It is a country of few towns, of many small villages, farm and manor houses. 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. Sometimes they escaped shell and machine gun to be burned to the ground vengefully with incendiary bombs, as at Sermaize-les-Bains, where of nine hundred buildings less than forty were left standing after the Germans retreated. These instances are the saddest of all because so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-François,--Favresse, Blesmes, Écrinnes, Thiéblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,--with acre upon acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered trees--and graves, everywhere soldiers' graves.
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 débris lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Écrinnes near by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving the front and spire intact. At Maurupt the whole edifice, which commanded the rolling countryside for miles, was riddled from end to end. Again, I would enter an apparently sound building to find a pile of rubbish in the nave, a gaping hole in the roof. And the same thing was true about Bar-le-Duc to the east and Meaux to the west. It is safe to say that in a fifty-mile wide stretch from Nancy to the English Channel not one village in ten has escaped the scourge.
I speak of the churches because of their irreplaceable beauty, the human tenderness of their relation with the earth. But even more poignant, perhaps, were the wrecks of little country homes--the stacks of ruined farm machinery, the gutted barns, the burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I remember, all but seven had been devastated--by incendiary fire. Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable--the "legitimate" wrack of war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate.