A HILLTOP ON THE MARNE

By Mildred Aldrich

Being Letters Written
June 3-September 8, 1914





Note To Tenth Impression


The author wishes to apologize for the constant use of the word 
English in speaking of the British Expedition to France.  At the 
beginning of the war this was a colloquial error into which we all fell 
over here, even the French press.  Everything in khaki was spoken 
of as "English," even though we knew perfectly well that Scotch, 
Irish, and Welsh were equally well represented in the ranks, and the 
colors they followed were almost universally spoken of as the 
"English flag." These letters were written in the days before the 
attention of the French press was called to this error of speech, 
which accounts for the mistake's persisting in the book.

La Creste, Huiry,

France, February, 1916.




To My Grandmother
Judith Trask Baker
That Staunch New Englander And
Pioneer Universalist
To The Memory Of Whose Courage
And Example I Owe A Debt
Of Eternal Gratitude




A HILLTOP ON THE MARNE

June 3, 1914

Well, the deed is done.  I have not wanted to talk with you much 
about it until I was here.  I know all your objections.  You remember 
that you did not spare me when, a year ago, I told you that this was 
my plan.  I realize that you--more active, younger, more interested in 
life, less burdened with your past--feel that it is cowardly on my part 
to seek a quiet refuge and settle myself into it, to turn my face 
peacefully to the exit, feeling that the end is the most interesting 
event ahead of me--the one truly interesting experience left to me in 
this incarnation.

I am not proposing to ask you to see it from my point of view.  You 
cannot, no matter how willing you are to try.  No two people ever 
see life from the same angle.  There is a law which decrees that two 
objects may not occupy the same place at the same time--result: 
two people cannot see things from the same point of view, and the 
slightest difference in angle changes the thing seen.

I did not decide to come away into a little corner in the country, in 
this land in which I was not born, without looking at the move from 
all angles.  Be sure that I know what I am doing, and I have found 
the place where I can do it.  Some time you will see the new home, I 
hope, and then you will understand.  I have lived more than sixty 
years.  I have lived a fairly active life, and it has been, with all its 
hardships--and they have been many--interesting.  But I have had 
enough of the city--even of Paris, the most beautiful city in the world.  
Nothing can take any of that away from me.  It is treasured up in my 
memory.  I am even prepared to own that there was a sort of 
arrogance in my persistence in choosing for so many years the 
most seductive city in the world, and saying, "Let others live where 
they will--here I propose to stay." I lived there until I seemed to take 
it for my own--to know it on the surface and under it, and over it, and 
around it; until I had a sort of morbid jealousy when I found any one 
who knew it half as well as I did, or presumed to love it half as 
much, and dared to say so.  You will please note that I have not 
gone far from it.

But I have come to feel the need of calm and quiet--perfect peace.  I 
know again that there is a sort of arrogance in expecting it, but I am 
going to make a bold bid for it.  I will agree, if you like, that it is 
cowardly to say that my work is done.  I will even agree that we both 
know plenty of women who have cheerfully gone on struggling to a 
far greater age, and I do think it downright pretty of you to find me 
younger than my years.  Yet you must forgive me if I say that none 
of us know one another, and, likewise, that appearances are often 
deceptive.

What you are pleased to call my "pride" has helped me a little.  No 
one can decide for another the proper moment for striking one's 
colors.

I am sure that you--or for that matter any other American--never 
heard of Huiry.  Yet it is a little hamlet less than thirty miles from 
Paris.  It is in that district between Paris and Meaux little known to 
the ordinary traveler.  It only consists of less than a dozen rude 
farm-houses, less than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux, which, 
with a fair cathedral, and a beautiful chestnut-shaded promenade on 
the banks of the Marne, spanned just there bylines of old mills 
whose water-wheels churn the river into foaming eddies, has never 
been popular with excursionists.  There are people who go there to 
see where Bossuet wrote his funeral orations, in a little summer-
house standing among pines and cedars on the wall of the garden 
of the Archbishop's palace, now, since the "separation," the property 
of the State, and soon to be a town museum.  It is not a very 
attractive town.  It has not even an out-of-doors restaurant to tempt 
the passing automobilist.

My house was, when I leased it, little more than a peasant's hut.  It 
is considerably over one hundred and fifty years old, with stables 
and outbuildings attached whimsically, and boasts six gables.  Is it 
not a pity, for early association's sake, that it has not one more?

I have, as Traddles used to say, "Oceans of room, Copperfield," 
and no joking.  I have on the ground floor of the main building a fair 
sized salon, into which the front door opens directly.  Over that I 
have a long, narrow bed-room and dressing-room, and above that, 
in the eaves, a sort of attic work-shop.  In an attached, one-story 
addition with a gable, at the west of the salon, I have a library lighted 
from both east and west.  Behind the salon on the west side I have 
a double room which serves as dining and breakfast-room, with a 
guest-chamber above.  The kitchen, at the north side of the salon, 
has its own gable, and there is an old stable extending forward at 
the north side, and an old grange extending west from the dining-
room.  It is a jumble of roofs and chimneys, and looks very much 
like the houses I used to combine from my Noah's Ark box in the 
days of my babyhood.

All the rooms on the ground floor are paved in red tiles, and the 
staircase is built right in the salon.  The ceilings are raftered.  The 
cross-beam in the salon fills my soul with joy--it is over a foot wide 
and a foot and a half thick.  The walls and the rafters are painted 
green,--my color,--and so good, by long trial, for my eyes and my 
nerves, and my disposition.

But much as I like all this, it was not this that attracted me here.  
That was the situation.  The house stands in a small garden, 
separated from the road by an old gnarled hedge of hazel.  It is 
almost on the crest of the hill on the south bank of the Marne,--the 
hill that is the water-shed between the Marne and the Grand Morin.  
Just here the Marne makes a wonderful loop, and is only fifteen 
minutes walk away from my gate, down the hill to the north.

From the lawn, on the north side of the house, I command a 
panorama which I have rarely seen equaled.  To me it is more 
beautiful than that we have so often looked at together from the 
terrace at Saint-Germain.  In the west the new part of Esbly climbs 
the hill, and from there to a hill at the northeast I have a wide view of 
the valley of the Marne, backed by a low line of hills which is the 
water-shed between the Marne and the Aisne.  Low down in the 
valley, at the northwest, lies lie de Villenoy, like a toy town, where 
the big bridge spans the Marne to carry the railroad into Meaux.  On 
the horizon line to the west the tall chimneys of Claye send lines of 
smoke into the air.  In the foreground to the north, at the foot of the 
hill, are the roofs of two little hamlets,--Joncheroy and Voisins,--and 
beyond them the trees that border the canal.

On the other side of the Marne the undulating hill, with its wide 
stretch of fields, is dotted with little villages that peep out of the trees 
or are silhouetted against the sky-line,--Vignely, Trilbardou, Pen-
chard, Monthyon, Neufmortier, Chauconin, and in the foreground to 
the north, in the valley, just halfway between me and Meaux, lies 
Mareuil-on-the-Marne, with its red roofs, gray walls, and church 
spire.  With a glass I can find where Chambry and Barcy are, on the 
slope behind Meaux, even if the trees conceal them.

But these are all little villages of which you may never have heard.  
No guidebook celebrates them.  No railroad approaches them.  On 
clear days I can see the square tower of the cathedral at Meaux, 
and I have only to walk a short distance on the route nationale,--
which runs from Paris, across the top of my hill a little to the east, 
and thence to Meaux and on to the frontier,--to get a profile view of it 
standing up above the town, quite detached, from foundation to 
clock-tower.

This is a rolling country of grain fields, orchards, masses of black-
currant bushes, vegetable plots,--it is a great sugar-beet country,--
and asparagus beds; for the Department of the Seine et Marne is 
one of the most productive in France, and every inch under 
cultivation.  It is what the French call un paysage riant, and I assure 
you, it does more than smile these lovely June mornings.  I am up 
every morning almost as soon as the sun, and I slip my feet into 
sabots, wrap myself in a big cloak, and run right on to the lawn to 
make sure that the panorama has not disappeared in the night.  
There always lie--too good almost to be true--miles and miles of 
laughing country, little white towns just smiling in the early light, a 
thin strip of river here and there, dimpling and dancing, stretches of 
fields of all colors--all so, peaceful and so gay, and so "chummy" 
that it gladdens the opening day, and makes me rejoice to have 
lived to see it.  I never weary of it.  It changes every hour, and I 
never can decide at which hour it is the loveliest.  After all, it is a 
rather nice world.

Now get out your map and locate me.

You will not find Huiry.  But you can find Esbly, my nearest station 
on the main line of the Eastern Railroad.  Then you will find a little 
narrow-gauge road running from there to Crecy-la-Chapelle.  
Halfway between you will find Couilly-Saint-Germain.  Well, I am 
right up the hill, about a third of the way between Couilly and Meaux.

It is a nice historic country.  But for that matter so is all France.  I am 
only fifteen miles northeast of Bondy, in whose forest the naughty 
Queen Fredegonde, beside whose tomb, in Saint-Denis, we have 
often stood together, had her husband killed, and nearer still to 
Chelles, where the Merovingian kings once had a palace stained 
with the blood of many crimes, about which you read, in many awful 
details, in Maurice Strauss's "Tragique Histoire des Reines Brunhaut 
et Fredegonde," which I remember to have sent you when it first 
came out.  Of course no trace of those days of the Merovingian 
dynasty remains here or anywhere else.  Chelles is now one of the 
fortified places in the outer belt of forts surrounding Paris.

So, if you will not accept all this as an explanation of what you are 
pleased to call my "desertion," may I humbly and reluctantly put up 
a plea for my health, and hope for a sympathetic hearing?

