Georgette, the Warden's daughter, brought the news that many
enormous automobiles and soldiers, French soldiers, were beginning
to pass through the main street. In a little while a procession began
filing past on the high road near the castle, leading to the bridge
over the Marne. This was composed of motor trucks, open and closed, that
still had their old commercial signs under their covering of dust and
spots of mud. Many of them displayed the names of business firms
in Paris, others the names of provincial establishments. With these
industrial vehicles requisitioned by mobilization were others from the
public service which produced in Desnoyers the same effect as a familiar
face in a throng of strangers. On their upper parts were the names of
their old routes:--"Madeleine-Bastille, Passy-Bourne," etc. Probably he
had travelled many times in these very vehicles, now shabby and aged by
twenty days of intense activity, with dented planks and twisted metal,
perforated like sieves, but rattling crazily on.
Some of the conveyances displayed white discs with a red cross in the
center; others had certain letters and figures comprehensible only to
those initiates in the secrets of military administration. Within
these vehicles--the only new and strong motors--he saw soldiers, many
soldiers, but all wounded, with head and legs bandaged, ashy faces made
still more tragic by their growing beards, feverish eyes looking fixedly
ahead, mouths so sadly immobile that they seemed carven by agonizing
groans.
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