Coincidentally there appear along the roadside, in the fields, among
the plough furrows, on every side, the crosses that mark the graves of
those who died for France--or for Germany. Along the slope you may mark
the passage of a charge by these crosses; those who fell were buried
as they lay, French and Germans with equal care. Indeed, there is a
certain pride visible in all that the French do for their dead foes.
Alongside a hamlet wantonly burned, burned by careful labor and with
German thoroughness; in villages where you will be told of nameless
atrocities and shameful killings, you will see the German graves,
marked by neat crosses, surrounded by sod embankments, marked with
plaques of black and white; the French are marked by plaques of red,
white and blue, and the latter invariably decorated with a flag and
flowers.
Once you have seen these graves by the roadside going east you will
hardly go a mile in two hundred which has not its graves. From the
environs of Meaux, a scant twenty miles from Paris, to the frontier
at the Seille, beyond Nancy, there are graves and more graves, now
scattered, now crowded together where men fought hand to hand. Passing
them in a swift-moving auto, they seem to march by you; there is the
illusion of an arrow advancing on the hillside, until at last, beyond
Nancy, where the fighting was so terrible, about little villages such
as Corbessaux, you come to the great common graves, where a hundred or
two hundred men have been gathered, where the trenches now levelled
are but long graves, and you read, "Here rest 179 French soldiers," or
across the road, "Here 196 Germans."
Take a map of France and from a point just south of Paris draw a
straight line to the Vosges; twenty or thirty miles to the north draw
another. Between the two is the black district of the Marne and Nancy
battles. It is the district of ruined villages, destroyed farms; it is
the region where every hillside--so it will seem to the traveler--is
marked by these pathetic crosses. It is a region in which the sense of
death and destruction is abroad. Go forty miles north again and draw
two more lines, and this is the region not of the death and destruction
of yesterday, but of to-day; this is the front, where the graves are
still in the making, the region of the Oise to the Meuse, from Noyon to
Verdun.
On this day our route led eastward through the villages which in
September, 1914, woke from at least a century of oblivion, from
the forgetting that followed Napoleon's last campaign in France
to a splendid but terrible ten days: Courtacon, Sézanne, La-Fère
Champenoise, Vitry-le-François, the region where Franchet d'Esperey and
Foch fought, where the "Miracle of the Marne" was performed. Mile after
mile the countryside files by, the never changing impression of a huge
cemetery, the hugest in the world, the stricken villages, now and then
striving to begin again, a red roof here and there telling of the first
counter offensive of peace, of construction made against the whirlwind
that had come and gone.