If I am to live much longer,--and I am on the road down the hill, you 
know,--I demand of Life my physical well-being.  I want a robust old 
age.  I feel that I could never hope to have that much longer in 
town,--city-born and city-bred though I am.  I used to think, and I 
continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did 
not press a city pavement.  The fact that I have changed my mind 
seems to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, 
changing my habits.  It surely proves that I have not a sick will--yet.  
In the simple life I crave--digging in the earth, living out of doors--I 
expect to earn the strength of which city life and city habits were 
robbing me.  I believe I can.  Faith half wins a battle.  No one ever 
dies up on this hill, I am told, except of hard drink.  Judging by my 
experience with workmen here, not always of that.  I never saw so 
many very old, very active, robust people in so small a space in all 
my life as I have seen here.

Are you answered?

Yet if, after all this expenditure of words, you still think I am shirking--
well, I am sorry.  It seems to me that, from another point of view, I 
am doing my duty, and giving the younger generation more room--
getting out of the lime-light, so to speak, which, between you and 
me, was getting trying for my mental complexion.  If I have 
blundered, the consequences be on my own head.  My hair could 
hardly be whiter--that's something.  Besides, retreat is not cut off.  I 
have sworn no eternal oath not to change my mind again.

In any case you have no occasion to worry about me: I've a head 
full of memories.  I am going to classify them, as I do my books.  
Some of them I am going to forget, just as I reject books that have 
ceased to interest me.  I know the latter is always a wrench.  The 
former may be impossible.  I shall not be lonely.  No one who reads 
is ever that.  I may miss talking.  Perhaps that is a good thing.  I may 
have talked too much.  That does happen.

Remember one thing--I am not inaccessible.  I may now and then 
get an opportunity to talk again, and in a new background.  Who 
knows? I am counting on nothing but the facts about me.  So come 
on, Future.  I've my back against the past.  Anyway, as you see, it is 
too late to argue.  I've crossed the Rubicon, and can return only 
when I have built a new bridge.




II



June 18, 1914.

That's right.  Accept the situation.  You will soon find that Paris will 
seem the same to you.  Besides, I had really given all I had to give 
there.

Indeed you shall know, to the smallest detail, just how the material 
side of my life is arranged,--all my comforts and discomforts,--since 
you ask.

I am now absolutely settled into my little "hole" in the country, as you 
call it.  It has been so easy.  I have been here now nearly three 
weeks.  Everything is in perfect order.  You would be amazed if you 
could see just how everything fell into place.  The furniture has 
behaved itself beautifully.  There are days when I wonder if either I 
or it ever lived anywhere else.  The shabby old furniture with which 
you were long so familiar just slipped right into place.  I had not a 
stick too little, and could not have placed another piece.  I call that 
"bull luck."

I have always told you--you have not always agreed--that France 
was the easiest place in the world to live in, and the love of a land in 
which to be a pauper.  That is why it suits me.

Don't harp on that word "alone." I know I am living alone, in a house 
that has four outside doors into the bargain.  But you know I am not 
one of the "afraid" kind.  I am not boasting.  That is a characteristic, 
not a quality.  One is afraid or one is not.  It happens that I am not.  
Still, I am Very prudent.  You would laugh if you could see me 
"shutting up" for the night.  All my windows on the ground floor are 
heavily barred.  Such of the doors as have glass in them have 
shutters also.  The window shutters are primitive affairs of solid 
wood, with diamond-shaped holes in the upper part.  First, I put up 
the shutters on the door in the dining-room which leads into the 
garden on the south side; then I lock the door.  Then I do a similar 
service for the kitchen door on to the front terrace, and that into the 
orchard, and lock both doors.  Then I go out the salon door and lock 
the stable and the grange and take out the keys.  Then I come into 
the salon and lock the door after me, and push two of the biggest 
bolts you ever saw.

After which I hang up the keys, which are as big as the historic key 
of the Bastille, which you may remember to have seen at the Musee 
Carnavalet.  Then I close and bolt all the shutters downstairs.  I do it 
systematically every night--because I promised not to be foolhardy.  
I always grin, and feel as if it were a scene in a play.  It impresses 
me so much like a tremendous piece of business--dramatic 
suspense--which leads up to nothing except my going quietly 
upstairs to bed.

When it is all done I feel as I used to in my strenuous working days, 
when, after midnight, all the rest of the world--my little world--being 
calmly asleep, I cuddled down in the corner of my couch to read;--
the world is mine!

Never in my life--anywhere, under any circumstances--have I been 
so well taken care of.  I have a femme de menage--a sort of cross 
between a housekeeper and a maid-of-all-work.  She is a married 
woman, the wife of a farmer whose house is three minutes away 
from mine.  My dressing-room window and my dining-room door 
look across a field of currant bushes to her house.  I have only to 
blow on the dog's whistle and she can hear.  Her name is Amelie, 
and she is a character, a nice one, but not half as much of a 
character as her husband--her second.  She is a Parisian.  Her first 
husband was a jockey, half Breton, half English.  He died years ago 
when she was young: broke his neck in a big race at Auteuil.

She has had a checkered career, and lived in several smart families 
before, to assure her old age, she married this gentle, queer little 
farmer.  She is a great find for me.  But the thing balances up 
beautifully, as I am a blessing to her, a new interest in her 
monotonous life, and she never lets me forget how much happier 
she is since I came here to live.  She is very bright and gay, 
intelligent enough to be a companion when I need one, and 
well-bred enough to fall right into her proper place when I don't.

Her husband's name is Abelard.  Oh, yes, of course, I asked him 
about Heloise the first time I saw him, and I was staggered when 
the little old toothless chap giggled and said, "That was before my 
time." What do you think of that? Every one calls him "Pere 
Abelard," and about the house it is shortened down to "Pere." He is 
over twenty years older than Amelie--well along in his seventies.  He 
is a native of the commune--was born at Pont-aux-Dames, at the 
foot of the hill, right next to the old abbaye of that name.  He is a 
type familiar enough to those who know French provincial life.  His 
father was a well-to-do farmer.  His mother was the typical mother of 
her class.  She kept her sons under her thumb as long as she lived.  
Pere Abelard worked on his father's farm.  He had his living, but 
never a sou in his pocket.  The only diversion he ever had was 
playing the violin, which some passer in the commune taught him.  
When his parents died, he and his brothers sold the old place at 
Pont-aux-Dames to Coquelin, who was preparing to turn the historic 
old convent into a maison de retraite for aged actors, and he came 
up here on the hill and bought his present farm in this hamlet, where 
almost every one is some sort of a cousin of his.

Oddly enough, almost every one of these female cousins has a 
history.  You would not think it, to look at the place and the people, 
yet I fancy that it is pretty universal for women in such places to 
have "histories." You will see an old woman with a bronzed face--
sometimes still handsome, often the reverse--in her short skirt, her 
big apron tied round where a waist is not, her still beautiful hair 
concealed in a colored handkerchief.  You ask the question of the 
right person, and you will discover that she is rich; that she is 
avaricious; that she pays heavy taxes; denies herself all but the 
bare necessities; and that the foundation of her fortune dates back 
to an affaire du coeur, or perhaps of interest, possibly of cupidity; 
and that very often the middle-aged daughter who still "lives at 
home with mother," had also had a profitable affaire arranged by 
mother herself.  Everything has been perfectly convenable.  Every 
one either knows about it or has forgotten it.  No one is bothered or 
thinks the worse of her so long as she has remained of the "people" 
and put on no airs.  But let her attempt to rise out of her class, or go 
up to Paris, and the Lord help her if she ever wants to come back, 
and, French fashion, end her days where she began them.  This is 
typically, provincially French.  When you come down here I shall tell 
you tales that will make Balzac and De Maupassant look tame.

You have no idea how little money these people spend, It must hurt 
them terribly to cough up their taxes.  They all till the land, and eat 
what they grow.  Amelie's husband spends exactly four cents a 
week--to get shaved on Sunday.  He can't shave himself.  A razor 
scares him to death.  He looks as if he were going to the guillotine 
when he starts for the barber's, but she will not stand for a beard of 
more than a week's growth.  He always stops at my door on his way 
back to let his wife kiss his clean old face, all wreathed with smiles--
the ordeal is over for another week.  He never needs a sou except 
for that shave.  He drinks nothing but his own cider: he eats his own 
vegetables, his own rabbits; he never goes anywhere except to the 
fields,--does not want to--unless it is to play the violin for a dance or 
a fete.  He just works, eats, sleeps, reads his newspaper, and is 
content.  Yet he pays taxes on nearly a hundred thousand francs' 
worth of real estate.

But, after all, this is not what I started to tell you--that was about my 
domestic arrangements.  Amelie does everything for me.  She 
comes early in the morning, builds a fire, then goes across the field 
for the milk while water is heating.  Then she arranges my bath, gets 
my coffee, tidies up the house.  She buys everything I need, cooks 
for me, waits on me, even mends for me,--all for the magnificent 
sum of eight dollars a month.  It really isn't as much as that, it is forty 
francs a month, which comes to about a dollar and eighty cents a 
week in your currency.  She has on her farm everything in the way 
of vegetables that I need, from potatoes to "asparagras," from peas 
to tomatoes.  She has chickens and eggs.  Bread, butter, cheese, 
meat come right to the gate; so does the letter carrier, who not only 
brings my mail but takes it away.  The only thing we have to go for is 
the milk.

To make it seem all the more primitive there is a rickety old diligence 
which runs from Quincy--Huiry is really a suburb of Quincy--to Esbly 
twice a day, to connect with trains for Paris with which the branch 
road does not connect.  It has an imperial, and when you come out 
to see me, at some future time, you will get a lovely view of the 
country from a top seat.  You could walk the four miles quicker than 
the horse does,--it is uphill nearly all the way,--but time is no longer 
any object with me.  Amelie has a donkey and a little cart to drive 
me to the station at Couilly when I take that line, or when I want to 
do an errand or go to the laundress, or merely to amuse myself.

If you can really match this for a cheap, easy, simple way for an 
elderly person to live in dignity, I wish you would.  It is far easier than 
living in Paris was, and living in Paris was easier for me than the 
States.  I am sorry, but it is the truth.

