"Those brave Tommies are gone now," he sighed, "but they left their dead in our care. You see those flowers on their graves? It is we who put them there, and the children tend them every day. If you come back next year, it will be the same. We shall not forget."
"A great statesman paid us a visit not long after Nesle was liberated," our officer guide took up the story. "He had heard what the Tommies did, and he was not quite sure if they were justified. 'After all, German or not German, a tomb is a tomb, and the dead are dead,' he argued. But when he saw the cemetery of another place not far away, where the bodies of Frenchmen--yes, and women and little babies!--still lay where Germans had thrown them in stealing their graves, the grand old man's blood rushed to his head. He was no longer uncertain if the Tommies were right. He was certain they had done well; and in his red rage he, with his own hands, tore down thirty of the lying tombstones."
Oh, the silence of these dead towns that the Germans have killed with bombs and burning! _You_ know what it is like, Padre, because you have passed behind the veil and have knowledge beyond our dreaming: but to me it is a _triste révélation_. I never realized before what the words "dead silence" could mean. It is a silence you _hear_. It cries out as the loudest voice could not cry. It makes you listen--listen for the pleasant, homely sounds you've always associated with human habitations: the laughter of girls, the shouts of schoolboys, the friendly barking of dogs. But you listen in vain. You wonder if you are deaf--if other people are hearing what you cannot hear: and then you see on each face the same blank, listening look that must be on your own. I think a night at Chauny, or Jussy, might drive a weak woman mad. But--I haven't come to Chauny or Jussy yet! After Nesle we arrived at Ham, with its canal and its green, surrounding marshes.
Ham has ceased to be silent. There are some houses left, and to those houses people have come back. Shops have reopened, as at Noyon, where the French Government has advanced money to the business men. We drove into the town of Ham (what is left of it!) just as we were hating ourselves for being hungry. It is sordid and dreadful to be hungry in the midst of one's rage and grief and pity--to want to eat in a place like Ham, where one should wish to absorb nothing but history; yet our officer guide, who has helped make a good deal of history since 1914, seemed to think lunching quite as important as sightseeing. In a somewhat battered square, busy with reopening shops (some of them most _quaint_ shops, with false hair as a favourite display!) was a hotel. The Germans had lived in it for months. They had bullied the very old, very vital landlady who welcomed us. Their boots had worn holes in the stair carpet, going up and down in a goose-step. Their elbows had polished the long table in the dining room, and--oh, horror!--their mouths had drunk beer from glasses in which the good wine of France was offered to us!