But do not think that destruction for destruction’s sake was done in all houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the glass tops of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.
To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big, conical haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.
It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open. Occasionally one saw the hastily made shelter trenches of a skirmish line; and again, the emplacements for batteries--hurried field emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then, pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.
Swift marching and quick manœuvres of the type which gave war some of its old sport and zest; the advance, all the while gathering force, like the deep tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested wheat-field or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day’s rain will wash away the blood stains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by his murderous wrath.
The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order. Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the rifles and guns and hell-fire, were moving across the fields with spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that were war’s victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and sometimes, when the burying was unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to take Paris.