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BACK AT MAIN HEADQUARTERS iiq
crosses suspended by chains round their necks. I take them
to belong to the Franciscan Order. The wind sighs sadly in
the tops of the leafy chestnut trees. Now and again a police
patrol comes riding by.
Once more we drive through Marville, the pretty village
with its curious amphitheatrical aspect and red-tiled houses,
and its church which rears its tower above them. The fields
round about are peopled with bivouacking troops and transport
trains. The harvesting machines stand abandoned in the
fields, where the German soldiers have brought in the autumn
crops. Here and there, however, the corn has been left out
to dry after the recent rams.
Although Longuyon has suffered far more from the war,
there seem to be more inhabitants left than at Stenay, where
only a couple of houses have been damaged by fire, I stood
for a moment in the main street to sketch the devastation,
the naked walls with their crazy chimneys, the crumpled
gutters and broken telephone wires, and the piles of wrecked
masonry.
By the roadside are a few soldiers’ graves with crosses of
untrimmed branches cut from the nearest tree. Next we
come to Tellancourt, a terribly battered village in which
only a few inhabitants remain, most of them women and
children—and cats. Yet a priest comes walking along in
his round hat and long black cassock, and behind him some
twenty boys—possibly a reorganised school.
A little further on I make a hasty sketch of the remains
of a piece of ordnance from St. Étienne, which has been shot
to pieces. Several unused shells are still lying in the
ammunition box by the side of the gun, and a cross shows
that one of the gunners has fallen at his post. Wreckage of
the war is everywhere to be seen. Broken rifles, torn knap-
sacks, scraps of uniforms and helmets—a whole open-air
museum. Near by, some French peasants are ploughing
their field with two ploughs and four horses.
On the way out I had not had time to visit Longwy, the
upper portion of which, within the Vauban fort, has suffered
dreadfully through the war, whilst the manufacturing
portion of the town down in the valley of the La Chiers has
remained undamaged. This time we drove over the two
moats up to the picturesquely ornamented gate with its
Vauban memorial, over which the German flag was flying.
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