Since the commencement of this short volume, the German flood has rolled again across the Somme. PÉronne, Nesle, Ham, Noyon, those towns mentioned so often and so gloriously in the annals of France, have fallen once more into the hands of the enemy. With them go the villages where my Unit laboured. Canizy, it is no more. The green-bladed wheatfields have become fields of unspeakable carnage; the poor ruins again smoke to heaven, and down the shattered highways course endlessly the grey columns of that Emperor whose empire is pillage and death.

What, then, remains to us of our labours? At least a memory in the lives of the peasants, and a present help in this their time of stress. Our villagers were rescued, and taken by special trains to safety. The Unit accomplished this work of succour. Their trucks were driven under shell fire through the villages to collect the inhabitants; sometimes they were the last over the bridges; they left our headquarters only when the Uhlans were within charging distance; they have fed and clothed thousands of refugees and soldiers. Mentioned with them in the newspaper accounts of their service is our Red Cross truck driver, Dave. The fate that has overtaken our peasants, what is it but a repetition of the immemorial blows that have welded and tempered their ancestral spirit? As one of their historians has limned them: “Les Picards sont francs et unis.... Ils vivent de peu.... Il arrive rarement que l’activitÉ et le dÉsir de s’avancer les dÉterminent À sortir de leur pays.... Ils sont sincÈres, fidÈles, libres, brusques, attachÉs À leurs opinions, fermes dans leurs rÉsolutions.”[6] It was to this spirit that an ancient king of France paid honour, when he granted his kinsman, who held this province, a coat of arms bearing the royal lilies, and the motto: Fidelissima, Picardie.

A thousand such Picards we have known, women for the most part; enduring a bitter winter, a daily hazard, that they might live on their own land and till their own fields once more. There was Mme. Pottier, sitting in her wrecked bakery, where the empty bread baskets were arranged like plaques against the walls. Her husband and her three daughters were prisoners. Her youngest son had died a soldier. She showed me with trembling hands the letter she had received from his Colonel, commending his clean life and his brave death. Her only remaining child was a religieuse,—a Red Cross nurse. I found Mme. Pottier one day reading the “Lives of the Saints.” “I like to read,” she said, “all books that are good. I love well the good God.” But she worked also, and knitted many a pair of stockings for us. First, however, the wool must be weighed. “It is just,” she reiterated after each protest on my part. “My conscience will be easy so.” And up a ladder she mounted to the loft, where stood scales designed to weigh sacks of flour. No weights being small enough, she took a few coppers from her pocket. “VoilÀ!” she said, throwing them into the balance. “Remember, the skeins weigh six sous; when the stockings are done, you shall see, they will be the same.”

There was Mme. Gouge, beautiful and tragic, who came and cooked for us, in order to send her son to school in Amiens; and even more pathetic, her brother-in-law, formerly the owner of the prettiest house in the village, who often accompanied her and served our meals. He was the village barber as well, and on a Saturday was busy all day in his shed, heating water, shaving M. le Maire and other of his neighbours, and presenting each, on the completion of the task, with a view of shaven cheeks, or clipped hair, in the broken bit of mirror which hung beside the door. Orderliness seemed to be M. Gouge’s ruling passion; the arbours in the two corners of his garden, the round flower-bed in the centre, the grassy square, the gravel walks,—all were as well kept as if the shattered house were still tenanted, and Madame, his wife, were looking out as she used to do upon the garden she loved.

Among the Picard soldiers, there was Caporal Levet, the boy-friend of M. l’AumÔnier, who made so light of his wounds. “It is nothing,” he repeated again and again after sharp fits of coughing brought on by exposure to the biting wind as he accompanied us during our week of fÊtes. “This is nothing; I am resting now. Soon I shall go back. My Colonel, he told me only to-day that I must go down to the Midi to train Moroccans. That is to the bayonet. Me, I do not like the bayonet,—the charges. One goes with the blacks, you know. I have been wounded twice. But,” a shrug of the shoulders, “my Colonel says that I am the youngest,—and I should go.” Some one asked at one of the parties that he lead the Marseillaise. He protested for the first time. “We French,” he said, “we are droll; we do not like to sing always of dying for the glory of la Patrie.” But they die, nevertheless; and one is left only to wonder when his time will come, on what dark night, in the lull of the bombardment, when the blacks leap out of the trenches and lead the desperate charge.

In Hombleux, in the church, beside the altar, hangs the Village roll of honour, bearing the names of six sons of Picardy fallen in its defence.

• Roullard Pottier
• Albert GourbiÈre
• Robert Gautier
• Pierre Commont
• August Deslatte
• AmidÉ Bens

Unknown heroes these, peasant names, roughly printed. Yet Hombleux, in the midst of its desolation, of its sorrow for those other sons and daughters forced into ignoble slavery, remembers its soldier dead. It remembers in prayer that France for which all have suffered. Near the illuminated scroll, upon its black background, stands a statue of Joan of Arc, and beneath it is placed this prayer:

Fidelissima, Picardie! It was in Amiens, in the Library there, that I first saw the emblazoned coat of arms of the province, and those of her famous cities, PÉronne, Nesle, St. Quentin, Amiens, Noyon, Ham with its castle, and Corbie, with its crows. I had come by slow train from Paris, and waited perforce for the still slower train which was to drop me that night at Hombleux, the nearest railroad station to our ChÂteau. Snow was upon the ground; the sunlight sharp and cold. It cleft the airy spire of the Cathedral out of the blue sky like a diamond-powdered sword. It frosted the delicate azure of the rose window, and high up among the clustered pillars, threw prismic whorls that floated like flowers upon a rippled stream of light. In the Library, it fell upon tooled leather bindings, upon the gorgeous blazons, upon pages illuminated, like the white walls of the Cathedral, with ethereal fruits and flowers. But the day was all too brief. As my train puffed and rumbled away from the city, dusk enveloped the plain till the evening star—or was it an avion?—burned forth. Passengers entered or descended, the last being a batch of Tommies bound for the Cambrai front. They were a noisy, good-natured lot, who slammed their rifles into the racks, trod upon one another’s toes, and wished heartily that “this bloomin’ war was done.” At Chaulnes they got out; an American engineer followed, and I was left alone. In total darkness the train proceeded, the engine as we swung around the curves looking like a dragon, belching fire. Presently, out of the vast level, rose the moon; and with it came those detonations which we, even in our sheltered camp, had learned to associate with its beauty. The Boches were bombing Ham.

Like my day in Amiens is my remembrance of Picardy; the dun plain, the windy sky, the play of light and shadow over both. The blazons given her by history glow anew in the heroisms of to-day. They form a glorious volume, illuminated with flowers as gorgeous as those traced by the monks of Corbie upon the pages of their Books of Chants, bound, as were they, with massive iron bands,—the iron bands of war.