Paths of Glory | Page 4

We went by the church. Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small
flag--the Tricolor of France--still fluttered from a window where some

one had stuck it. We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a
sign over its door--a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx. And
through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a
table. We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front of
it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn I
picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from
the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled. The
figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have
belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment. Behind the barn we
found a whole pile of new knapsacks--the flimsy play-soldier
knapsacks of the French infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so
substantial as the heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with
straps and covered on the back side with undressed red bullock's hide.
Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human being.
The place fairly ached with emptiness. Cats sat on the doorsteps or in
the windows, and presently from a barn we heard imprisoned beasts
lowing dismally. Cows were there, with agonized udders and, penned
away from them, famishing calves; but there were no dogs. We already
had remarked this fact--that in every desolated village cats were thick
enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish- looking Belgian dogs
had disappeared along with their masters. And it was so in Montignies
St. Christophe.
On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a
breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which
the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by
side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind the
riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the town,
one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at us
through a break in the wall. He called out to her in French, but she
never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter.
He started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having
spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.
Just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon--a furniture dealer's

wagon--from some larger community, which had been impressed by
the Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service. A
jaded team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their
centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft. One man led the near
horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon. All three
of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.
The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends. Overhauling it
we saw that it contained two dead soldiers--French foot-soldiers. The
bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed. Their feet somehow were
caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red
pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being
about to glide backward and out of the wagon.
The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc,
encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles
these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly. The other's head
was canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face. It
was a young face--we could tell that much, even through the mask of
caked mud on the drab-white skin--and it might once have been a
comely face. It was not comely now.
Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had been partly
shot or shorn away--the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an
abominable thing to look on. These two had been men the day before.
Now they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked
back we saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the
wild red poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of
neglected sugar beets.
We stopped and watched. The wagon bumped through the beet patch to
where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug. The diggers were
two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw upturned
earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a painting by