Roye was the first big place on our road. It used to be rich, and its
4,000 inhabitants traded in grain and sugar. How the very name brought
back our last spring joy in reading news of the recapture! "Important
Victory. Roye Retaken." It was grandly impressive in ruin, especially
the old church of St. Pierre, whose immense, graceful windows used to be
jewelled with ancient glass that people came from far away to see.
Jim had written his mother about that glass, consequently she _would_
get out of the car to climb (with my help and her husband's) over a pile
of fallen stones like a petrified cataract, which leads painfully up to
the desecrated and pillaged high altar. I nearly sprained my ankle in
getting to one of the windows, under which my eyes had caught the glint
of a small, sparkling thing: but I had my reward, for the sparkling
thing was a lovely bit of sapphire-blue glass from the robe of some
saint, and the little lady was grateful for the gift as if it had been a
real jewel--indeed, more grateful. "I'll keep it with my souvenirs of
Jim," she said, "for his eyes have looked on it: and it's just the
colour of yours which he loved. He'd be pleased that you found it for
me." (Ah, if she knew! I can't help praying that she never may know,
though such prayers from me are almost sacrilege.)
A little farther on--as the motor, not the crow, flies--we came to
Nesle, or what once was Nesle. The ghost of the twelfth-century church
looms in skeleton form above one more Pompeii among the many forced by
the Germans upon France: but save for that towering relic of the past
there's little left of this brave town of the Somme, which was historic
before the thirteenth century.
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