ans, 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'Esperay.

"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, Chateau 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.

Yesterday, coming back to Paris from the trenches that guard Rheims, I
covered the same road. But it was not the same. It seemed that I must
surely have lost the way. Only the iron signs at the crossroads, and
the map used the year before and scarred with my own pencil marks, were
evidences that again I was following mile by mile and foot by foot the
route of that swift advance and riotous retreat.

A year before the signs of the retreat were the road itself, the houses
facing it, and a devastated countryside. You knew then, that, of these
signs, some would at once be effaced. They had to be effaced, for they
were polluting the air. But until the villagers returned to their
homes, or to what remained of their homes, the bloated carcasses of
horses blocked the road, the bodies of German soldiers, in death
mercifully unlike anything human and as unreal as fallen scarecrows,
sprawled in the fields.

But while you knew these signs of the German raid would be removed,
other signs were scars that you thought would be long in healing. These
were the stone arches and buttresses of the bridges, dynamited and
dumped into the mud of the Marne and Ourcq, chateaux and villas with the
roof torn away as deftly as with one hand you could rip off the lid of
a cigar-box, or with a wall blown in, or out, in either case exposing
indecently the owner's bedroom, his wife's boudoir, the children's
nursery.

Other signs of the German were villages with houses wrecked, the humble
shops sacked, garden walls levelled, fields of beets and turnips
uprooted by his shells, or where he had snatched sleep in the trampled
mud, strewn with demolished haystacks, vast trees split clean in half as
though by lightning, or with nothing remaining but the splintered stump.
That was the picture of the roads and countryside in the triangle of