7
The retreat of the Germans to the Marne, when those columns of
men turned their backs on Paris and trudged back along many roads
down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony
fields strewn already with the debris of fighting, on through villages
where they burned arid looted as they passed, left a trail of muck and
blood and ruin. Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part
of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of
beauty dwelt in it. Those fields, without any black blotches on grass
nibbled short by flocks of sheep, were fresh and green in the sunlight.
Wild flowers spangled them with gold and silver. No horrors lurked in
the woods, where birds sang shrill choruses to the humming
undertone of nature's organists. Little French towns stood white on
the hillsides and in villages of whitewashed houses under thatch
roofs, with deep, low barns filled with the first fruits of the harvest,
peasant girls laughed as they filled their jugs from the wells, and boys
and girls played games in the marketplaces; and old men and
women, sitting in the cool gloom of their doorways, watched the old
familiar things of peaceful life and listened to the chimes of the church
clocks, without any terror in their hearts.
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