Civilians in Senlis, a destroyed town in northern France that was occupied on September 2, 1914, in the initial German advance into France, and evacuated a week later in the retreat from the Marne.
The War. Scenes in Northern France.© IN U.S.A. by the International News Service35Reverse:Before Rheims, Senlis was razed to the ground by the German army. It was a beautiful Old-World town.C.C.A 145
"These pleasant villages of the Aisne, with their one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofed granaries with espaliered gable-ends, are all much of one pattern, and one can easily picture what Auve must have been as it looked out, in the blue September weather, above the ripening pears of its gardens to the crops in the valley and the large landscape beyond. Now it is a mere waste of rubble and cinders, not one threshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruined villages after Auve, but this was the first, and perhaps for that reason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all the separate terrors, anguishes, uprootings and rendings apart involved in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered, all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and continuity to the present — of all that accumulated warmth nothing was left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!"
In 1915, novelist Edith Wharton traveled and reported from behind the French front lines in Paris, Lorraine, the Vosges, northern France, and Alsace. In February she was in Argonne and saw towns and villages that had been captured in the initial German invasion of France in August 1914, then retaken by the French after their victory in the Battle of the Marne in September.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 57, 58, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
1915-02-20, 1915, February, Auve
