Each day her car was ordered and ran to Rheims and Chalons through the
battlefields, or through the mountains to Givet, Dinant or Namur.
Changes passed over the mountains as quickly as the shades of flying
clouds. The spring growth, at every stage and age from valley to crest,
shook like light before the eyes. There were signs of spring, too, in
the battlefields. Cowslips grew in the ditches, and grass itself, as
rare and bright as a flower, broke out upon the plains.
A furtive and elementary civilisation began to creep back upon the
borders of the national roads. Pioneers, with hand, dog, and donkey
carts, with too little money, with too many children, with obstinate and
tenacious courage, began to establish themselves in cellars and
pill-boxes, in wooden shelters scraped together from the _debris_ of
their former villages. In those communities of six or seven families
the re-birth and early struggles of civilisation set in. One tilled a
patch of soil the size of a sheet between two trenches--one made a
fowl-yard, fenced it in and placed a miserable hen within. Little
notices would appear, nailed to poles emerging from the bowels of the
earth. "Vin-Cafe" or "Small motor repairs done here."
All this was noticeable along the great national roads. But in the side
roads, roads deep in yellow mud, uncleared, empty of lorries and cars,
no one set up his habitation.
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