The inhabitants of these ruins had come back in many instances--where else had they to go? Swept up before the blast of the cyclone, they had fled south over the fields and hard white roads, then crept back a few days after the cyclone had passed to find their homes pillaged, burned, their villages blackened scars on the earth. But they stayed there! The English Society of Friends has given some money with which to put up wooden huts, on which old men and Belgian refugees were working when I passed that way. There is a French charity that tries to outfit these new homes in the devastated districts, one of the numberless efforts of the French to put their national house in order. But for all that charity can do, the lot of these villagers is a bitter one: their strong men have gone to the front; old men, women, and children are left to scratch the fields, and exist miserably in the cellars, underneath bits of corrugated iron roof, in tiny wooden huts. But they have planted their potatoes, in the ruins in some cases, and have taken up sturdily the struggle of existence in the wreck of their old homes. The children play among the crumbling walls, the women go barefoot to the public well for water. The fields have been sown and harvested somehow. Until the Germans can kill off the French peasant women, they can never hope to conquer France.
Compared with the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that bill which France expects to present some day. The old châteaux that were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads of plunder that went back to German cities, the emptied cellars and ransacked houses have fed the fire of disgust and loathing which the French feel for their foe. Yet they should not begrudge the invader the extraordinary quantity of good wine which he consumed on his raid, because the victory of the Marne was doubtless won in part by the aid of the champagne bottle!
When I passed through the Marne valley the fields were being harvested for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers' _képi_, who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant. The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ruins of the villages one might have forgotten the fact of war were it not for the graves. Here and there the corner of some wood where a battery had been placed was mowed as if cut by a giant reaper. The tall poplars along the roadsides had been ripped and torn as by a violent storm. Some hillsides were scarred with ripples from burrowing shells, and hastily made trenches had not yet been ploughed completely under. But over the undulating golden fields it would be difficult to trace the course of the tempest were it not for the crosses above the graves, thousands upon thousands of them,--singly, in clumps, in long lines where the dead bodies had been brought out of the copses and buried side by side in trenches, or where at a crossroads a little cemetery had been made to receive the dead of the vicinity.