Not that it looked like the moon. It looked more like a futurist sketch, in red and brown, of the heart of a cyclone; or of the inside of a submarine that has rammed a skeleton ship on the stocks. But the sight gave me the same kind of icy shock I had when I first saw the moon's ravaged face through a huge telescope. _You_ took me, Padre, so you'll remember.
If you came to Jussy, and didn't know about the war, you'd think you had stumbled into hell--or else that you were having a nightmare and couldn't wake up. I shall never forget a brobdingnagian boiler as big as a battle tank, that had reared itself on its hind-legs to peer through a _cheval de frise_ of writhing girders--tortured girders like a vast wilderness of immense thorn bushes in a hopeless tangle, or a pit of bloodstained snakes. The walls of the _usine_ have simply melted, and it's hard to realize that it as a building, put up by human hands for human uses, ever existed. There is a new Jussy, though, created since the German retreat; and seeing it, you couldn't _help_ knowing that there was a war! The whole landscape is full of cannon, big and little and middle-sized. Queer mushroom buildings have sprung up, for officers' and soldiers' barracks and canteens. Narrow plank walks built high above mud-level--"duck boards," I think they're called--lead to the corrugated iron, tin, and wooden huts. There are aerodromes and aerodromes like a vast circus encampment, where there are not cannon; and the greenish canvas roofs give the only bit of colour, as far as the eye can see--unless one counts the soldiers' uniforms. All the rest is gray as the desert before a dust-storm. Even the sky, which had been blue and bright, was gray over Jussy, and the grayest of gray things were the immense "_saucisses_"--three or four of them--hanging low under the clouds like advertisements of titanic potatoes, haughtiest of war-time vegetables.
Dierdre O'Farrell inadvertently called the big bulks "_saucissons_," which amused our officer guide so much that he laughed to tears. The rest of us were able to raise only a faint smile, and we felt his disappointment at our lack of humour.
"Ah, but it is most _funny!_" he said. "I will tell everyone. In future they shall for us be '_saucissons_' forever. I suppose it is not so funny for you, because the sight of these dead towns has made you sad. I am almost afraid to take you on to Chauny. You will be much sadder there. Chauny is the sight most pitiful of all. Would you perhaps wish to avoid it?"