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Updated: June 10, 2025
If you had been with me I should have asked you to pinch me, and remind me that "all this is not yet ancient history," and that a little sentimentality would have become me. But Amélie would never have understood me. It was not until we were driving east again to approach Penchard that a full realization of it came to me.
As near as I could guess, from the condition of the walls, I imagine that the French artillery must have been in the direction of Penchard, on the wooded hills. The walls are pierced with gun holes, about three feet apart, and those on the west and southwest are breeched by cannon and shell- fire.
The deliberate ingenuity of the nastiness is its most debasing feature. At Penchard, where the Germans only stayed twenty-four hours, many people were obliged to make bonfires of the bedding and all sorts of other things as the only and quickest way to purge the town of danger in such hot weather.
From Penchard we ran a little out to the west at the foot of the hill, on top of which stand the white walls of Montyon, from which, on September 5, we had seen the first smoke of battle.
I am told that Penchard is a fair example of what the Germans did in all these small towns which lay in the line of their hurried retreat. It is not worth while for me to go into detail regarding such disgusting acts. Your imagination, at its most active, cannot do any wrong to the race which in this war seems determined to offend where it cannot terrorize.
Penchard crowns the hill just in the centre of the line which I see from the garden. It was one of the towns bombarded on the evening of September 5, and, so far as I can guess, the destruction was done by the French guns which drove the Germans out that night.
The driver talked to us in faint murmurs over his shoulder, indicating the positions of various villages such as Penchard, Poincy, Crecy, Monthyon, Chambry, Varreddes, all of which will be found, in the future detailed histories of the great locust-advance. "Did you yourself see any Germans?" "Yes." "Where?" "At Meaux." "How many?" He smiled. "About a dozen."
I simply asked from where these people had come, and was told that they were evacuating Daumartin and all the towns on the plain between there and Meaux, which meant that Monthyon, Neufmortier, Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry, in fact, all the villages visible from my garden were being evacuated by order of the military powers.
They had come out of the firing line and were going back to Penchard for food. "Topping the next ridge... the hill slopes steeply down to the hamlet of Chamvery, just below us. The battery which I mentioned just now is in the wood on this side of it to our right.
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