Amiens was gone
behind her.
Again, on. In ten minutes the battlefields closed in beside the road.
Julien was gone. Stewart was gone. Comfort and ease and plenty were
gone. "But _We_ are here again!" groaned the great moors ahead, and on
each hand. The dun grass waved to the very edge of the road cut through
it. Deep and wild stretched the battlefields, and there, a few yards
ahead, were those poor strangers, the scavenging Chinamen.
Upon a large rough signpost the word "Foucaucourt" was painted in white
letters. A village of spars and beams and broken bricks--yet here, as
everywhere, returning civilians hunted like crows among the ruins,
carrying beams and rusty stoves, and large umbrellas for the rain.
At the next corner a Scotch officer hailed her.
"Will you give me a lift?"
He sat down beside her.
"What do you do?" she asked.
"I look after Chinamen."
"Ah, how lonely!"
"It is terrible," he replied. "Look at it! Dead for miles; the army
gone, and I here with these little yellow fellows, grubbing up
the crumbs."
She put him down at what he called "my corner"--a piece of ground
indistinguishable from the rest.
"Is that where you live?"
"Yes."
There was a black-boarded hut from whose chimney smoke exuded, and to
this ran a track across the grass. She watched him walk along it, a
friendless, sandy man, left over from the armies which had peopled the
rabbit warren in the ground.
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