e country-side. The innumerable graves, single
or grouped, among the harvest fields and the pastures, have been covered
with flowers, and bright, mile after mile, with the twinkling tricolour,
as far as the eye could see. At Barcy and Etrepilly, the centres of the
fight, priests have blessed the graves, and prayed for the dead.

There has been neither labour nor money indeed as yet wherewith to
rebuild the ruined villages and farms, beyond the most necessary
repairs. They stand for the most part as the battle left them. And the
fields are still alive with innumerable red flags--distinct from the
tricolour of the graves--which mark where the plough must avoid an
unexploded shell. In a journal of September 1914, a citizen of Senlis
describes passing in a motor through the scene of the fight, immediately
after the departure of the Germans, when the scavenging and burying
parties were still busy.

"How can I describe it? Where to begin? Abandoned farms, on hills of
death! The grain-giving earth, empty of human beings. No labourers--no
household smoke. The fire of the burning villages has smouldered out,
and round the houses, and in the courtyards, lie the debris of their
normal life, trampled, dirty and piecemeal, under foot. Poor farms of
the Ile-de-France!--dwellings of old time, into whose barns the rich
harvests of the fields had been joyously gathered year by year--old
tiled roofs, clothed with ancestral moss--plain hospitable rooms where
masters and servants met familiarly together:--you are no more than
calcined and blackened stones! Not a living animal in the ruined stalls,
not an ox, not a horse, not a sheep. One flies from the houses, only to
find a scene more horrible in the fields. Corpses everywhere, of men and
horses. And everywhere in the fields unexploded shells, which it would
be death to touch, which have already made many unsuspecting victims.

"Sometimes, as the motor draws near, a man or a woman emerges from a
building, having still on their faces the terror of the hours they have
lived through. They scarcely look at us. They are absorbed in their
losses, in the struggle to rescue something from the wreck. As soon as
they are sure it is not the Germans come back, they turn away, with slow
steps, bewildered by what they have suffered."

The small party in the motor includes a priest, and as it passes near
Betz, at the northern end of the battle-field, they see a burying-party
of French Territorials at