Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the
rifles and guns and shell-fire, were moving across the fields with
spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that
were war's victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of
battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered
mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and, sometimes, when
the burying was unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes
like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that
Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to
take Paris.

Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we
have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he
was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some
man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At
one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came
running across the street at sight of him.

"Son of an old friend of mine, from my town," said our statesman.
Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All
inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.

Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and
shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their
eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to
our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who
threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to
the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of
victorious France--France after forty years' waiting throwing back a
foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields