lets of
my memory, the deepest is of the time when I was on guard at the field
of battle on the Ourcq, north of Meaux, on the extremity of the battle
line of the Marne. Field of battle I have just written. No, it was not
a field of battle but a field of carnage. I have forgotten the corpses
I met in the roads or in the fields with their grinning faces and
their distorted attitudes. But I shall never forget the ruin that was
everywhere, the abominable manner in which the fields had been laid
waste, the sacrilegious pillage of homes. That bore the trade mark of
German "Kultur." That trade mark will be enough to dishonor a nation
for centuries.

I see again those humble villages situated along the road to Meaux,
Penchard, Marcilly, Chambry, Etrepilly, where a barbarian horde had
passed. Since there were no inhabitants remaining--men whose throats
could be cut, women who could be violated, or babies to shoot
down--the horde had vented its rage on the furniture and the poor
little familiar objects in which each one of us puts a bit of his
soul.

I arrived in Etrepilly at the same time as a detachment of Zouaves.
While they piously buried their companions who had fallen in forcing
their way into the village, I wandered alone among the ruins. There
had been a hundred houses there, and not a single one was untouched.
Some had been hit by shells, and the shell which burst in the interior
of the house had destroyed everything. That, of course, was war, and
there was nothing to say about it.

But other houses, which had been spared by shell fire, had not been
spared by the Kaiser's soldiery. The Barbarians had placed their claws
on them. Everything had been taken out of the houses and scattered to
the four winds of heaven. Here is a portrait that has been wrenched
from its frame and trampled on. A baby's bathtub has been carried into
the garden, and the soldiers have deposited their excrement in it.
There are chairs that have been smashed by the kicks of heavy boots
and wardrobes that have been disemboweled. Here is a fine old mahogany
table that has been carried into the fields for five hundred meters
and then broken in two. An old red damask armchair, with wings at the
sides, one of those old armchairs in which the grandmothers of France
sit by the fire in the evening has been torn in shreds by knife
thrusts. Linen is mixed with mud; the white veil some girl wore at her
first communion is defiled with excrement.... An old ma