n is wandering
among the ruins. He has just come back to the devastated village. He
says to me simply:

"I saw them in 1870. They came here, but they didn't do this. They are
savages."

A woman was there, too. She had come an hour or so ago with the old
man, and she stood on the step of her defiled, despoiled home where
the curtains hung in tatters at the windows. She saw me pass by. She
wanted to speak to me, but her voice stuck in her throat. There she
stood, her arms extended like a great cross. She could only sob:

"Look! Look!"

And she was like a symbol of the whole wretched business.

The men who do such deeds are the men France is fighting.

* * * * *

Vincy-Manoeuvre was another one of the villages. It is situated near
the border of the Department of the Oise. It was still in flames when
I entered it. On the outskirts of the hamlet there used to be a large
factory. Only the iron framework of this factory remained; the ashes
had commenced to smoke, giving forth flames from time to time. Here
also every house had been destroyed and pillaged. Only the church
remained standing, and on the belfry which was silhouetted against the
sky, the weather cock seemed to shudder with horror.

Bottles covered the ground everywhere at Vincy-Manoeuvre. There were
bottles in the streets, along the highways, in the fields. They
marked the road by which the vanquished hordes had retreated. I
counted almost two hundred in one trench, where a German battery had
been placed. They lay pell-mell, mixed in with unexploded shells.
Panic had apparently swept the gunners away. They had not had time to
carry off their shells, so they had left them behind. But they had had
time to empty the bottles. Absinthe, brandy, rum, champagne, beer, and
wine had all been consumed, and the labels lay alongside of each
other. Drunken, bloodthirsty brutes, thieving, sickening, nauseous
beasts were what had descended upon France and passed through her
country. Ruins, ashes and filth were the traces left behind by the
German mob.

Some hundreds of yards from the village I noticed a woman lost in the
immense beet fields. Apparently she was unharmed. I walked in her
direction, thrusting aside with my legs corpses of men and horses,
scaling the trenches, making a circuit around the craters made by
shells. Suddenly what was my surprise at seeing two German soldiers,
accompanied by a farmer, coming along a footpath! They