We found a city among hills which knew itself to be a prize
greatly coveted by the Kaiser. For, truly, it was a pleasant,
a desirable, and an insolent city. Its streets were full of
life; it boasted an establishment almost as big as Harrod's
and full of buyers, and its women dressed and shod themselves
with care and grace, as befits ladies who, at any time, may be
ripped into rags by bombs from aeroplanes. And there was
another city whose population seemed to be all soldiers in
training; and yet another given up to big guns and ammunition
--an extraordinary sight.
After that, we came to a little town of pale stone which an
Army had made its headquarters. It looked like a plain woman
who had fainted in public. It had rejoiced in many public
institutions that were turned into hospitals and offices; the
wounded limped its wide, dusty streets, detachments of
Infantry went through it swiftly; and utterly bored
motor-lorries cruised up and down roaring, I suppose, for
something to look at or to talk to. In the centre of it I found
one Janny, or rather his marble bust, brooding over a minute
iron-railed garden of half-dried asters opposite a shut-up
school, which it appeared from the inscription Janny had founded
somewhere in the arid Thirties. It was precisely the sort of
school that Janny, by the look of him, would have invented. Not
even French adaptability could make anything of it. So Janny
had his school, with a faint perfume of varnish, all to himself
in a hot stillness of used-up air and little whirls of dust.
And because that town seemed so barren, I met there a French
General whom I would have gone very far to have encountered.
He, like the others, had created and tempered an army for
certain work in a certain place, and its hand had been heavy on
the Boche. We talked of what the French woman was, and had
done, and was doing, and extolled her for her goodness and her
faith and her splendid courage. When we parted, I went back and
made my profoundest apologies to Janny, who must have had a
mother. The pale, overwhelmed town did not now any longer
resemble a woman who had fainted, but one who must endure in
public all manner of private woe and still, with hands that
never cease working, keeps her soul and is cleanly strong for
herself and for her men.