One I saw twenty-six kilometres outside of Meaux and one at Bouneville.

As they fell they had buried their motors deep in the soft earth and their wings were twisted wrecks of silk and steel.
All the fields through which the army passed had become waste land.
Shells had re-ploughed them.

Horses and men had camped in them.
The haystacks, gathered by the sweat of the brow and patiently set in trim rows were trampled in the mud and scattered to the winds.

All the smaller villages through which I passed were empty of people, and since the day before, when the Germans occupied them, none of the inhabitants had returned.

These villages were just as the Germans had left them.