The War had been full of surprises--had been one great catastrophic surprise, since its declaration, and had kept up its pyrotechnic suddenness of change through all its four years. But the change that extinguished it outdid all else in strangeness. Late in October, the inhabitants of the château and the farm had heard the familiar sound of twelve-inch shells falling in Dunkirk, and never dreamed that they were never to hear that sound again. All day the roads and rail had been busy with French and English troops. They had halted in and around Hondebecq and passed on. The inhabitants of the farm and the château little dreamed that no more were to pass that way. The days and nights became quieter and ever more strangely quiet. There was a continual tension of the ear to catch that familiar rat-tat-tat, swish, boom. No sound came. Then, early in gray November, Jacobs and the Baron returned earlier than usual from their eternal cycling tour. In all the cellars of Hazebrouck, in all the hastily contrived, already-forgotten “strong points” in the area, they had not found one unburied mule, one neglected latrine. Or Jacobs had forgotten to take map references, for both were excited. Instead, they bent over a day-old English paper, that pretended to have the terms of the Armistice. At first it was mere meaningless words. Nothing happened. The daily life of Hondebecq did not change. But soon a phenomenon was observed. Up the solid gray pavé road that Napoleon built from Lille to Dunkirk, along which the victorious armies of mid-October had advanced, there flowed, in the opposite direction, another human stream. No army this, and nothing victorious about it, though here and there a dirty old hat, or wonderfully made, decrepit wheelbarrow was decorated with the flags of the Allies, bought from Germans who had been selling them during the last weeks in the French industrial area. By one and two, here a family, there an individual with a dog, all those civilians who had been swept within the German lines in the offensives of 1914 or 1918, were walking home. Such a home-coming surely never was since misery began. Doré used to picture such events in his illustrations to the Bible, but no one has even seen the like in reality. For censors had been strict, and the line of trenches where the Allies had fronted the Germans unpassable. Many a man of the Flemish border, or the Somme downs, had hoped to find his house or his field spared, and had to go to look himself in order to be finally disillusioned. Madeleine, superintending the cleaning of the fields, the weed burning, and autumn plowing, saw them come incuriously, not able to realize that even she, who had seen the whole War through, with the trenches only just beyond the sight of her eyes and never out of her hearing, had only now to begin to learn what it really had been.