lines of communication: and troops and war material passed through it,
going and coming, in almost endless procession. It served also as a camp
of rest. Companies from the trenches would arrive there, generally
towards the evening, weary, listless, dull-eyed, many of them staggering
like over-driven cattle beneath their mass of burdens. They would fling
their accoutrements from them and stand in silent groups till the
sergeants and corporals returned to lead them to the barns and out-houses
that had been assigned to them, the houses still habitable being mostly
reserved for the officers. Like those of most French villages, they were
drab, plaster-covered buildings without gardens; but some of them were
covered with vines, hiding their ugliness; and the village as a whole,
with its groups, here and there, of fine sycamore trees and its great
stone fountain in the centre, was picturesque enough. It had twice
changed hands, and a part of it was in ruins. From one or two of the
more solidly built houses merely the front had fallen, leaving the rooms
just as they had always been: the furniture in its accustomed place, the
pictures on the walls. They suggested doll's houses standing open. One
wondered when the giant child would come along and close them up. The
iron spire of the little church had been hit twice. It stood above the
village, twisted into the form of a note of interrogation. In the
churchyard many of the graves had been ripped open. Bones and skulls lay
scattered about among the shattered tombstones. But, save for a couple
of holes in the roof, the body was still intact, and every afternoon a
faint, timid-sounding bell called a few villagers and a sprinkling of
soldiers to Mass. Most of the inhabitants had fled, but the farmers and
shopkeepers had remained. At intervals, the German batteries, searching
round with apparent aimlessness, would drop a score or so of shells about
the neighbourhood; but the peasant, with an indifference that was almost
animal, would still follow his ox-drawn plough; the old, bent crone,
muttering curses, still ply the hoe. The proprietors of the tiny
_epiceries_ must have been rapidly making their fortunes, considering the
prices that they charged the unfortunate _poilu_, dreaming of some small
luxury out of his five sous a day. But as one of them, a stout, smiling
lady, explained to Joan, with a gesture: "It is not often that one has a
war."
Joan had gone out in September, and for a while the weather was pleasant.
The men, wrapped up in their great-coats, would sleep for preference
under the great sycamore trees. Through open doorways she would catch
glimpses of picturesque groups of eager card-players, crowded round a
flickering candle. From the darkness there would steal the sound of
flute or zither, of voices singing. Occasionally it would be some
strident ditty of the Paris music-halls, but more often it was sad and
plaintive. But early in October the rains commenced and the stream
became a roaring torrent, and a clammy mist lay like a white river
between the wooded hills.
Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war.
Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank
up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which
you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you
slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little
donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up
and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and
be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud;
lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the
straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud,
motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back
in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through