You ask me what I do with the "long days." My dear! they are short, 
and yet I am out of bed a little after four every morning.  To be sure I 
get into bed again at half past eight, or, at latest, nine, every night.  
Of course the weather is simply lovely.  As soon as I have made 
sure that my beloved panorama has not disappeared in the night I 
dress in great haste.  My morning toilette consists of a long black 
studio apron such as the French children wear to school,--it takes 
the place of a dress,--felt shoes inside my sabots, a big hat, and 
long gardening-gloves.  In that get-up I weed a little, rake up my 
paths, examine my fruit trees, and, at intervals, lean on my rake in a 
Maud Muller posture and gaze at the view.  It is never the same two 
hours of the day, and I never weary of looking at it.

My garden would make you chortle with glee.  You will have to take 
it by degrees, as I do.  I have a sort of bowing acquaintance with it 
myself--en masse, so to speak.  I hardly know a thing in it by name.  
I have wall fruit on the south side and an orchard of plum, pear, and 
cherry trees on the north side.  The east side is half lawn and half 
disorderly flower beds.  I am going to let the tangle in the orchard 
grow at its own sweet will--that is, I am going to as far as Amelie 
allows me.  I never admire some trailing, flowering thing there that, 
while I am admiring it, Amelie does not come out and pull it out of 
the ground, declaring it une salete and sure to poison the whole 
place if allowed to grow.  Yet some of these same saletes are so 
pretty and grow so easily that I am tempted not to care.  One of 
these trials of my life is what I am learning to know as liserone--we 
used to call it wild morning-glory.  That I am forbidden to have--if I 
want anything else.  But it is pretty.

I remember years ago to have heard Ysolet, in a lecture at the 
Sorbonne, state that the "struggle for life" among the plants was 
fiercer and more tragic than that among human beings.  It was mere 
words to me then.  In the short three weeks that I have been out 
here in my hilltop garden I have learned to know how true that was.  
Sometimes I am tempted to have a garden of weeds.  I suppose my 
neighbors would object if I let them all go to seed and sow these 
sins of agriculture all over the tidy farms about me.

Often these lovely mornings I take a long walk with the dog before 
breakfast.  He is an Airedale, and I am terribly proud of him and my 
neighbors terribly afraid of him.  I am half inclined to believe that he 
is as afraid of them as they are of him, but I keep that suspicion, for 
prudential reasons, to myself.  At any rate, all passers keep at a 
respectful distance from me and him.

Our usual walk is down the hill to the north, toward the shady route 
that leads by the edge of the canal to Meaux.  We go along the 
fields, down the long hill until we strike into a footpath which leads 
through the woods to the road called "Paves du Roi" and on to the 
canal, from which a walk of five minutes takes us to the Marne.  
After we cross the road at the foot of the hill there is not a house, 
and the country is so pretty--undulating ground, in every tint of 
green and yellow.  From the high bridge that crosses the canal the 
picture is--well, is French-canally, and you know what that means--
green-banked, tree-shaded, with a towpath bordering the straight 
line of  water, and here and there a row of broad long canal-boats 
moving slowly through the shadows.

By the time I get back I am ready for breakfast.  You know I never 
could eat or drink early in the morning.  I have my coffee in the 
orchard under a big pear tree, and I have the inevitable book 
propped against the urn.  Needless to say I never read a word.  I 
simply look at the panorama.  All the same I have to have the book 
there or I could not eat, just as I can't go to sleep without books on 
the bed.

After breakfast I write letters.  Before I know it Amelie appears at the 
library door to announce that "Madame est servie"--and the morning 
is gone.  As I am alone, as a rule I take my lunch in the breakfast-
room.  It is on the north side of the house, and is the coolest room in 
the house at noon.  Besides, it has a window overlooking the plain.  
In the afternoon I read and write and mend, and then I take a light 
supper in the arbor on the east side of the house under a crimson 
rambler, one of the first ever planted here over thirty years ago.

I must tell you about that crimson rambler.  You know when I hired 
this house it was only a peasant's hut.  In front of what is now the 
kitchen--it was then a dark hole for fuel--stood four dilapidated 
posts, moss-covered and decrepit, over which hung a tangle of 
something.  It was what I called a "mess." I was not as educated as 
I am now.  I saw--it was winter--what looked to me an unsightly 
tangle of disorder.  I ordered those posts down.  My workmen, who 
stood in some awe of me,--I was the first American they had ever 
seen,--were slow in obeying.  They did not dispute the order, only 
they did not execute it.

One day I was very stern.  I said to my head mason, "I have ordered 
that thing removed half a dozen times.  Be so good as to have 
those posts taken down before I come out again."

He touched his cap, and said, "Very well, madame."

It happened that the next time I came out the weather had become 
spring-like.

The posts were down.  The tangle that had grown over them was 
trailing on the ground--but it had begun to put out leaves.  I looked 
at it--and for the first time it occurred to me to say, "What is that?"

The mason looked at me a moment, and replied, "That, madame! 
That is a 'creamson ramblaire'--the oldest one in the commune."

Poor fellow, it had never occurred to him that I did not know.

Seven feet to the north of the climbing rose bush was a wide hedge 
of tall lilac bushes.  So I threw up an arbor between them, and the 
crimson rambler now mounts eight feet in the air.  It is a glory of 
color to-day, and my pride.  But didn't I come near to losing it?

The long evenings are wonderful.  I sit out until nine, and can read 
until almost the last minute.  I never light a lamp until I go up to bed.  
That is my day.  It seems busy enough to me.  I am afraid it will--to 
you, still so willing to fight, still so absorbed in the struggle, and still 
so over-fond of your species--seem futile.  Who knows which of us 
is right ?--or if our difference of opinion may not be a difference in 
our years? If all who love one another were of the same opinion, 
living would be monotonous, and conversation flabby.  So cheer up.  
You are content.  Allow me to be.




Ill



June 20, 1914.

I have just received your letter--the last, you say, that you can send 
before you sail away again for "The Land of the Free and the Home 
of the Brave," where you still seem to feel that it is my duty to return 
to die.  I vow I will not discuss that with you again.  Poverty is an 
unpretty thing, and poverty plus old age simply horrid in the 
wonderful land which saw my birth, and to which I take off my sun-
bonnet in reverent admiration, in much the same spirit that the 
peasants still uncover before a shrine.  But it is the land of the 
young, the energetic, and the ambitious, the ideal home of the very 
rich and the laboring classes.  I am none of those--hence here I 
stay.  I turn my eyes to the west often with a queer sort of amazed 
pride.  If I were a foreigner--of any race but French--I 'd work my 
passage out there in an emigrant ship.  As it is, I did forty-five years 
of hard labor there, and I consider that I earned the freedom to die 
where I please.

I can see in "my mind's eye" the glitter in yours as you wrote--and
underscored--I'll wager you spend half your days in writing letters
back to the land you have willfully deserted.  As well have stayed
among us and talked--and you talk so much better than you write.
"Tut! tut! That is nasty."  Of course I do not deny that I shall miss the
inspiration of your contradictions--or do you call it repartee? I scorn
your arguments, and I hereby swear that you shall not worry another
remonstrance from me.

You ask me how it happens that I wandered in this direction, into a 
part of the country about which you do not remember to have ever 
heard me talk, when there were so many places that would have 
seemed to you to be more interesting.  Well, this is more interesting 
than you think.  You must not fancy that a place is not interesting 
because you can't find it in Hare, and because Henry James never 
talked about it.  That was James's misfortune and not his fault.

The truth is I did look in many more familiar directions before 
fortunate accident led me here.  I had an idea that I wanted to live 
on the heights of Montmorency, in the Jean Jacques Rousseau 
country.  But it was terribly expensive--too near to Enghien and its 
Casino and baccarat tables.  Then I came near to taking a house 
near Viroflay, within walking distance of Versailles.  But at the very 
mention of that all my French friends simply howled.  "It was too 
near to Paris"; "it was the chosen route of the Apaches"; and so on 
and so forth.  I did not so much care for the situation.  It was too 
familiar, and it was not really country, it was only suburbs.  But the 
house attracted me.  It was old and quaint, and the garden was 
pretty, and it was high.  Still it was too expensive.  After that I found 
a house well within my means at Poigny, about an hour, by 
diligence, from Rambouillet.  That did attract me.  It was real 
country, but it had no view and the house was very small.  Still I had 
got so tired of hunting that I was actually on the point of taking it 
when one of my friends accidentally found this place.  If it had been 
made to order it could not have suited me better--situation, age, 
price, all just to my taste.  I put over a year and a half into the 
search.  Did I keep it to myself well?

Besides, the country here had a certain novelty to me.  I know the 
country on the other side of the Petit Morin, but all this is new to me 
except Meaux.  At first the house did not look habitable to me.  It 
was easily made so, however, and it has great possibilities, which 
will keep me busy for years.

Although you do not know this part of the country, it has, for me, 
every sort of attraction--historical as well as picturesque.  Its 
historical interest is rather for the student than the tourist, and I love 
it none the less for that.

If ever you relent and come to see me, I can take you for some 
lovely walks.  I can, on a Sunday afternoon, in good weather, even 
take you to the theater--what is more, to the theater to see the 
players of the Comedie Francaise.  It is only half an hour's walk from 
my house to Pont-aux-Dames, where Coquelin set up his maison 
de retraite for aged actors, and where he died and is buried.  In the 
old park, where the du Barry used to walk in the days when Louis 
XVI clapped her in prison on a warrant wrung from the dying old 
king, her royal lover, there is an open-air theater, and there, on 
Sundays, the actors of the Theatre Francais play, within sight of the 
tomb of the founder of the retreat, under the very trees--and they 
are stately and noble--where the du Barry walked.

Of course I shall only take you there if you insist.  I have outgrown 
the playhouse.  I fancy that I am much more likely to sit out on the 
lawn and preach to you on how the theater has missed its mission 
than I am--unless you insist--to take you down to the hill to listen to 
Moliere or Racine.

