I saw some of those white-haired women in Blesmes and Huiron and other scrap-heaps of German ruthlessness. They wandered in a disconsolate way about the ruins, watching rather hopelessly the building of wooden huts by a number of English "Quakers" who had come here to put up shelters for these homeless people of France. They were doing good work--one of the most beautiful works of charity which had been called out of this war, and giving a new meaning to their name of the Society of Friends. But though they were handy in the use of the wood given them by the French Government for this purpose, not all their industry nor all their friendliness could bring back the beauty of these old-world villages of Champagne, built centuries ago by men of art and craft, and chiselled by Time itself, so that the stones told tales of history to the villagers. It would be difficult to patch up the grey old tower of Huiron Church, through which shells had come crashing, or to rebuild its oak roof whose beams were splintered like the broken ribs of a rotting carcase. A white-haired priest passed up and down the roadway before the place in which he had celebrated Mass and praised God for the blessings of each day. His hands were clenched behind his bent back, and every now and then he thrust back his broad felt hat and looked up at the poor, battered thing which had been his church with immense sadness in his eyes. There was an old château near Huiron in which a noble family of France had lived through centuries of war and revolution. It had many pointed gables and quaint turrets and mullioned windows, overlooking a garden in which there were arbours for love-in-idleness where ladies had dreamed awhile on many summer days in the great yesterday of history. When I passed it, after the Germans had gone that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls. The gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion. A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the château of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed, murderously, by outrageous hands. In one of these villages of Champagne--I think it was at Blesmes--I saw one relic which had been spared by chance when the flames of the incendiaries had licked up all other things around, and somehow, God knows why, it seemed to me the most touching thing in this place of desolation.