Over There | Page 5

underestimated the number, and the
length of the stay, but no matter. "They were scouts. They came into
the town for a few hours--and left it. The Germans were deceived. They
might have got to Paris if they had liked. But they were deceived."
"How were they deceived?"
"They thought there were more English in front of them than actually
there were. The head-quarters of the English were over there, at La
Ferte-sous-Jouarre. The English blew up our bridge, as a measure of
precaution."
We drove on.
"The first tomb," said the driver, nonchalantly, in his weak voice,
lifting an elbow.
There it was, close by the roadside, and a little higher than ourselves.
The grave was marked by four short, rough posts on which was strung
barbed wire; a white flag; a white cross of painted wood, very simply
but neatly made; a faded wreath. We could distinguish a few words of
an inscription. "Comrades, 66th Territorials..." Soldiers were buried
where they fell, and this was the tomb of him who fell nearest to Paris.
It marked the last homicidal effort of the Germans before their advance
in this region curved eastwards into a retreat. This tomb was a very
impressive thing. The driver had thrilled me again.
We drove on. We were now in a large rolling plain that sloped
gradually behind us southwards towards the Marne. It had many little
woods and spinneys, and no watercourses. To the civilian it ap- peared
an ideal theatre for a glorious sanguinary battle in which thousands of
fathers, sons, and brothers should die violently because some hierarchy

in a distant capital was suffering from an acute attack of swelled head.
A few trenches here and there could still be descried, but the whole
land was in an advanced state of cultivation. Wheat and oats and
flaming poppies had now conquered the land, had overrun and
possessed it as no Germans could ever do. The raw earth of the
trenches struggled vainly against the tide of germination. The harvest
was going to be good. This plain, with its little woods and little villages,
glittered with a careless and vast satisfaction in the sheets of sunshine
that fell out of a blue too intense for the gaze.
We saw a few more tombs, and a great general monument or cenotaph
to the dead, constructed at cross-roads by military engineers. The driver
pointed to the village of Penchard, which had been pillaged and burnt
by the enemy. It was only about a mile off, but in the strong, dazzling
light we could distinguish not the least sign of damage. Then we came
to a farm-house by the roadside. It was empty; it was a shell, and its
roof was damaged. The Germans had gutted it. They had taken away its
furniture as booty. (What they intended to do with furniture out of a
perfectly mediocre farm-house, hundreds of miles from home, it is
difficult to imagine.) Articles which it did not suit them to carry off
they destroyed. Wine-casks of which they could not drink the wine,
they stove in. ... And then they retreated.
This farm-house was somebody's house, just as your home is yours,
and mine mine. To some woman or other every object in it was familiar.
She glanced at the canister on the mantelpiece and said to herself: "I
really must clean that canister to-morrow." There the house stood, with
holes in its roof, empty. And if there are half a million similarly tragic
houses in Europe to-day, as probably there are, such frequency does not
in the slightest degree diminish the forlorn tragedy of that particular
house which I have beheld.
At last Barcy came into view--the pierced remains of its church tower
over the brow of a rise in the plain. Barcy is our driver's show- place.
Barcy was in the middle of things. The fighting round Barcy lasted a
night and a day, and Barcy was taken and retaken twice.
"You see the new red roofs," said the driver as we approached. "By

those new red roofs you are in a state to judge a little what the damage
was."
Some of the newly made roofs, however, were of tarred paper.
The street by which we entered had a small-pox of shrapnel and
bullet-marks. The post office had particularly suffered: its bones were
laid bare. It had not been restored, but it was ready to do any business
that fell to be done, though closed on that afternoon. We turned a
corner, and came upon the church. The work on the church was well up
to the reported Teutonic average. Of its roof only the rafters were left.
The windows were all smashed, and their lead fantastically twisted.
The west door was entirely gone; a rough grille of