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Updated: June 24, 2025
In the west it seemed to be somewhere near Claye, and in the east it was in the direction of Barcy. I tried to remember what the English soldiers had said, that the Germans were, if possible, to be pushed east, in which case the artillery at the west must be either the French of English. The hard thing to bear was, that it was all conjecture.
In villages where there had been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramee and Chevreville, the whitewashed cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the German soldiers before they were driven out by shell-fire or bayonet charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin. Here and there a house had escaped.
Behind us Barcy, whose every edifice was decapitated or so degraded as to look like a gigantic sieve. Around us and on all sides fields fairly ploughed up by shot and shell, and every fifty yards it seemed to me rose a freshly covered mound, extending as far as eye could see.
With the growing remoteness of imminent danger came the reaction of all we had passed through, and deep down in our hearts we welcomed the idea of entering a village. A village! Alas! As we reached the road leading to Barcy, there was a rift in the clouds, and a long golden ray shot through an enormous breach in the church tower, flickered a moment upon a group of roofless houses, and was gone.
Penchard is the town in which the Germans exercised their taste for wilful nastiness, of which I wrote you weeks ago. It is a pretty little village, beautifully situated, commanding the slopes to the Marne on one side, and the wide plains of Barcy and Chambry on the other. It is prosperous looking, the home of sturdy farmers and the small rentiers.
With a glass I can find where Chambry and Barcy are, on the slope behind Meaux, even if the trees conceal them. But these are all little villages of which you may never have heard. No guidebook celebrates them. No railroad approaches them.
Moving and eloquent words! They gain for me a double significance as I look back from them to the little scene we saw at Barcy under the snow a halt of some French infantry, in front of the ruined church. The "salut an drapeau" was going on, that simple, daily rite which, like a secular mass, is the outward and visible sign to the French soldier of his country and what he owes her.
It is not the actual destruction of the battle for Barcy alone of the towns in sight from here seems to be practically destroyed which is the most painful, it is the devastation of the German occupation, with its deliberate and filthy defilement of the houses, which defies words, and will leave a blot for all time on the records of the race so vile-minded as to have achieved it.
This long tomb, with its crosses and flags and flowers, was the scene on All Soul's Day of the commemorative ceremony in honor of the victory, and marks not only the beginning of the battle, but the beginning of its triumph. From this point we drove back to the east, almost along the line of battle, to the hillside hamlet of Barcy, the saddest scene of desolation on this end of the great fight.
You can realize how near it is, and what an easy trip it will be in normal times, when I tell you that we left Esbly for Meaux at half past one only ten minutes by train and were back in the station at Meaux at quarter to four, and had visited Monthyon, Villeroy, Neufmontier, Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry, and Vareddes. The authorities are not very anxious to have people go out there.
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