were the small and peaceful houses of noncombatants.
Only two men were killed. They were in a side
street when the first bomb dropped, and they tried
to find an unlocked door, an open house, anything
for shelter. It was impossible. Built like
all French towns, without arcades or sheltering archways,
the flat facades of the closed and barricaded houses
refused them sanctuary. The second bomb killed
them both.
Through all that night after the bombardment I could
hear each hour the call of the trumpet from the great
overhanging tower, a double note at once thin and
musical, that reported no enemy in sight in the sky
and all well. From far away, at the gate in the
wall, came the reply of the distant watchman’s
horn softened by distance.
“All well here also,” it said.
Following the trumpets the soft-toned chimes of the
church rang out a hymn that has chimed from the old
tower every hour for generations, extolling and praising
the Man of Peace.
The ambulances had finished their work. The dead
lay with folded hands, surrounded by candles, the
lights of faith. And under the fading moon the
old city rested and watched.
NO MAN’S LAND
I have just had this conversation with the little
French chambermaid at my hotel. “You have
not gone to mass, Mademoiselle?”
“I? No.”
“But here, so near the lines, I should think—”
“I do not go to church. There is no God.”
She looked up with red-rimmed, defiant eyes.
“My husband has been killed,” she said.
“There is no God. If there was a God, why
should my husband be killed? He had done nothing.”
This afternoon at three-thirty I am to start for the
front. I am to see everything. The machine
leaves the Mairie at three-thirty.
* * * *
*
Do you recall the school map on which the state of
Texas was always pink and Rhode Island green?
And Canada a region without colour, and therefore
without existence?
The map of Europe has become a battle line painted
in three colours: yellow for the Belgian Army,
blue for the British and red for the French.
It is really a double line, for the confronting German
Army is drawn in black. It is a narrow line to
signify what it does—not only death and
wanton destruction, but the end of the myth of civilisation;
a narrow line to prove that the brotherhood of man
is a dream, that modern science is but an improvement
on fifth-century barbarity; that right, after all,
is only might.
It took exactly twenty-four hours to strip the shirt
off the diplomacy of Europe and show the coat of mail
underneath.
It will take a century to hide that coat of mail.
It will take a thousand years to rebuild the historic
towns of Belgium. But not years, nor a reclothed
diplomacy, nor the punishment of whichever traitor
to the world brought this thing to pass, nor anything
but God’s great eternity, will ever restore
to one mother her uselessly sacrificed son; will quicken
one of the figures that lie rotting along the battle
line; will heal this scar that extends, yellow and
blue and red and black, across the heart of Western
Europe.
