Title:  Where the Sabots Clatter Again

Author:  Katherine Shortall

Release Date:  July 29, 2004 [EBook #13048]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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[Illustration:  Where the Sabots Clatter Again by Katherine Shortall]

[Illustration:  Katherine Shortall (autograph), December 1921]

The Radcliffe Unit in France collaborated with the French Red Cross in its work of reconstruction after the Armistice.  It was as a member of this unit and as chauffeuse in the devastated regions that the writer received the impressions set forth in these sketches.

Where the Sabots Clatter Again

by Katherine Shortall

[Illustration:  street scene]

Ralph Fletcher Seymour
Publisher
410 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago

Published for the Benefit of the
Radcliffe College endowment fund
in an edition limited to 150 copies

SECOND EDITION OF 150 COPIES

1921

WHERE THE SABOTS CLATTER AGAIN.

THE BRIDE OF NOYON.

A returning flush upon the plain.  Streaks of color across a mangled landscape:  the gentle concealment of shell hole and trench.  This is what one saw, even in the summer of 1919.  For the sap was running, and a new invasion was occurring.  Legions of tender blades pushed over the haggard No Man’s Land, while reckless poppies scattered through the ranks of green, to be followed by the shyer starry sisters in blue and white.  Irrepressibly these floral throngs advanced over the shell torn spaces, crowding, mingling and bending together in a rainbow riot beneath the winds that blew them.  They were the vanguard.

* * * * *

In the midst of the reviving fields lay Noyon:  Noyon, that gem of the Oise, whose delicate outline of spires and soft tinted roofs had graced the wide valley for centuries.  Today the little city lay blanched and shapeless between the hills, as all towns were left that stood in the path of the armies.  The cathedral alone reared its battered bulk in the midst; a resisting pile, its two grim and blunted towers frowning into the sky.  Nobly Gothic through all the shattering, the great church rose out of the wreckage, with flying buttresses still outspread like brooding wings to the dead houses that had sunk about her.