"Well, that's better. I was on the English Front once, driving for the French Mission."
"Among other things they give me two francs when three is marked!"
"But once they gave you ten where three was marked!"
"That's all changed!" laughed the taxi-man. "And it's a long story. I don't like them."
"Go away!" said France restlessly, pushing at the new nations in her bosom. "It's all done. Go back again!"
"Are you an Ally?" said the Allies to each other balefully, their eyes no longer lit by battle, but irritable with disillusion--and each told his women tales of the other's shortcomings.
Along the sides of the roads, in the gutters, picking the dust-heap of the battlefields, there were representatives of other nations who did not join in the inter-criticism of the lords of the earth. Chinese, Arabs and Annamites made signs and gibbered, but none cared whether they were in amity or enmity.
Only up in Germany was there any peace from acrimony. _There_ the Allies walked contentedly about, fed well, looked kindly at each other. _There_ were no epithets to fling--they had all been flung long ago.
And the German people, looking curiously back, begged buttons as souvenirs from the uniforms of the men who spoke so many different languages.
The sun came lower and nearer, till the half-light ran with her half- thought, dropping, sinking, dying. "Guise," said the signpost, and a battlement stared down and threw its shadow across her face. "Is that where the dukes lived?" She was a speck in the landscape, moving on wheels that were none of her invention, covering distances of hundreds of miles without amazement, upon a magic mount unknown to her forefathers. Dark and light moved across the face of the falling day. Sometimes when she lifted her eyes great clouds full of rain were crossing the sky; and now, when she looked again the wind had torn them to shreds and hunted them away. The shadows lengthened--those of the few trees falling in bars across the road. A turn of the road brought the setting sun in her face, and blinded with light, she drove into it. When it had gone it left rays enough behind to colour everything, gilding the road itself, the air, the mists that hung in the ditches.