time almost a town!  The soldiers gathered round us as the motor stopped—­throngs of chasseurs-a-pied in faded, trench-stained uniforms—­for few visitors climb to this point, and their pleasure at the sight of new faces was presently expressed in a large “Vive l’Amerique!” scrawled on the door of the car. L’Amerique was glad and proud to be there, and instantly conscious of breathing an air saturated with courage and the dogged determination to endure.  The men were all reservists:  that is to say, mostly married, and all beyond the first fighting age.  For many months there has not been much active work along this front, no great adventure to rouse the blood and wing the imagination:  it has just been month after month of monotonous watching and holding on.  And the soldiers’ faces showed it:  there was no light of heady enterprise in their eyes, but the look of men who knew their job, had thought it over, and were there to hold their bit of France till the day of victory or extermination.