faces and sodden, gray uniforms merge into anonymity. A squad of French
soldiers appeared at a turn in the road. Two officers rode beside them,
and they were just moving off across the fields carrying shovels instead
of rifles. Looking after them, beyond the belt of timber, one could see
other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to the left, and here
and there smoke. Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a
wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms. With the boyish good nature
which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue, they
stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges. They were
burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans. The dead had
been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while the battle line rolled
northward, clear across France.

We turned back toward Crepy, passing again through the shattered village
of Betz. For three days it had been the centre of a battle, the two
forces lying outside it and shelling each other across the town. The
main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on
the edge of the ravine smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood
about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over and over again
what they had seen.

Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked and thrashed,
past the carcasses of horses sprawled stiff-legged in the ditch or in
the stubble, we tramped on to Crepy-en-Valois. The country was empty,
scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled back again, and
now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon
to the north. The little hotel across from the railroad station in
Crepy had kept open through it all. It was the typical Hotel de la Gare
of these little old towns--a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a