There was a village that had been stamped flat, till it looked
older than Pompeii. There were not three roofs left, nor one
whole house. In most places you saw straight into the
cellars. The hops were ripe in the grave-dotted fields round
about. They had been brought in and piled in the nearest
outline of a dwelling. Women sat on chairs on the pavement,
picking the good-smelling bundles. When they had finished
one, they reached back and pulled out another through the
window-hole behind them, talking and laughing the while. A
cart had to be maneuvered out of what had been a farmyard, to
take the hops to market. A thick, broad, fair-haired wench,
of the sort that Millet drew, flung all her weight on a spoke
and brought the cart forward into the street. Then she shook
herself, and, hands on hips, danced a little defiant jig in
her sabots as she went back to get the horse. Another girl
came across a bridge. She was precisely of the opposite type,
slender, creamy-skinned, and delicate-featured. She carried a
brand-new broom over her shoulder through that desolation, and
bore herself with the pride and grace of Queen Iseult.
The farm-girl came out leading the horse, and as the two young
things passed they nodded and smiled at each other, with the
delicate tangle of the hop-vines at their feet.
The guns spoke earnestly in the north. That was the Argonne,
where the Crown Prince was busily getting rid of a few
thousands of his father's faithful subjects in order to secure
himself the reversion of his father's throne. No man likes
losing his job, and when at long last the inner history of
this war comes to be written, we may find that the people we
mistook for principals and prime agents were only average
incompetents moving all Hell to avoid dismissal. (For it is
absolutely true that when a man sells his soul to the devil he
does it for the price of half nothing.)