Soissons, Rheims, and Meaux, as it was a year ago.

And I expected to see the wake of that great retreat still marked by
ruins and devastation.

But I had not sufficiently trusted to the indomitable spirit of the
French, in their intolerance of waste, their fierce, yet ordered energy.

To-day the fields are cultivated up to the very butts of the French
batteries. They are being put to bed, and tucked in for the long winter
sleep. For miles the furrows stretch over the fields in unbroken lines.
Ploughs, not shells, have drawn them.

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 chateau 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 chateau, 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