If, however, that bores you,--it would me,--you can sit under the 
trees and close your eyes while I give you a Stoddard lecture 
without the slides.  I shall tell you about the little walled town of 
Crecy, still surrounded by its moat, where the tiny little houses stand 
in gardens with their backs on the moat, each with its tiny footbridge, 
that pulls up, just to remind you that it was once a royal city, with 
drawbridge and portcullis, a city in which kings used to stay, and in 
which Jeanne d'Arc slept one night on her way back from crowning 
her king at Rheims: a city that once boasted ninety-nine towers.  
Half a dozen of these towers still stand.  Their thick walls are now 
pierced with windows, in which muslin curtains blow in the wind, to 
say that to-day they are the humble homes of simple people, and to 
remind you of what warfare was in the days when such towers were 
a defense.  Why, the very garden in which you will be sitting when I 
tell you this was once a part of the royal estate, and the last Lord of 
the Land was the Duke de Penthievre.  I thought that fact rather 
amusing when I found it out, considering that the house I came so 
near to taking at Poigny was on the Rambouillet estate where his 
father, the Duke de Toulouse, one of Louis XIV's illegitimate sons, 
died, where the Duke de Penthievre was born, and where he buried 
his naughty son, the Duke de Lamballe.

Of course, while I am telling you things like this you will have to bring 
your imagination into play, as very few vestiges of the old days 
remain.  I still get just as much fun out of Il y avait une fois, even 
when the "once on a time" can only be conjured up with closed 
eyes.  Still, I can show you some dear little old chapels, and while I 
am telling you about it you will probably hear the far-off, sad tolling of 
a bell, and I shall say to you "Ca sonne a Bouleurs." It will be the 
church bells at Bouleurs, a tiny, tree-shaded hamlet, on another 
hilltop, from which, owing to its situation, the bells, which rarely ring 
save for a funeral, can be heard at a great distance, as they have 
rung over the valley for years.  They sound so sad in the still air that 
the expression, Ca sonne a Bouleurs, has come to mean bad luck.  
In all the towns where the bell can be heard, a man who is having 
bad luck at cards, or has made a bad bargain, or has been tricked 
in any way, invariably remarks, "Ca sonne a Bouleurs."

I could show you something more modern in the way of historical 
association.  For example, from the road at the south side of my hill I 
can show you the Chateau de la Haute Maison, with its mansard 
and Louis XVI pavilions, where Bismarck and Favre had their first 
unsuccessful meeting, when this hill was occupied by the Germans 
in 1870 during the siege of Paris.  And fifteen minutes' walk from 
here is the pretty Chateau de Conde, which was then the home of 
Casimir-Perier, and if you do not remember him as the President of 
the Republic who resigned rather than face the Dreyfus case, you 
may remember him as the father-in-law of Madame Simone, who 
unsuccessfully stormed the American theater, two years ago.

You ask me how isolated I am.  Well, I am, and I am not.  My house 
stands in the middle of my garden.  That is a certain sort of isolation.  
There is a house on the opposite side of the road, much nearer than 
I wish it were.  Luckily it is rarely occupied.  Still, when it is, it is over-
occupied.  At the foot of the hill--perhaps five hundred yards away--
are the tiny hamlet of Joncheroy and the little village of Voisins.  Just 
above me is the hamlet of Huiry--half a dozen houses.  You see that 
is not sad.  So cheer up.  So far as I know the commune has no 
criminal record, and I am not on the route of tramps.  Remember, 
please, that, in those last winters in Paris, I did not prove immune to 
contagions.  There is nothing for me to catch up here--unless it be 
the gayety with which the air is saturated.

You ask me also how it happens that I am living again "near by 
Quincy?" As true as you live, I never thought of the coincidence.  If 
you please, we pronounce it "Kansee." When I read your question I 
laughed.  I remembered that Abelard, when he was first 
condemned, retired to the Hermitage of Quincy, but when I took 
down Larousse to look it up, what do you think I found? Simply this 
and nothing more: "Quincy: Ville des Etats-Unis (Massachusetts), 
28,000 habitants."

Isn't that droll? However, I know that there was a Sire de Quincy 
centuries ago, so I will look him up and let you know what I find.

The morning paper--always late here--brings the startling news of 
the assassination of the Crown Prince of Austria.  What an unlucky 
family that has been! Franz Josef must be a tough old gentleman to 
have stood up against so many shocks.  I used to feel so sorry for 
him when Fate dealt him another blow that would have been a 
"knock-out" for most people.  But he has stood so many, and 
outlived happier people, that I begin to believe that if the wind is 
tempered to the shorn lamb, the hides, or the hearts, of some 
people are toughened to stand the gales of Fate.

Well, I imagine that Austria will not grieve much--though she may be 
mad--over the loss of a none too popular crown prince, whose 
morganatic wife could never be crowned, whose children cannot 
inherit, and who could only have kept the throne warm for a while for 
the man who now steps into line a little sooner than he would have 
had this not happened.  If a man will be a crown prince in these 
times he must take the consequences.  We do get hard-hearted, 
and no mistake, when it is not in our family that the lightning strikes.  
The "Paths of Glory lead but to the grave," so what matters it, really, 
out by what door one goes?

This will reach you soon after you arrive in the great city of tall 
buildings.  More will follow, and I expect they will be so gay that 
you will rejoice to have even a postal tie with La Belle France, to 
which, if you are a real good American, you will come back when 
you die--if you do not before.




IV



July 16, 1914.

Your Fourth of July letter came this morning.  It was lively reading, 
especially coming so soon after my first quatorze de juillet in the 
country.  The day was a great contrast to the many remembrances I 
have of Bastille Day in Paris.  How I remember my first experience 
of that fete, when my bedroom window overlooked one of the 
squares where the band played for the three nights of dancing.  
That was a fierce experience after the novelty of the first night had 
worn off, when hour after hour the dance music droned on, and 
hour after hour the dancing feet on the pavement nearly drove me 
frantic.  To offset it I have memories of the Champs-Elysees and the 
Place de l'Hotel de Ville turned into a fairyland.  I am glad I saw all 
that.  The memory hangs in my mind like a lovely picture.  Out here 
it was all as still as--I was going to say Sunday, but I should have to 
say a New England Sunday, as out here Sunday is just like any 
other day.  There was not even a ringing of bells.  The only 
difference there was to me was that Amelie drove Pere over to 
Coutevroult, on the other side of the valley of the Grand Morin, 
where he played for the dance, and did not get back until long after 
daylight.  I did put out my flags in honor of the day.  That was the 
extent of my celebrating.

In the evening there was a procession at Voisins, and from Meaux 
and the other towns on the hill there was an occasional rocket.  It 
was not really an exciting day.

The procession at Voisins was a primitive affair, but, to me, all the 
prettier for that.  It looked so quaint with its queer lanterns, its few 
flags, its children and men in blouses, strolling through the crooked, 
hilly streets of the old town, to the tap of the drum.  No French 
procession, except it be soldiers, ever marches.  If you ever saw a 
funeral procession going through the street, or one going about a 
church, you do not need to be told that.

I was glad that this little procession here kept so much of its old-time 
character, but I was sorry it was not gayer.  Still, it was so 
picturesque that it made me regret anew, what I have so many 
times regretted of late years, that so many of the old habits of 
country life in France are passing away, as they are, for that matter, 
all over Europe, along with ignorance and national costumes.

I must tell you that up to three years ago it was the custom in this 
commune, which, simply because it is not on a railroad, has 
preserved its old-days air and habits, for wedding and baptismal 
parties to walk in procession through the streets from the house to 
the church and back again.  Pere Abelard used to head the 
procession, playing on his violin.  There has been but one event of 
that kind since I came, and I am afraid it will be the last.  That was 
for the baptism of the first grandchild of a French officer who had 
married a woman born in this commune, and the older members of 
the family had a desire to keep up the old traditions.  The church is 
at Quincy, just a step off the route nationale to Meaux.  Pere walked 
ahead,--he could not be accused of marching,--fiddling away for 
dear life.  The pretty young godmother carried the baby, in its 
wonderful christening finery, walking between the grandmother and 
the father, and the guests, all in their gayest clothes, followed on as 
they liked behind, all stepping out a little on account of the fiddle 
ahead.  They came back from the church in the same way, only 
father carried the baby, and the godmother scattered her largesse 
among the village children.

It is a pity that such pretty customs die out.  Wedding parties must 
have looked so attractive going along these country roads.  The 
fashion that has replaced it is unattractive.  To-day they think it 
much more chic to hire a big barge and drive down to Esbly and 
have a rousing breakfast and dance in the big hall which every 
country hotel has for such festivities.  Such changes are in the spirit 
of the times, so I suppose one must not complain.  I should not if 
people were any happier, but I cannot see that they are.  However, I 
suppose that will come when the Republic is older.  The 
responsibility which that has put on the people has made them more 
serious than they used to be.

I don't blame you for laughing at the idea of me in a donkey cart.  
You would laugh harder if you could see the cart and me.  I do look 
droll.  But this is the land where nothing astonishes any one, thank 
Heaven.  But you wait until I get my complet de velours--which is to 
say my velveteens.  I shall match up with the rig then, never fear.  
Rome was not built in a day, nor can a lady from the city turn into a 
country-looking lady in the wink of an eye.  By the time you have 
sufficiently overcome your prejudices as to come out and see me 
with your own eyes, I'll fit into the landscape and the cart in great 
style.

Absolutely no news to write you, unless you will consider it news that 
my hedge of dahlias, which I planted myself a month ago, is coming 
up like nothing else in the world but Jack's Beanstalk.  Nothing but 
weeds ever grew so rank before.  Pere says I was too generous 
with my biogene--the latest French thing in fertilizers.  But I did want 
them to be nourished in a rich soil--and come up quick.  They did.  I 
can actually see them grow.  I am almost afraid to tell you that they 
are over two feet high now.  Of course you won't believe me.  But it 
is not a fairy tale.  I would not have believed it myself if I had not 
seen it.

