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The most complete destruction I saw in France was in Champagne, when I walked through places which had been the villages of Sermaize, Heiltz-le-Maurupt, Blesmes, and Huiron. Sermaize was utterly wiped out. As far as I could see, not one house was left standing. Not one wall was spared.
His hands were clenched behind his bent back, and every now and then he thrust back his broad felt hat and looked up at the poor, battered thing which had been his church with immense sadness in his eyes. There was an old chateau near Huiron in which a noble family of France had lived through centuries of war and revolution.
The churches suffered most, probably because they were used for temporary defense. At Huiron the upper half of the thirteenth-century Gothic church had been shaved off in the ten-foot deep mass of debris lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Ecrinnes near by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving the front and spire intact.
A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the chateau of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed, murderously, by outrageous hands.
"Go and ask," wrote a French writer in 1915, "for the village of Huiron, or that of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashed with blood and powder Sermaize. Inquire for the English Quakers. Where are they? Here are only a band of workmen, smooth-faced not like our country folk. They laugh and sing while they make the shavings fly under the plane and the saw.
The buildings cluster in the hollows or about the crossroads, and sometimes they escaped the storm because the shells exchanged from hill to hill went quite over their roofs; again, as was the case with Huiron just outside Vitry or with Maurupt near by, they could not escape because they were perched on hills, and they were almost completely razed by the fierce fire that raked them for days.
It would be difficult to patch up the grey old tower of Huiron Church, through which shells had come crashing, or to rebuild its oak roof whose beams were splintered like the broken ribs of a rotting carcase. A white-haired priest passed up and down the roadway before the place in which he had celebrated Mass and praised God for the blessings of each day.
A trial would have been inevitable; and then, no 18th Brumaire, no Consulate, no Empire, no conquest of Europe but also, it may be added, no St. Helena. None of these, events would have ensued had not the English squadron, when it appeared off Corsica, obliged the Huiron to scud about at hazard, and to touch at the first land she could reach.
A trial would have been inevitable; and then, no 18th Brumaire, no Consulate, no Empire, no conquest of Europe- but also, it may be added, no St. Helena. None of these, events would have ensued had not the English squadron, when it appeared off Corsica, obliged the Huiron to scud about at hazard, and to touch at the first land she could reach.
A trial would have been inevitable; and then, no 18th Brumaire, no Consulate, no Empire, no conquest of Europe but also, it may be added, no St. Helena. None of these, events would have ensued had not the English squadron, when it appeared off Corsica, obliged the Huiron to scud about at hazard, and to touch at the first land she could reach.
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