France at War | Page 4

FIELDS
The voices and the wings were still busy after lunch, when the car
slipped past the tea-houses in the drive, and came into a country where
women and children worked among the crops. There were large raw
shell holes by the wayside or in the midst of fields, and often a cottage
or a villa had been smashed as a bonnet-box is smashed by an umbrella.
That must be part of Belial's work when he bellows so truculently
among the hills to the north.

We were looking for a town that lives under shell-fire. The regular road
to it was reported unhealthy--not that the women and children seemed
to care. We took byways of which certain exposed heights and corners
were lightly blinded by wind-brakes of dried tree-tops. Here the shell
holes were rather thick on the ground. But the women and the children
and the old men went on with their work with the cattle and the crops;
and where a house had been broken by shells the rubbish was collected
in a neat pile, and where a room or two still remained usable, it was
inhabited, and the tattered window-curtains fluttered as proudly as any
flag. And time was when I used to denounce young France because it
tried to kill itself beneath my car wheels; and the fat old women who
crossed roads without warning; and the specially deaf old men who
slept in carts on the wrong side of the road! Now, I could take off my
hat to every single soul of them, but that one cannot traverse a whole
land bareheaded. The nearer we came to our town the fewer were the
people, till at last we halted in a well-built suburb of paved streets
where there was no life at all. . . .
A WRECKED TOWN
The stillness was as terrible as the spread of the quick busy weeds
between the paving-stones; the air smelt of pounded mortar and
crushed stone; the sound of a footfall echoed like the drop of a pebble
in a well. At first the horror of wrecked apartment-houses and big shops
laid open makes one waste energy in anger. It is not seemly that rooms
should be torn out of the sides of buildings as one tears the soft heart
out of English bread; that villa roofs should lie across iron gates of
private garages, or that drawing-room doors should flap alone and
disconnected between two emptinesses of twisted girders. The eye
wearies of the repeated pattern that burst shells make on stone walls, as
the mouth sickens of the taste of mortar and charred timber. One
quarter of the place had been shelled nearly level; the facades of the
houses stood doorless, roofless, and windowless like stage scenery.
This was near the cathedral, which is always a favourite mark for the
heathen. They had gashed and ripped the sides of the cathedral itself, so
that the birds flew in and out at will; they had smashed holes in the roof;
knocked huge cantles out of the buttresses, and pitted and starred the

paved square outside. They were at work, too, that very afternoon,
though I do not think the cathedral was their objective for the moment.
We walked to and fro in the silence of the streets and beneath the
whirring wings overhead. Presently, a young woman, keeping to the
wall, crossed a corner. An old woman opened a shutter (how it jarred!),
and spoke to her. The silence closed again, but it seemed to me that I
heard a sound of singing--the sort of chant one hears in nightmare-cities
of voices crying from underground.
IN THE CATHEDRAL
"Nonsense," said an officer. "Who should be singing here?" We circled
the cathedral again, and saw what pavement-stones can do against their
own city, when the shell jerks them upward. But there was singing after
all--on the other side of a little door in the flank of the cathedral. We
looked in, doubting, and saw at least a hundred folk, mostly women,
who knelt before the altar of an unwrecked chapel. We withdrew
quietly from that holy ground, and it was not only the eyes of the
French officers that filled with tears. Then there came an old, old thing
with a prayer-book in her hand, pattering across the square, evidently
late for service.
"And who are those women?" I asked.
"Some are caretakers; people who have still little shops here. (There is
one quarter where you can buy things.) There are many old people, too,
who will not go away. They are of the place, you see."
"And this bombardment happens often?" I said.
"It happens always. Would you like to look at the railway station? Of
course, it has not been so bombarded as the cathedral."
We