Alas! I find that I cannot break myself of reading the newspapers, 
and reading them eagerly.  It is all the fault of that nasty affair in 
Servia.  I have a dim recollection that I was very flippant about it in 
my last letter to you.  After all, woman proposes and politics upset 
her proposition.  There seems to be no quick remedy for habit, 
more's the pity.  It is a nasty outlook.  We are simply holding our 
breaths here.




July 30,1914.


This will be only a short letter--more to keep my promise to you than 
because I feel in the mood to write.  Events have broken that.  It 
looks, after all, as if the Servian affair was to become a European 
affair, and that, what looked as if it might happen during the Balkan 
War is really coming to pass--a general European uprising.

It is an odd thing.  It seems it is an easy thing to change one's 
environment, but not so easy to change one's character.  I am just 
as excited over the ugly business as I should have been had I 
remained near the boulevards, where I could have got a newspaper 
half a dozen times a day.  I only get one a day, and this morning I 
got that one with difficulty.  My "Figaro," which comes out by mail, 
has not come at all.

Well, it seems that the so-called "alarmists" were right.  Germany 
has NOT been turning her nation into an army just to divert her 
population, nor spending her last mark on ships just to amuse 
herself, and keep Prince Henry busy.

I am sitting here this morning, as I suppose all France is doing, 
simply holding my breath to see what England is going to do.  I 
imagine there is small doubt about it.  I don't see how she can do 
anything but fight.  It is hard to realize that a big war is inevitable, but 
it looks like it.  It was staved off, in spite of Germany's perfidy, during 
the Balkan troubles.  If it has to come now, just imagine what it is 
going to mean! It will be the bloodiest affair the world has ever seen--
a war in the air, a war under the sea as well as on it, and carried out 
with the most effective man-slaughtering machines ever used in 
battle.

I need not tell you--you know, we have so often talked about it--how 
I feel about war.  Yet many times since I came to France to live, I 
have felt as if I could bear another one, if only it gave Alsace and 
Lorraine back to us--us meaning me and France.  France really 
deserves her revenge for the humiliation of 1870 and that beastly 
Treaty of Frankfort.  I don't deny that 1870 was the making of 
modern France, or that, since the Treaty of Frankfort, as a nation 
she has learned a lesson of patience that she sorely needed.  But 
now that Germany is preparing--is really prepared to attack her 
again--well, the very hair on my head rises up at the idea.  There 
have been times in the last ten years when I have firmly believed 
that she could not be conquered again.  But Germany! Well, I don't 
know.  If she is, it will not be for lack of nerve or character.  Still, it is 
no secret that she is not ready, or that the anti-military party is 
strong,--and with that awful Caillaux affair; I swore to myself that 
nothing should tempt me to speak of it.  It has been so disgraceful.  
Still, it is so in the air just now that it has to be recognized as pitifully 
significant and very menacing to political unity.

The tension here is terrible.  Still, the faces of the men are stern, 
and every one is so calm--the silence is deadly.  There is an 
absolute suspension of work in the fields.  It is as if all France was 
holding its breath.

One word before I forget it again.  You say that you have asked me 
twice if I have any friend near me.  I am sure I have already 
answered that--yes! I have a family of friends at Voulangis, about 
two miles the other side of Crecy-en-Brie.  Of course neighbors do 
not see one another in the country as often as in the city, but there 
they are; so I hasten to relieve your mind just now, when there is a 
menace of war, and I am sitting tight on my hilltop on the road to the 
frontier.




VI



August 2, 1914.


Well, dear, what looked impossible is evidently coming to pass.

Early yesterday morning the garde champetre--who is the only thing 
in the way of a policeman that we have--marched up the road 
beating his drum.  At every crossroad he stopped and read an 
order.  I heard him at the foot of the hill, but I waited for him to pass.  
At the top of the hill he stopped to paste a bill on the door of the 
carriage-house on Pere Abelard's farm.  You can imagine me,--in 
my long studio apron, with my head tied up in a muslin cap,--running 
up the hill to join the group of poor women of the hamlet, to read the 
proclamation to the armies of land and sea--the order for the 
mobilization of the French military and naval forces--headed by its 
crossed French flags.  It was the first experience in my life of a thing 
like that.  I had a cold chill down my spine as I realized that it was 
not so easy as I had thought to separate myself from Life.  We 
stood there together--a little group of women--and silently read it 
through--this command for the rising up of a Nation.  No need for 
the men to read it.  Each with his military papers in his pocket knew 
the moment he heard the drum what it meant, and knew equally well 
his place.  I was a foreigner among them, but I forgot that, and if any 
of them remembered they made no sign.  We did not say a word to 
one another.  I silently returned to my garden and sat down.  War 
again! This time war close by--not war about which one can read, as 
one reads it in the newspapers, as you will read it in the States, far 
away from it, but war right here--if the Germans can cross the 
frontier.

It came as a sort of shock, though I might have realized it yesterday 
when several of the men of the commune came to say au revoir, 
with the information that they were joining their regiments, but I felt 
as if some way other than cannon might be found out of the 
situation.  War had not been declared--has not to-day.  Still, things 
rarely go to this length and stop there.  Judging by this morning's 
papers Germany really wants it.  She could have, had she wished, 
held stupid Austria back from the throat of poor Servia, not yet 
recovered from her two Balkan wars.

I imagine this letter will turn into a sort of diary, as it is difficult to say 
when I shall be able to get any mail matter off.  All our 
communications with the outside world--except by road--were cut 
this morning by order of the War Bureau.  Our railroad is the road to 
all the eastern frontiers--the trains to Belgium as well as to Metz and 
Strasbourg pass within sight of my garden.  If you don't know what 
that means--just look on a map and you will realize that the army 
that advances, whether by road or by train, will pass by me.

During the mobilization, which will take weeks,--not only is France 
not ready, all the world knows that her fortified towns are mostly only 
fortified on the map,--civilians, the mails, and such things must 
make way for soldiers and war materials.  I shall continue to write.  It 
will make me feel in touch still; it will be something to do: besides, 
any time some one may go up to town by road and I thus have a 
chance to send it.




VII



August 3, 1914.


Well--war is declared.

I passed a rather restless night.  I fancy every one in France did.  All 
night I heard a murmur of voices, such an unusual thing here.  It 
simply meant that the town was awake and, the night being warm, 
every one was out of doors.

All day to-day aeroplanes have been flying between Paris and the 
frontier.  Everything that flies seems to go right over my roof.  Early 
this morning I saw two machines meet, right over my garden, circle 
about each other as if signaling, and fly off together.  I could not help 
feeling as if one chapter of Wells's "War in the Air" had come to 
pass.  It did make me realize how rapidly the aeroplane had 
developed into a real weapon of war.  I remember so well, no longer 
ago than Exposition year,--that was 1900,--that I was standing, one 
day, in the old Galerie des Machines, with a young engineer from 
Boston.  Over our heads was a huge model of a flying machine.  It 
had never flown, but it was the nearest thing to success that had 
been accomplished--and it expected to fly some time.  So did Darius 
Green, and people were still skeptical.  As he looked up at it, the 
engineer said: "Hang it all, that dashed old thing will fly one day, but 
I shall probably not live to see it."

He was only thirty at that time, and it was such a few years after that 
it did fly, and no time at all, once it rose in the air to stay there, 
before it crossed the Channel.  It is wonderful to think that after 
centuries of effort the thing flew in my time--and that I am sitting 
in my garden to-day, watching it sail overhead, like a bird, looking so 
steady and so sure.  I can see them for miles as they approach and 
for miles after they pass.  Often they disappear from view, not 
because they have passed a horizon line, but simply because they 
have passed out of the range of my vision-? becoming smaller 
and smaller, until they seem no bigger than a tiny bird, so small that 
if I take my eyes off the speck in the sky I cannot find it again.  It is 
awe-compelling to remember how these cars in the air change all 
military tactics.  It will be almost impossible to make any big 
movement that may not be discovered by the opponent.

Just after breakfast my friend from Voulangis drove over in a great 
state of excitement, with the proposition that I should pack up and 
return with her.  She seemed alarmed at the idea of my being alone, 
and seemed to think a group of us was safer.  It was a point of view 
that had not occurred to me, and I was not able to catch it.  Still, I 
was touched at her thoughtfulness, even though I had to say that I 
proposed to stay right here.  When she asked me what I proposed 
to do if the army came retreating across my garden, I instinctively 
laughed.  It seems so impossible this time that the Germans can 
pass the frontier, and get by Verdun and Toul.  All the same, that 
other people were thinking it possible rather brought me up stand-
ing.  I just looked at the little house I had arranged such a little time 
ago--I have only been here two months.

She had come over feeling pretty glum--my dear neighbor from 
Voulangis.  She went away laughing.  At the gate she said, "It looks 
less gloomy to me than it did when I came.  I felt such a brave thing 
driving over here through a country preparing for war.  I expected 
you to put a statue up in your garden 'To a Brave Lady.'"

I stood in the road watching her drive away, and as I turned back to 
the house it suddenly took on a very human sort of look.  There 
passed through my mind a sudden realization, that, according to my 
habit, I had once again stuck my feet in the ground of a new home--
and taken root.  It is a fact.  I have often looked at people who seem 
to keep foot-free.  I never can.  If I get pulled up violently by the 
roots, if I have my earthly possessions pruned away, I always hurry 
as fast as I can, take root in a new place, and proceed to sprout a 
new crop of possessions which fix me there.  I used, when I was 
younger, to envy people who could just pack a bag and move on.  I 
am afraid that I never envied them enough to do as they did.  If I 
had I should have done it.  I find that life is pretty logical.  It is like 
chemical action--given certain elements to begin with, contact with 
the fluids of Life give a certain result.  After all I fancy every one 
does about the best he can with the gifts he has to do with.  So I 
imagine we do what is natural to us; if we have the gift of knowing 
what we want and wanting it hard enough we get it.  If we don't, we 
compromise.

I am closing this up rather hurriedly as one of the boys who joins his 
regiment at Fontainebleau will mail it in Paris as he passes through.  
I suppose you are glad that you got away before this came to pass.




