matter.

Some of the families in our commune have relatives residing in the
little hamlets between Cregy and Monthyon, and have been out to
help them re-install themselves. Very little in the way of details of the
battle seems to be known. Trees and houses dumbly tell their own
tales. The roads are terribly cut up, but road builders are already at
work. Huge trees have been broken off like twigs, but even there men
are at work, uprooting them and cutting the wood into lengths and
piling it neatly along the roadside to be carted away. The dead are
buried, and Paris automobiles are rapidly removing all traces of the
battles and carrying out of sight such disfigurements as can be
removed.

But the details we get regarding the brief German occupation are too
disgusting for words. It is not the actual destruction of the battle--for
Barcy alone of the towns in sight from here seems to be practically
destroyed--which is the most painful, it is the devastation of the
German occupation, with its deliberate and filthy defilement of the
houses, which defies words, and will leave a blot for all time on the
records of the race so vile-minded as to have achieved it. The
deliberate ingenuity of the nastiness is its most debasing feature. At
Penchard, where the Germans only stayed twenty-four hours, many
people were obliged to make bonfires of the bedding and all sorts of
other things as the only and quickest way to purge the town of danger
in such hot weather.

I am told that Penchard is a fair example of what the Germans did in
all these small towns which lay in the line of their hurried retreat.