ed the church in Croisilles.
I could have found it with my eyes shut. With my eyes open I could
not find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which
lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose
wheel-ruts were three years old.

As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French
civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a
little higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, when
first I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But now
he stood quite still looking down at the mound.

"Voila ma maison," he said.

He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture that
indicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothing
whatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with the
French, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we;
there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deep
affection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a woman
might say of her only child, "Look at _my_ baby."

"Voila ma maison," he said.

I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he
spoke of his house.

It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal
times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under
that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of
his house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys
high. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even
that has known palaces, will smile at this old man's efforts to tell
of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys
high, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me that
his son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me so
much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two
storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose
fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of
France.

He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone
had stuck a small cross of wood. "The church," he said. And that I
knew already.

In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. I told him that
surely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies;
for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely
drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still
wandering homeless. I told him that surel