VIII



August 10,1914.


I have your cable asking me to come "home" as you call it.  Alas, my 
home is where my books are--they are here.  Thanks all the same.

It is a week since I wrote you--and what a week.  We have had a 
sort of intermittent communication with the outside world since the 
6th, when, after a week of deprivation, we began to get letters and 
an occasional newspaper, brought over from Meaux by a boy on a 
bicycle.

After we were certain, on the 4th of August, that war was being 
declared all around Germany and Austria, and that England was to 
back France and Russia, a sort of stupor settled on us all.  Day after 
day Amelie would run to the mairie at Quincy to read the telegraphic 
bulletin--half a dozen lines of facts--that was all we knew from day to 
day.  It is all we know now.

Day after day I sat in my garden watching the aeroplanes flying over 
my head, and wishing so hard that I knew what they knew.  Often I 
would see five in the day, and one day ten.  Day after day I watched 
the men of the commune on their way to join their classe.  There 
was hardly an hour of the day that I did not nod over the hedge to 
groups of stern, silent men, accompanied by their women, and 
leading the children by the hand, taking the short cut to the station 
which leads over the hill, right by my gate, to Couilly.  It has been so 
thrilling that I find myself forgetting that it is tragic.  It is so different 
from anything I ever saw before.  Here is a nation--which two weeks 
ago was torn by political dissension--suddenly united, and with a 
spirit that I have never seen before.

I am old enough to remember well the days of our Civil War, when 
regiments of volunteers, with flying flags and bands of music, 
marched through our streets in Boston, on the way to the front.  
Crowds of stay-at-homes, throngs of women and children lined the 
sidewalks, shouting deliriously, and waving handkerchiefs, inspired 
by the marching soldiers, with guns on their shoulders, and the 
strains of martial music, varied with the then popular "The girl I left 
behind me," or, "When this cruel war is over." But this is quite 
different.  There are no marching soldiers, no flying flags, no bands 
of music.  It is the rising up of a Nation as one man--all classes 
shoulder to shoulder, with but one idea--"Lift up your hearts, and 
long live France." I rather pity those who have not seen it.

Since the day when war was declared, and when the Chamber of 
Deputies--all party feeling forgotten--stood on its feet and listened to 
Paul Deschanel's terse, remarkable speech, even here in this little 
commune, whose silence is broken only by the rumbling of the 
trains passing, in view of my garden, on the way to the frontier, and 
the footsteps of the groups on the way to the train, I have seen 
sights that have moved me as nothing I have ever met in life before 
has done.  Day after day I have watched the men and their families 
pass silently, and an hour later have seen the women come back 
leading the children.  One day I went to Couilly to see if it was yet 
possible for me to get to Paris.  I happened to be in the station when 
a train was going out.  Nothing goes over the line yet but men 
joining their regiments.  They were packed in like sardines.  There 
were no uniforms--just a crowd of men--men in blouses, men in 
patched jackets, well-dressed men--no distinction of class; and on 
the platform the women and children they were leaving.  There was 
no laughter, none of the gayety with which one has so often 
reproached this race--but neither were there any tears.  As the 
crowded train began to move, bare heads were thrust out of 
windows, hats were waved, and a great shout of "Vive la France" 
was answered by piping children's voices, and the choked voices of 
women--"Vive l'Armee"; and when the train was out of sight the 
women took the children by the hand, and quietly climbed the hill.

Ever since the 4th of August all our crossroads have been guarded, 
all our railway gates closed, and also guarded--guarded by men 
whose only sign of being soldiers is a cap and a gun, men in 
blouses with a mobilization badge on their left arms, often in 
patched trousers and sabots, with stern faces and determined eyes, 
and one thought--"The country is in danger."

There is a crossroad just above my house, which commands the 
valley on either side, and leads to a little hamlet on the route 
nationale from Couilly to Meaux, arid is called "La Demi-Lune"--
why "Half-Moon" I don't know.  It was there, on the 6th, that I saw, 
for the first time, an armed barricade.  The gate at the railway 
crossing had been opened to let a cart pass, when an automobile 
dashed through Saint-Germain, which is on the other side of the 
track.  The guard raised his bayonet in the air, to command the car 
to stop and show its papers, but it flew by him and dashed up the 
hill.  The poor guard--it was his first experience of that sort--stood 
staring after the car; but the idea that he ought to fire at it did not 
occur to him until it was too late.  By the time it occurred to him, and 
he could telephone to the Demi-Lune, it had passed that guard in 
the same way--and disappeared.  It did not pass Meaux.  It simply 
disappeared.  It is still known as the "Phantom Car." Within half an 
hour there was a barricade at the Demi-Lune mounted by armed 
men--too late, of course.  However, it was not really fruitless,--that 
barricade,--as the very next day they caught three Germans there, 
disguised as Sisters of Charity--papers all in order--and who would 
have got by, after they were detected by a little boy's calling 
attention to their ungloved hands, if it had not been for the number 
of armed old men on the barricade.

What makes things especially serious here, so near the frontier, and 
where the military movements must be made, is the presence of so 
many Germans, and the bitter feeling there is against them.  On the 
night of August 2, just when the troops were beginning to move 
east, an attempt was made to blow up the railroad bridge at lie de 
Villenoy, between here and Meaux.  The three Germans were 
caught with the dynamite on them--so the story goes--and are now 
in the barracks at Meaux.  But the most absolute secrecy is 
preserved about all such things.  Not only is all France under martial 
law: the censorship of the press is absolute.  Every one has to carry 
his papers, and be provided with a passport for which he is liable to 
be asked in simply crossing a road.

Meaux is full of Germans.  The biggest department shop there is a 
German enterprise.  Even Couilly has a German or two, and we had 
one in our little hamlet.  But they've got to get out.  Our case is 
rather pathetic.  He was a nice chap, employed in a big fur house in 
Paris.  He came to France when he was fifteen, has never been 
back, consequently has never done his military service there.  Oddly 
enough, for some reason, he never took out his naturalization 
papers, so never did his service here.  He has no relatives in 
Germany--that is to say, none with whom he has kept up any 
correspondence, he says.  He earns a good salary, and has always 
been one of the most generous men in the commune, but 
circumstances are against him.  Even though he is an intimate 
friend of our mayor, the commune preferred to be rid of him.  He 
begged not to be sent back to Germany, so he went sadly enough 
to a concentration camp, pretty well convinced that his career here 
was over.  Still, the French do forget easily.

Couilly had two Germans.  One of them--the barber--got out quick.  
The other did not.  But he was quietly informed by some of his 
neighbors--with pistols in their hands--that his room was better than 
his company.

The barber occupied a shop in the one principal street in the village, 
which is, by the way, a comparatively rich place.  He had a front 
shop, which was a cafe, with a well-fitted-up bar.  The back, with a 
well-dressed window on the street, full of toilette articles, was the 
barber and hairdressing-room, very neatly arranged, with modern 
set bowls and mirrors, cabinets full of towels, well-filled shelves of all 
the things that make such a place profitable.  You should see it now.  
Its broken windows and doors stand open to the weather.  The 
entire interior has been "efficiently" wrecked.  It is as systematic a 
work of destruction as I have ever seen.  Not a thing was stolen, but 
not an article was spared.  All the bottles full of things to drink and all 
the glasses to drink out of are smashed, so are counters, tables, 
chairs, and shelving.  In the barber shop there is a litter of broken 
porcelain, broken combs, and smashed-up chairs and boxes 
among a wreck of hair dyes, perfumes, brillantine, and torn towels, 
and an odor of aperitifs and cologne over it all.

Every one pretends not to know when it happened.  They say, "It 
was found like that one morning." Every one goes to look at it--no 
one enters, no one touches anything.  They simply say with a smile 
of scorn, "Good--and so well done."

There are so many things that I wish you could see.  They would 
give you such a new point of view regarding this race--traditionally 
so gay, so indifferent to many things that you consider moral, so 
fond of their individual comfort and personal pleasure, and often so 
rebellious to discipline.  You would be surprised--surprised at their 
unity, surprised at their seriousness, and often touched by their 
philosophical acceptance of it all.

Amelie has a stepson and daughter.  The boy--named Marius--like 
his father plays the violin.  Like many humble musicians his music is 
his life and he adds handsomely to his salary as a clerk by playing 
at dances and little concerts, and by giving lessons in the evening.  
Like his father he is very timid.  But he accepted the war without a 
word, though nothing is more foreign to his nature.  It brought it 
home to me--this rising up of a Nation in self-defense.  It is not the 
marching into battle of an army that has chosen soldiering.  It is the 
marching out of all the people--of every temperament--the rich, the 
poor, the timid and the bold, the sensitive and the hardened, the 
ignorant and the scholar--all men, because they happen to be 
males, called on not only to cry, "Vive la France," but to see to it that 
she does live if dying for her can keep her alive.  It is a compelling 
idea, isn't it?

Amelie's stepdaughter is married to a big burly chap by the name of 
Georges Godot.  He is a thick-necked, red-faced man--in the 
dynamite corps on the railroad, the construction department.  He is 
used to hardships.  War is as good as anything else to him.  When 
he came to say "good-bye" he said, "Well, if I have the luck to come 
back--so much the better.  If I don't, that will be all right.  You can put 
a placque down below in the cemetery with 'Godot, Georges: Died 
for the country '; and when my boys grow up they can say to their 
comrades, 'Papa, you know, he died on the battlefield.' It will be a 
sort of distinction I am not likely to earn for them any other way"; and 
off he went.  Rather fine for a man of that class.

Even the women make no cry.  As for the children--even when you 
would think that they were old enough to understand the meaning of 
these partings they make no sign, though they seem to understand 
all the rest of it well enough.  There isn't a boy of eight in our 
commune who cannot tell you how it all came about, and who is not 
just now full of stories of 1870, which he has heard from grandma 
and grandpa, for, as is natural, every one talks of 1870 now.  I have 
lived among these people, loved them and believed in them, even 
when their politics annoyed me, but I confess that they have given 
me a surprise.




