Perhaps it may have been Charlemagne in the spirit who
persuaded the Germans to their great retreat from the Noyon front this
last spring of 1917!
Coming into the _Place_, and stopping in front of the Hotel de Ville,
gave me the oddest sense of unreality, because, when we were in Paris
the other day, I saw the scene in a moving picture: the first joyful
entry of the French soldiers into the town, when the Germans had cleared
out. I could hardly believe that I wasn't just a figure flickering
across a screen, and that the film wouldn't hurry me along somewhere
else, whether I wanted to go or not.
There were the venerable houses with the steep slate roofs, and
singularly intelligent-looking windows, whose bright panes seemed to
twinkle with knowledge of what they had seen during these dreadful
eighteen months of German occupation. There were the odd, unfinished
towers of the cruciform cathedral--quaint towers, topped with wood and
pointed spirelets--soaring into the sky above the gray colony of
clustered roofs. There was the cobbled pavement, glittering like masses
of broken glass, after a shower of rain just past; and even more
interesting than any of these was the fantastically carved facade of the
Hotel de Ville, which has lured thousands of tourists to Noyon in days
of peace. Who knows but they have been coming ever since 1532, when it
was finished?
At first sight, we should never have guessed what Noyon had suffered
from the Germans.
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