Читать книгу A Village in Picardy онлайн

6 страница из 20

You will not find my hamlet on any map of the région dévastée with which I am familiar; it is not listed among the destroyed villages of the Department, although it was looted, dynamited and defaced, even to the cutting of the oak trees about its Calvary. You would have to search minutely in history for any mention of it among the King’s towns of Picardy which became famous in guarding his frontier of the Somme. Comparatively modern and quite insignificant, it lies beside a tree-bordered, dyked canal, one of many which tapped the rich plain and bore the produce of farm and garden to the market centres, of Péronne, Ham and St. Quentin. To this canal sloped its fields of chicory, leeks, pumpkins, potatoes, turnips, carrots and other garden truck. Crooked lanes, brick-walled or faced with trim brick cottages, led from it back through the village to higher ground. There, before the war, the grands cultivateurs, such as M. le Maire, and M. Lanne, who rents the old Château, would have ploughed and sown their winter wheat.