IX



August 17, 1914.


I have Belgium on my soul.  Brave little country that has given new 
proof of its courage and nobility, and surprised the world with a ruler 
who is a man, as well as king.  It occurs to me more than ever to-
day in what a wonderful epoch we have lived.  I simply can't talk 
about it.  The suspense is so great.  I heard this morning from an 
officer that the English troops are landing, though he tells me that in 
London they don't yet know that the Expedition has started.  If that is 
true, it is wonderful.  Not a word in the papers yet, but your press is 
not censored as ours is.  I fancy you know these things in New York 
before we do, although we are now getting a newspaper from 
Meaux regularly.  But there is never anything illuminating in it.  The 
attitude of the world to the Belgian question is a shock to me.  I 
confess to have expected more active indignation at such an 
outrage.

Everything is very quiet here.  Our little commune sent two hundred 
men only, but to take two hundred able-bodied men away makes a 
big hole, and upsets life in many ways.  For some days we were 
without bread: bakers gone.  But the women took hold and, though 
the bread is not yet very good, it serves and will as long as flour 
holds out.  No one complains, though we already lack many things.  
No merchandise can come out yet on the railroads, all the 
automobiles and most of the horses are gone, and shops are shy of 
staple things.

Really I don't know which are the more remarkable, the men or the 
women.  You may have read the proclamation of the Minister of 
Agriculture to the women of France, calling on them to go into the 
fields and get in the crops and prepare the ground for the sowing of 
the winter wheat that the men on returning might not find their fields 
neglected nor their crops lost.  You should have seen the old men 
and the women and the youngsters respond.  It is harvest-time, you 
know, just as it was in the invasion of 1870.

In a few weeks it will be time to gather the fruit.  Even now it is time 
to pick the black currants, all of which go to England to make the 
jams and jellies without which no English breakfast table is 
complete.

For days now the women and children have been climbing the hill at 
six in the morning, with big hats on their heads, deep baskets on 
their backs, low stools in their hands.  There is a big field of black-
currant bushes beside my garden to the south.  All day, in the heat, 
they sit under the bushes picking away.  At sundown they carry their 
heavy baskets to the weighing-machine on the roadside at the foot 
of the hill, and stand in line to be weighed in and paid by the English 
buyers for Crosse and Blackwell, Beach, and such houses, who 
have, I suppose, some special means of transportation.

That work is, however, the regular work for the women and children.  
Getting in the grain is not.  Yet if you could see them take hold of it 
you would love them.  The old men do double work.  Amelie's 
husband is over seventy.  His own work in his fields and orchard 
would seem too much for him.  Yet he and Amelie and the donkey 
are in the field by three o'clock every morning, and by nine o'clock 
he is marching down the hill, with his rake and hoe on his shoulder, 
to help his neighbors.

There is many a woman working in the fields to-day who was not 
trained to it.  I have a neighbor, a rich peasant, whose two sons are 
at the front.  Her only daughter married an officer in the Engineer 
Corps.  When her husband joined his regiment she came home to 
her mother with her little boy.  I see her every day, in a short skirt 
and a big hat, leading her boy by the hand, going to the fields to 
help her mother.  If you don't think that is fine, I do.  It is only one of 
many cases right under my eyes.

There are old men here who thought that their days of hard work 
were over, who are in the fields working like boys.  There is our 
blacksmith--old Pere Marie--lame with rheumatism, with his white-
haired wife working in the fields from sunrise to sunset.  He 
cheerfully limps up the hill in his big felt slippers, his wife carrying the 
lunch basket, and a tiny black-and-tan English dog called "Missy," 
who is the family baby, and knows lots of tricks, trotting behind, 
"because," as he says, "she is so much company." The old 
blacksmith is a veteran of 1870, and was for a long time a prisoner 
at Konigsburg.  He likes nothing better than to rest a bit on a big 
stone at my gate and talk of 1870.  Like all Frenchmen of his type 
he is wonderfully intelligent, full of humor, and an omnivorous 
reader.  Almost every day he has a bit of old newspaper in his 
pocket out of which he reads to la dame Americaine as he calls me, 
not being able to pronounce my name.  It is usually something 
illuminating about the Germans, when it is not something prophetic.  
It is wonderful how these old chaps take it all to heart.

All the time my heart is out there in the northeast.  It is not my 
country nor my war--yet I feel as if it were both.  All my French 
friends are there, all my neighbors, and any number of English 
friends will soon be, among them the brother of the sculptor you met 
at my house last winter and liked so much.  He is with the Royal 
Field Artillery.  His case is rather odd.  He came back to England in 
the spring, after six years in the civil service, to join the army.  His 
leave expired just in time for him to reenter the army and see his 
first active service in this war.  Fortunately men seem to take it all as 
a matter of course.  That consoles some, I find.

I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians 
can go up to Paris IF THERE ARE PLACES LEFT after the army is 
accommodated.  There is no guaranty that I can get back the same 
day.  Still, I am going to risk it.  I am afraid to be any longer without 
money, though goodness knows what I can do with it.  Besides, I 
find that all my friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say 
"good-bye"--I don't know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse.  
Anyway, I am going to try it.  I am going armed with every sort of 
paper--provisional passport from our consul, permis de sejour from 
my mayor here, and a local permit to enter and leave Paris, which 
does not allow me to stay inside the fortifications after six o'clock at 
night, unless I get myself identified at the prefecture of the 
arrondissement in which I propose to stay and have my passport 
vised.




X



August 24, 1914.


I seem to be able to get my letters off to you much more regularly 
than I dared to hope.

I went up to Paris on the 19th, and had to stay over one night.  The 
trip up was long and tedious, but interesting.  There were soldiers 
everywhere.  It amused me almost to tears to see the guards all 
along the line.  We hear so much of the wonderful equipment of the 
German army.  Germany has been spending fortunes for years on 
its equipment.  French taxpayers have kicked for years against 
spending public moneys on war preparations.  The guards all along 
the railroad were not a jot better got up than those in our little 
commune.  There they stand all along the track in their patched 
trousers and blouses and sabots, with a band round the left arm, a 
broken soldier cap, and a gun on the shoulder.  Luckily the uniform 
and shaved head do not make the soldier.

Just before we reached Chelles we saw the first signs of actual war 
preparations, as there we ran inside the wire entanglements that 
protect the approach to the outer fortifications at Paris, and at Pantin 
we saw the first concentration of trains--miles and miles of made-up 
trains all carrying the Red Cross on their doors, and line after line of 
trucks with gray ammunition wagons, and cannons.  We were being 
constantly held up to let trainloads of soldiers and horses pass.  In 
the station we saw a long train being made up of men going to 
some point on the line to join their regiments.  It was a crowd of men 
who looked the lower laboring class.  They were in their working 
clothes, many of them almost in rags, each carrying in a bundle, or 
a twine bag, his few belongings, and some of them with a loaf of 
bread under the arm.  It looked as little martial as possible but for 
the stern look in the eyes of even the commonest of them.  I waited 
on the platform to see the train pull out.  There was no one to see 
these men off.  They all seemed to realize.  I hope they did.  I 
remembered the remark of the woman regarding her husband when 
she saw him go: "After all, I am only his wife.  France is his mother"; 
and I hoped these poor men, to whom Fate seemed not to have 
been very kind, had at least that thought in the back of their minds.

I found Paris quiet, and every one calm--that is to say, every one 
but the foreigners, struggling like people in a panic to escape.  In 
spite of the sad news--Brussels occupied Thursday, Namur fallen 
Monday--there is no sign of discouragement, and no sign of defeat.  
If it were not for the excitement around the steamship offices the city 
would be almost as still as death.  But all the foreigners, caught here 
by the unexpectedness of the war, seemed to be fighting to get off 
by the same train and the same day to catch the first ship, and they 
seemed to have little realization that, first of all, France must move 
her troops and war material.  I heard it said--it may not be true--that 
some of the consular officers were to blame for this, and that there 
was a rumor abroad among foreigners that Paris was sure to be 
invested, and that foreigners had been advised to get out, so that 
there should be as few people inside the fortifications as possible.  
This rumor, however, was prevalent only among foreigners.  No 
French people that I saw seemed to have any such feeling.  Apart 
from the excitement which prevailed in the vicinity of the steamship 
offices and banks the city had a deserted look.  The Paris that you 
knew exists no longer.  Compared with it this Paris is a dead city.  
Almost every shop is closed, and must be until the great number of 
men gone to the front can be replaced in some way.  There are 
streets in which every closed front bears, under a paper flag pasted 
on shutter or door, a sign saying, "Closed on account of the 
mobilization"; or, "All the men with the colors."

There are almost no men in the streets.  There are no busses or 
tramways, and cabs and automobiles are rare.  Some branches of 
the underground are running at certain hours, and the irregular 
service must continue until women, and men unfit for military 
service, replace the men so suddenly called to the flag, and that will 
take time, especially as so many of the organizers as well as 
conductors and engineers have gone.  It is the same with the big 
shops.  However, that is not important.  No one is in the humor to 
buy anything except food.

It took me a long time to get about.  I had to walk everywhere and 
my friends live a long way apart, and I am a miserable walker.  I 
found it impossible to get back that night, so I took refuge with one 
of my friends who is sailing on Saturday.  Every one seems to be 
sailing on that day, and most of them don't seem to care much how 
they get away--"ameliorated steerage," as they call it, seems to be 
the fate of many of them.  I can assure you that I was glad enough 
to get back the next day.  Silent as it is here, it is no more so than 
Paris, and not nearly so sad, for the change is not so great.  Paris is 
no longer our Paris, lovely as it still is.

