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　　CHAPTER XIV

　　The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside the city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the tow-path, past market-gardens going down to the river on the opposite bank, and past the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-idleness in days of peace. They were of fantastic architecture—these Cottages where well-to-do citizens of Amiens used to come for week-ends of boating and fishing—and their garden gates at the end of wooden bridges over back-waters were of iron twisted into the shapes of swans or flowers, and there were snails of terra-cotta on the chimney-pots, and painted woodwork on the walls, in the worst taste, yet amusing and pleasing to the eye in their green bowers. I remember one called Mon Idee, and wondered that any man should be proud of such a freakish conception of a country house. They were abandoned during the war, except one or two used for casual rendezvous between French officers and their light o' loves, and the tow-path was used only by stray couples who came out for loneliness, and British soldiers walking out with French girls. The market-gardeners punted down the river in long, shallow boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages, cauliflowers, and asparagus, and farther up-stream there was a boat-house where orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour's rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des tambours de la mort—the ruffle of the drums of death. The winding waters of the Somme flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war by Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Peronne, where dead bodies floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges and barges, and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was a highway into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving barges the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter's yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on stretchers into the wooden sheds. They were the bad cases—French boys wounded in the abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or hopelessly shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, even on the stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful anguish, or moaned like wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds spoiled the music of the lapping water and the whispering of the willows and the song of birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that vision of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched them from the bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried to the bank. I think some of them looked for their own men. One of them spoke to me one day.

　　“That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!”

　　“Yes. That is war, Madame.”

　　She put a skinny hand on my arm.

　　“Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?”

　　“Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very old and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the lines.”

　　“The Germans are losing many men, Monsieur?”

　　“Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn about the fields.”

　　“Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose their sons, as I have lost mine.”

　　“Where was that, Madame?”

　　“Over there.”

　　She pointed up the Somme.

　　“He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yesterday he lay at my breast. My man weeps for him. They were good comrades.”

　　“It is sad, Madame.”

　　“Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur.”

　　“Au revoir, Madame.” Now It Can Be Told