France at War | Page 8

strung all along a level;
or supply; or those eternal big guns coming round corners with trees
chained on their long backs to puzzle aeroplanes, and their leafy,
big-shell limbers snorting behind them. In the rare breathing-spaces
men with rollers and road metal attacked the road. In peace the roads of
France, thanks to the motor, were none too good. In war they stand the
incessant traffic far better than they did with the tourist. My impression
--after some seven hundred miles printed off on me at between 60 and
70 kilometres--was of uniform excellence. Nor did I come upon any
smashes or breakdowns in that distance, and they were certainly trying
them hard. Nor, which is the greater marvel, did we kill anybody;
though we did miracles down the streets to avoid babes, kittens, and
chickens. The land is used to every detail of war, and to its grime and

horror and make-shifts, but also to war's unbounded courtesy, kindness,
and long-suffering, and the gaiety that comes, thank God, to balance
overwhelming material loss.
FARM LIFE AMIDST WAR
There was a village that had been stamped flat, till it looked older than
Pompeii. There were not three roofs left, nor one whole house. In most
places you saw straight into the cellars. The hops were ripe in the
grave-dotted fields round about. They had been brought in and piled in
the nearest outline of a dwelling. Women sat on chairs on the pavement,
picking the good-smelling bundles. When they had finished one, they
reached back and pulled out another through the window-hole behind
them, talking and laughing the while. A cart had to be maneuvered out
of what had been a farmyard, to take the hops to market. A thick, broad,
fair-haired wench, of the sort that Millet drew, flung all her weight on a
spoke and brought the cart forward into the street. Then she shook
herself, and, hands on hips, danced a little defiant jig in her sabots as
she went back to get the horse. Another girl came across a bridge. She
was precisely of the opposite type, slender, creamy-skinned, and
delicate-featured. She carried a brand-new broom over her shoulder
through that desolation, and bore herself with the pride and grace of
Queen Iseult.
The farm-girl came out leading the horse, and as the two young things
passed they nodded and smiled at each other, with the delicate tangle of
the hop-vines at their feet.
The guns spoke earnestly in the north. That was the Argonne, where the
Crown Prince was busily getting rid of a few thousands of his father's
faithful subjects in order to secure himself the reversion of his father's
throne. No man likes losing his job, and when at long last the inner
history of this war comes to be written, we may find that the people we
mistook for principals and prime agents were only average
incompetents moving all Hell to avoid dismissal. (For it is absolutely
true that when a man sells his soul to the devil he does it for the price
of half nothing.)

WATCHING THE GUN-FIRE
It must have been a hot fight. A village, wrecked as is usual along this
line, opened on it from a hillside that overlooked an Italian landscape
of carefully drawn hills studded with small villages--a plain with a road
and a river in the foreground, and an all-revealing afternoon light upon
everything. The hills smoked and shook and bellowed. An
observation-balloon climbed up to see; while an aeroplane which had
nothing to do with the strife, but was merely training a beginner,
ducked and swooped on the edge of the plain. Two rose-pink pillars of
crumbled masonry, guarding some carefully trimmed evergreens on a
lawn half buried in rubbish, represented an hotel where the Crown
Prince had once stayed. All up the hillside to our right the foundations
of houses lay out, like a bit of tripe, with the sunshine in their square
hollows. Suddenly a band began to play up the hill among some trees;
and an officer of local Guards in the new steel anti-shrapnel helmet,
which is like the seventeenth century sallet, suggested that we should
climb and get a better view. He was a kindly man, and in speaking
English had discovered (as I do when speaking French) that it is
simpler to stick to one gender. His choice was the feminine, and the
Boche described as "she" throughout made me think better of myself,
which is the essence of friendship. We climbed a flight of old stone
steps, for generations the playground of little children, and found a
ruined church, and a battalion in billets, recreating themselves with
excellent music and a little horseplay on the outer edge of the crowd.
The trouble in the hills was none