They are gray with fertilizers, strewn with manure; the swiftly dug trenches of a year ago have given way to the peaked mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. Where there were vast stretches of mud, scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with stale, ill-smelling straw, the carcasses of oxen and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a smiling landscape, with miles of growing grain, green vegetables, green turf.
In Champagne the French spirit and nature, working together, have wiped out the signs of the German raid. It is as though it had never been. You begin to believe it was only a bad dream, an old wife's tale to frighten children.
The car moved slowly, but, look no matter how carefully, it was most difficult to find the landfalls I remembered.
Near Feret Milton there was a château with a lawn that ran to meet the Paris road. It had been used as a German emergency hospital, and previously by them as an outpost. The long windows to the terrace had been wrecked, the terrace was piled high with blood-stained uniforms, hundreds of boots had been tossed from an upper story that had been used as an operating-room, and mixed with these evidences of disaster were monuments of empty champagne-bottles.
That was the picture I remembered. Yesterday, like a mantle of moss, the lawn swept to the road, the long windows had been replaced and hung with yellow silk, and, on the terrace, where I had seen the blood-stained uniforms, a small boy, maybe the son and heir of the château, with hair flying and bare legs showing, was joyfully riding a tricycle.
Neufchelles I remembered as a village completely wrecked and inhabited only by a very old man, and a cat, that, as though for company, stalked behind him.
But to-day Neufchelles is a thriving, contented, commonplace town. Splashes of plaster, less weather-stained than the plaster surrounding them, are the only signs remaining of the explosive shells. The stone-mason and the plasterer have obliterated the work of the guns, the tiny shops have been refilled, the tide of life has flowed back, and in the streets the bareheaded women, their shoulders wrapped in black woollen shawls, gather to gossip, or, with knitting in hand, call to each other from the doorways.