The voices and the wings were still busy after lunch, when the
car slipped past the tea-houses in the drive, and came into a
country where women and children worked among the crops.
There were large raw shell holes by the wayside or in the
midst of fields, and often a cottage or a villa had been
smashed as a bonnet-box is smashed by an umbrella. That must
be part of Belial's work when he bellows so truculently among
the hills to the north.
We were looking for a town that lives under shell-fire. The
regular road to it was reported unhealthy--not that the women
and children seemed to care. We took byways of which certain
exposed heights and corners were lightly blinded by
wind-brakes of dried tree-tops. Here the shell holes were rather
thick on the ground. But the women and the children and the
old men went on with their work with the cattle and the crops;
and where a house had been broken by shells the rubbish was
collected in a neat pile, and where a room or two still
remained usable, it was inhabited, and the tattered
window-curtains fluttered as proudly as any flag. And time was
when I used to denounce young France because it tried to kill
itself beneath my car wheels; and the fat old women who
crossed roads without warning; and the specially deaf old men
who slept in carts on the wrong side of the road! Now, I
could take off my hat to every single soul of them, but that
one cannot traverse a whole land bareheaded. The nearer we
came to our town the fewer were the people, till at last we
halted in a well-built suburb of paved streets where there was
no life at all. . . .