We pushed on past sentinels, motionless, silent, fatefully awake. The moonlight had turned their blue uniforms white and flashed on their steel helmets. They were like men in armor, and so still that only when you brushed against them, cautiously as men change places in a canoe, did you feel they were alive. At times, one of them thinking something in the gardens of barb-wire had moved, would loosen his rifle, and there would be a flame and flare of red, and then again silence, the silence of the hunter stalking a wild beast, of the officer of the law, gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of the burglar to betray his presence.
The next morning I called to make my compliments to General Franchet d'Espéray. He was a splendid person--as alert as a steel lance. He demanded what I had seen.
"Nothing!" he protested. "You have seen nothing. When you return from Serbia, come to Champagne again and I myself will show you something of interest."
I am curious to see what he calls "something of interest."
There promised to be a story for some one to write a year after the war. It would tell how quickly Champagne recovered from the invasion of the Germans. But one need not wait until after the war. The story can be written now.
We know that the enemy was thrown back across the Aisne.
We know that the enemy drove the French and English before him until at the Forest of Montmorency, the Hun was within ten and at Claye within fifteen miles of Paris.
But to-day, by any outward evidence, he would have a hard time to prove it. And that is not because when he advanced he was careful not to tramp on the grass or to pick the flowers. He did not obey even the warnings to automobilists: "Attention _les enfants_!"
On the contrary, as he came, he threw before him thousands of tons of steel and iron. Like a cyclone he uprooted trees, unroofed houses; like a tidal wave he excavated roads that had been built by the Romans, swept away walls, and broke the backs of stone bridges that for hundreds of years had held their own against swollen rivers.
[Illustration: General Franchet d'Espéray.
"He was a splendid person, as alert as a steel lance."]
A year ago I followed the German in his retreat from Claye through Meaux, Château Thierry to Soissons, where, on the east bank of the Aisne, I watched the French artillery shell his guns on the hills opposite. The French then were hot upon his heels. In one place they had not had time to remove even their own dead, and to avoid the bodies in the open road the car had to twist and turn.