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It is pitiable to see the miserable people on the road with their boxes and children. In the afternoon set out for Chauny, in direction of Compiegne, where we arrive in the evening. All along the line were scattered the poor people. We have twelve on our waggon, and let them eat our food. We had our own provisions, and we gave them to these people. Stationed at Compiegne awaiting orders.
"I can answer for all three, Monsieur," said Mother Beckett, with a pathetically defiant tilt of her small chin. "My son, you know, was a soldier. We have come to this part of the world to see what we can do for the people in honour of his memory. So we mustn't leave Chauny out." "Madame, there are no people there, for there are no houses. There are but a few soldiers with an anti-aircraft gun."
No use telling myself I shall feel exactly the same about Soissons to-morrow, and Roye and Ham and Chauny and various others the day after. My reason couldn't detach itself at that instant from Noyon. Our daily programme as now arranged is: Me to knock at Mother Beckett's door half an hour before starting-time.
We started at once for Chauny: in fact, we flew along the road almost as fast it seemed as enemy aeroplanes could fly along the sky if they pursued. But we had a long respite still before twilight. Our guide was right. Chauny was sadder than the rest, because there had been more of beauty to ruin. And it was ruined cruelly, completely!
But his notebook only contains statements of facts, and we have to turn to his correspondence for more details. "Decidedly," he wrote on June 17 to his sister Odette, "the Boches have quite a special affection for me, and the parts of my 'coucou' serve me for a calendar. Yesterday we flew over Chauny, Tergnier, Laon, Coucy, Soissons.
I have already alluded to the recent discovery of this same ox near Chauny, in the valley of the Oise, in France; and in 1856 I found a skull of it preserved in the museum at Berlin, which Professor Quenstedt, the curator, had correctly named so long ago as 1836, when the fossil was dug out of drift, in the hill called the Kreuzberg, in the southern suburbs of that city.
You wonder if you are deaf if other people are hearing what you cannot hear: and then you see on each face the same blank, listening look that must be on your own. I think a night at Chauny, or Jussy, might drive a weak woman mad. But I haven't come to Chauny or Jussy yet! After Nesle we arrived at Ham, with its canal and its green, surrounding marshes. Ham has ceased to be silent.
Beginning on the 17th with an attack on a ten-mile front between Tracy-le-Val and Vingre he had steadily pushed on until by the 23rd his left flank held the Oise as far as its junction with the Ailette and his front faced the latter canalized river as far as Guny. By the 29th he was across the Ailette and threatening to turn the whole German position south of the Somme at Chauny.
He went to see the jugglers, tumblers, mountebanks, and quacksalvers, and considered their cunning, their shifts, their somersaults and smooth tongue, especially of those of Chauny in Picardy, who are naturally great praters, and brave givers of fibs, in matter of green apes.
There was a manufacturing district about Chauny; and after that the banks grew so high that they hid the adjacent country, and we could see nothing but clay sides, and one willow after another. Only, here and there, we passed by a village or a ferry, and some wondering child upon the bank would stare after us until we turned the corner.
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