Northern France is held in that cessation. Suddenly death came, and touched seven hundred villages. Nor can there ever be a renewal of the old charm. The art of the builders is gone, and the old sense of security in a quiet, continuing world. I have been spending the recent days with these peasants in the ruins of their shattered world. Little wooden baraquements are springing up, as neat and bare as the bungalows of summer visitors on the shore of a Maine lake. Brisk brick houses and stores lift out of crumpled rock with the rawness of a mining camp. It is all very brave and spirited. But it reminded me of the new wooden legs, with shining leather supports, and bright metal joints, which maimed soldiers are wearing. Everything is there which a mechanism can give, but the life-giving currents no longer flow. A spiritual mutilation has been wrought on these peasant people in destroying the familiar setting of their life. They had reached out filaments of habit and love to the deep-set hearth and ancient rafters. The curve of the village street was familiar to their eye, and the profile of the staunch time-resisting houses. From a new wooden structure, with one fair-sized, very neat room in it, a girl came out to talk with us. She was about twenty years old, with a settled sadness in her face. Her old home had stood on what was now a vegetable garden. A fragment of wall was still jutting up out of the potatoes. Everything that was dear to her had been carefully burned by the Germans. "All the same, it is my own home," she said, pointing to the new shack, "it does very well. But my mother could not stand it that everything was gone. We ran away for the few days that the Germans were here. My mother died eight days after we came back." The 51st Regiment of German Infantry entered the village, and burned it by squirting petrol on piles of straw in the houses. The machine they used was like a bicycle pump--a huge syringe. Of the Town Hall simply the front is standing, carrying its date of 1836. Seventeen steps go up its exterior, leading to nothing but a pit of rubbish. "For three days I lay hidden without bread to eat," said a passer-by. An old peasant talked with us. He told us that the Germans had come down in the night, and burned the village between four and six in the morning. A little later, they fired on the church. With petrol on hay they had burned his own home. "Tout brûlé," he kept repeating, as he sent his gaze around the wrecked village. He gestured with his stout wooden stick, swinging it around in a circle to show the completeness of the destruction. Five small boys had joined our group. The old man swung his cane high enough to clear the heads of the youngsters. One of them ran off to switch a wandering cow into the home path. "Doucement," said the old man. ("Gently.")