Читать книгу A Village in Picardy онлайн

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It was dusk when we turned off the main road between the half dozen dynamited farm-houses that once formed a tiny village, past the little church, and into the gate of the Château. To the rear of this ruined mass, set in a row as soldiers would set them, were the three baraques, or temporary shacks, which the Army had made ready for us. Very cheerful they looked that night with the lamplight streaming from open doors and windows, and the smell of savoury stew upon the air.

But morning revealed what darkness had hidden: the destruction which this estate shared with the entire countryside. Of the noble spruces and poplars, which had formed the two main avenues leading the one to the church and the other to the highway, only a ragged line remained; the rest lay as they had been felled, in tangles of crossed trunks. The Château itself, an imposing building as one viewed it through the frame of a scrolled wrought-iron gate, proved to be a rectangle of roofless walls. The water-tower, draped in flaming ampelopsis, no longer held the reservoir which had supplied in former days the mansion, the greenhouses, the servants’ quarters and the stables. The greenhouses themselves, the jardin d’hiver, and the orangerie, where were grown hot-house fruits, retained scarcely one unbroken pane of glass. Dynamite had been employed freely; but—an instance of German economy—the main roof of the greenhouse had been demolished by the well-calculated fall of a heavy spruce. In this same greenhouse were the remains of a white tiled tank, and a heating plant which had involved the construction of three new buildings. “Voilà,” said Marcel, the sixteen-year-old son of the gardener, as he pointed it out, “the officers’ bath.”