Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 270, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 November 1918 — WHEN NOYON WAS EVACUATED [ARTICLE]

WHEN NOYON WAS EVACUATED

Despairing Villager* Could Not at Once Believe That Savage Hun* Were Really Gone. Noyon was before the war just one of the many sleepy old French pro* vincial towns, with an hotel de ville, and a cathedral, and little gray streets twisting out into a rich, green agricultural plain; now, writes Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, in the Century, it will always be remembered as the town nearest to Paris—only 65 miles away—where the enemy stayed for two and a half years. It had been used during the occupation as a sort of concentration center from the actual firing line. Before the retreat, however, virtually all the useful members of the community had been deported; all the men between sixteen and sixty-r-there were a good many ot territorial age not mobilized during the first days of the war, and therefore caught by the German invasion—and most of the women between the same ages except those who had dependent children. It was, then, a community largely made up of old women and children and of the very old, who, on a certain Thurs* day in March, were ordered to go Into their houses, close their shutters, and not come out for 48 hours. Promptly a series of explosions began, very alarming explosions, which made the poor people inside tremble. What new horror were they up to now? The sounds went on for a day and a half, gradually growing fewer on the second morning. By afternoon) strangely, nothing whatever could be heard; not a voice, not a rumble. The boldest spirits pushed open the shutters a little and perceived that the streets were absolutely deserted—the graygreen soldiers were nowhere to be seen. Slowly and cautiously, halting at every step, they ventured out and up into the center of the town, coming back with the astonishing news, the news nobody dared believe, that the Germans were gone. They had blown up the bridges, burned a few factories, cut down trees along the roadsides, and made off. Even then the French inhabitants believed there must be some trick about it; and when their own soldiers, looking unfamiliar in blue uniforms instead of the old red‘ and black, entered the town the next morning, they tried, in the midst of the tears and welcomes, to hold them back lest they get caught in an ambush. It was true, though; the people of the Noyon region were again free citizens of France.