Paths of Glory | Page 3

limb of a small tree. Beneath the tree were a
sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire;
and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all ready
for the pot or the pan. Looking on past these things we saw much
scattered dunnage: Frenchmen's knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards,
fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered

with slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on
their tops--which proved them to be French canteens--tumbled straw,
odd shoes with their lacings undone, a toptilted service shelter of
canvas; all the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently
disturbed.
As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it
occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the
clumped trees of the chateau grounds. We were desperately weary, to
begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the
signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the
wake of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.
Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally
shot to bits. From our side--that is to say, from the north and likewise
from the west--the Germans had shelled it. From the south, plainly, the
French had answered. The village, in between, had caught the full force
and fury of the contending fires. Probably the inhabitants had warning;
probably they fled when the German skirmishers surprised that outpost
of Frenchmen camping in the park. One imagined them scurrying like
rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage patches. But they had
left their belongings behind, all their small petty gearings and
garnishings, to be wrecked in the wrenching and racking apart of their
homes.
A railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street.
Shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the
cross-ties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like
rows of snaggled teeth. Other shells, dropping in the road, had so
wrought with the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and
there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six feet
deep.
Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again. One house
would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back
to the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves. Another house
would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were
now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potter's

door. The doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes
all gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered emptily, like
eye-sockets without eyes.
So it went. Two of the houses had caught fire and the interiors were
quite burned away. A sodden smell of burned things came from the still
smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.
Our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted. If she had had
energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the
way she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses--a big gray
and a roan--with their stark legs sticking out across the road. The gray
was shot through and through in three places. The right fore hoof of the
roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax;
and the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about it,
suggesting a natural malformation. Dead only a few hours, their
carcasses already had begun to swell. The skin on their bellies was as
tight as a drumhead.
We forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses. Beyond them
the road was a litter. Knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots,
pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere. The
deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things.
The dropped caps and the abandoned knapsacks were always French
caps and French knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after
the melee.
The Germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the French
had fallen back--or at least so we deduced from the looks of things. In
the debris was no object that bespoke German workmanship or German
ownership. This rather puzzled us until we learned that the Germans, as
tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it a hard-and-fast
rule to gather up their own belongings after every engagement, great or
small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to give the enemy an
idea of their losses.