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One of them shouted out to me, "Voil? les Boches!" waving his
arm to left and right, and then shaking a clenched fist at them.
A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an open bodice
munched an apple, like Audrey in "As You Like It," and between her
bites told me that she had had a brother killed in the war, and that
she had been nearly killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came
bursting all round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed to
great holes in the field), and described the coming of the Germans
into her village over there, when she had lied to some Uhlans about
the whereabouts of French soldiers and had given one of those fat
Germans a blow on the face when he had tried to make love to her in
her father's barn. Her mother had been raped.
In further fields out of view of the German trenches, but well within
shell-range, the harvesting was being done by French soldiers. One of
them was driving the reaping--machine and looked like a gunner on his
limber, with his kepi thrust to the back of his head.


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