ribe Chateau-Thierry as a "peaceful-looking
place." But it was the first glimpse the Becketts had had of war's
abominable destruction. I took up nursing in the south of France before
the Zeppelins made much visible impression on London; and as I
volunteered for a "contagious" hospital, I've lived an isolated life far
from all horrors save those in my own ward, and the few I saw when I
went to nurse Brian. Perhaps it was well for us to begin with
Chateau-Thierry, whose gaping wounds are not mortal, and to miss tragic
Varreddes. Had Sermaize-les-Bains, which burst upon us later, been our
first experience, the shock might have been too great for Mrs. Beckett.
As it was, we worked slowly to the climax. Yet even so, we travelled on
with a hideous mirage of broken homes, of intimacies brutally laid bare,
floating between the landscape and our eyes. We could not get rid of
this mirage, could not brush it away, though the country was friendly
and fair of face as a child playing in a waterside meadow. The crudely
new bridges that crossed the Marne were the only open confessions of
what the river had suffered. But the Marne spirit had known wars enough
to learn "how sweet it is to live, forgetting." With her bits of
villages scattered like strewn flowers on her green flood, she floats
in a dream of her adventurous past and the glorious future which she has
helped to win for France.

It was hard to realize that the tiny island villages and hamlets on the
level shores had seen the Germans come and go; that under the gray
roofs--furry-soft as the backs of Maltese cats--hearts had beaten in
agony of fear; that along the white road, with its double row of
straight trees like an endless army on parade, weeping fugitives had
fled.

We were not aiming to reach Nancy that night, so we paused at Epernay.
The enemy behaved better there than in most Marne towns, perhaps because
Wagner once lived in it, or, more likely, under the soothing influence
of Epernay's champagne, which has warmed the cockles of men's hearts
since a bishop of the ninth century made it famous by his praise.
Nevertheless, there are ruins to see, for the town was bombarded by the
Germans after they were turned out. All the quarter of the rich was laid
waste: and the vast "Fabrique de Champagne" of Mercier, with its
ornamental frieze of city names, is silent to this day, its proud facade
of windows broken. Not a big building of the town, not a neighbouring
chateau of a