You are fortresses to fight in; you are shelters from
air-pirates, you hide cannon; you give shelter to your fighting
countrymen from rain and heat. You delay the enemy; you mislead him, you
drive him back. When you die, deserted by the birds and all your hidden
furred and feathered children, you give yourselves--give, give to the
last! Your wood strengthens the trenches, or burns to warm the freezing
_poilus_. Brave forests, pathetic forests! I hear you defy the enemy in
your hour of death: Strike us, kill us. Still you shall never pass!"
We had felt that we knew something of the war-zone after Lorraine; but
there the great battles had all been fought in 1914, when the world was
young. Here, it seemed as if the earth must still be hot from the feet
of retreating Germans.
The whole landscape was pitted with shell-holes, and spider-webbed with
barbed wire. The three lines of French trenches we passed might, from
their look, have been manned yesterday. Piled along the neat new road
were bombs for aviators to drop; queer, fish-shaped things, and still
queerer cages they had been in. There were long, low sheds for fodder.
At each turn was the warning word, "_Convois_." The poor houses of such
villages as continued to exist were numbered, for the first time in
their humble lives, because they were needed for military lodgings.
Notices in the German language were hardly effaced from walls of
half-ruined buildings. They had been partly rubbed out, one could see,
but the ugly German words survived, strong and black as a stain on one's
past.
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