I do not feel in the mood to do much.  I work in my garden 
intermittently, and the harvest bug (bete rouge we call him here) 
gets in his work unintermittently on me.  If things were normal this 
introduction to the bete rouge would have seemed to me a tragedy.  
As it is, it is unpleasantly unimportant.  I clean house intermittently; 
read intermittently; write letters intermittently.  That reminds me, do 
read Leon Daudet's "Fantomes et Vivantes"--the first volumes of 
his memoirs.  He is a terrible example of "Le fils a papa." I don't 
know why it is that a vicious writer, absolutely lacking in reverence, 
can hold one's attention so much better than a kindly one can.  In 
this book Daudet simply smashes idols, tears down illusions, 
dances gleefully on sacred traditions, and I lay awake half the night 
reading him,--and forgot the advancing Germans.  The book comes 
down only to 1880, so most of the men he writes about are dead, 
and most of them, like Victor Hugo, for example, come off very 
sadly.

Well, I am reconciled to living a long time now,--much longer than I 
wanted to before this awful thing came to pass,--just to see all the 
mighty good that will result from the struggle.  I am convinced, no 
matter what happens, of the final result.  I am sure even now, when 
the Germans have actually crossed the frontier, that France will not 
be crushed this time, even if she be beaten down to Bordeaux, with 
her back against the Bay of Biscay.  Besides, did you ever know the 
English bulldog to let go? But it is the horror of such a war in our 
times that bears so heavily on my soul.  After all, "civilization" is a 
word we have invented, and its meaning is hardly more than 
relative, just as is the word "religion."

There are problems in the events that the logical spirit finds it hard 
to face.  In every Protestant church the laws of Moses are printed 
on tablets on either side of the pulpit.  On those laws our civil code is 
founded.  "Thou shalt not kill," says the law.  For thousands of years 
the law has punished the individual who settled his private quarrels 
with his fists or any more effective weapon, and reserved to itself 
the right to exact "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And 
here we are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people 
have long been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning 
of life, trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it 
materialism, endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, 
and governments can still find no better way to settle their disputes 
than wholesale slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called 
civilized man should ever have invented nor any so-called civilized 
government ever permitted to be made.  The theory that the death 
penalty was a preventive of murder has long ago been exploded.  
The theory that by making war horrible, war could be prevented, is 
being exploded to-day.

And yet--I KNOW that if the thought be taken out of life that it is worth 
while to die for an idea a great factor in the making of national spirit 
will be gone.  I KNOW that a long peace makes for weakness in a 
race.  I KNOW that without war there is still death.  To me this last fact 
is the consolation.  It is finer to die voluntarily for an idea deliberately 
faced, than to die of old age in one's bed; and the grief of parting no 
one ever born can escape.  Still it is puzzling to us simple folk--the 
feeling that fundamental things do not change: that the balance of 
good and evil has not changed.  We change our fashions, we 
change our habits, we discover now and then another of the secrets 
Nature has hidden, that delving man may be kept busy and 
interested.  We pride ourselves that science at least has 
progressed, that we are cleaner than our progenitors.  Yet we are 
no cleaner than the Greeks and Romans in the days when Athens 
and Rome ruled the world, nor do we know in what cycle all we 
know to-day was known and lost.  Oh, I can hear you claiming more 
happiness for the masses! I wonder.  There is no actual buying and 
selling in open slave markets, it is true, but the men who built the 
Pyramids and dragged the stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any 
worse off really than the workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, 
I don't know.  Life is only a span between the Unknown and the 
Unknowable.  Living is made up in all centuries of just so many 
emotions.  We have never, so far as I know, invented any new one.  
It is too bad to throw these things at you on paper which can't 
answer back as you would, and right sharply I know.

Nothing going on here except the passing now and then of a long 
line of Paris street busses on the way to the front.  They are all 
mobilized and going as heroically to the front as if they were human, 
and going to get smashed up just the same.  It does give me a 
queer sensation to see them climbing this hill.  The little Montmartre-
Saint-Pierre bus, that climbs up the hill to the funicular in front of 
Sacre-Coeur, came up the hill bravely.  It was built to climb a hill.  
But the Bastille-Madeleine and the Ternes-Fille de Calvaine, and 
Saint-Sulpice-Villette just groaned and panted and had to have their 
traction changed every few steps.  I thought they would never get 
up, but they did.

Another day it was the automobile delivery wagons of the Louvre, 
the Bon Marche, the Printemps, Petit-Saint-Thomas, La Belle 
Jardiniere, Potin--all the automobiles with which you are so familiar 
in the streets of Paris.  Of course those are much lighter, and came 
up bravely.  As a rule they are all loaded.  It is as easy to take men 
to the front, and material, that way as by railroad, since the cars go.  
Only once have I seen any attempt at pleasantry on these 
occasions.  One procession went out the other day with all sorts of 
funny inscriptions, some not at all pretty, many blackguarding the 
Kaiser, and of course one with the inevitable "A Berlin" the first 
battle-cry of 1870.  This time there has been very little of that.  I 
confess it gave me a kind of shiver to see "A Berlin--pour notre 
plaisir" all over the bus.  "On to Berlin!" I don't see that that can be 
hoped for unless the Germans are beaten to a finish on the Rhine 
and the allied armies cross Germany as conquerors, unopposed.  If 
they only could! It would only be what is due to Belgium that King 
Albert should lead the procession "Under the Lindens." But I doubt if 
the maddest war optimist hopes for anything so well deserved as 
that.  I don't dare to, sure as I am of seeing Germany beaten to her 
knees before the war is closed.




XI



September 8, 1914.


Oh, the things I have seen and felt since I last wrote to you over two 
weeks ago.  Here I am again cut off from the world, and have been 
since the first of the month.  For a week now I have known nothing 
of what was going on in the world outside the limits of my own 
vision.  For that matter, since the Germans crossed the frontier our 
news of the war has been meager.  We got the calm, constant 
reiteration--"Left wing--held by the English--forced to retreat a little." 
All the same, the general impression was, that in spite of that, "all 
was well." I suppose it was wise.

On Sunday week,--that was August 30,--Amelie walked to Esbly, 
and came back with the news that they were rushing trains full of 
wounded soldiers and Belgian refugies through toward Paris, and 
that the ambulance there was quite insufficient for the work it had to 
do.  So Monday and Tuesday we drove down in the donkey cart to 
carry bread and fruit, water and cigarettes, and to "lend a hand."

It was a pretty terrible sight.  There were long trains of wounded 
soldiers.  There was train after train crowded with Belgians--well-
dressed women and children (evidently all in their Sunday best)--
packed on to open trucks, sitting on straw, in the burning sun, 
without shelter, covered with dust, hungry and thirsty.  The sight set 
me to doing some hard thinking after I got home that first night.  But 
it was not until Tuesday afternoon that I got my first hint of the truth.  
That afternoon, while I was standing on the platform, I heard a drum
beat in the street, and sent Amelie out to see what was going on.  
She came back at once to say that it was the garde champetre
calling on the inhabitants to carry all their guns, revolvers, etc., to
the mairie before sundown.  That meant the disarming of our
departement, and it flashed through my mind that the Germans
must be nearer than the official announcements had told us.

While I stood reflecting a moment,--it looked serious,--I saw 
approaching from the west side of the track a procession of wagons.  
Amelie ran down the track to the crossing to see what it meant, and 
came back at once to tell me that they were evacuating the towns to 
the north of us.

I handed the basket of fruit I was holding into a coach of the train 
just pulling into the station, and threw my last package of cigarettes 
after it; and, without a word, Amelie and I went out into the street, 
untied the donkey, climbed into the wagon, and started for home.

By the time we got to the road which leads east to Montry, whence 
there is a road over the hill to the south, it was full of the flying 
crowd.  It was a sad sight.  The procession led in both directions as 
far as we could see.  There were huge wagons of grain; there were 
herds of cattle, flocks of sheep; there were wagons full of household 
effects, with often as many as twenty people sitting aloft; there were 
carriages; there were automobiles with the occupants crowded in 
among bundles done up in sheets; there were women pushing 
overloaded handcarts; there were women pushing baby-carriages; 
there were dogs and cats, and goats; there was every sort of a 
vehicle you ever saw, drawn by every sort of beast that can draw, 
from dogs to oxen, from boys to donkeys.  Here and there was a 
man on horseback, riding along the line, trying to keep it moving in 
order and to encourage the weary.  Every one was calm and silent.  
There was no talking, no complaining.

The whole road was, however, blocked, and, even had our donkey 
wished to pass,--which she did not,--we could not.  We simply fell 
into the procession, as soon as we found a place.  Amelie and I did 
not say a word to each other until we reached the road that turns off 
to the Chateau de Conde; but I did speak to a man on horseback, 
who proved to be the intendant of one of the chateaux at 
Daumartin, and with another who was the mayor.  I simply asked 
from where these people had come, and was told that they were 
evacuating Daumartin and all the towns on the plain between there 
and Meaux, which meant that Monthyon, Neufmortier, Penchard, 
Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry,--in fact, all the villages visible from my 
garden were being evacuated by order of the military powers.

One of the most disquieting things about this was to see the effect 
of the procession as it passed along the road.  All the way from 
Esbly to Montry people began to pack at once, and the speed with 
which they fell into the procession was disconcerting.

When we finally escaped from the crowd into the poplar-shaded 
avenue which leads to the Chateau de Conde, I turned to look at 
Amelie for the first time.  I had had time to get a good hold of myself.

"Well, Amelie?" I said.

"Oh, madame," she replied, "I shall stay."

"And so shall I," I answered; but I added, "I think I must make an 
effort to get to Paris to-morrow, and I think you had better come with 
me.  I shall not go, of course, unless I am sure of being able to get 
back.  We may as well face the truth: if this means that Paris is in 
danger, or if it means that we may in our turn be forced to move on, 
I must get some money so as to be ready."

"Very well, madame," she replied as cheerfully as if the rumble of 
the procession behind us were not still in our ears.

The next morning--that was September 2--I woke just before 
daylight.  There was a continual rumble in the air.  At first I thought it 
was the passing of more refugies on the road.  I threw open my 
blinds, and then realized that the noise was in the other direction--
from the route nationale.  I listened.  I said to myself, "If that is not 
artillery, then I never heard any." 

Sure enough, when Amelie came to get breakfast, she announced 
that the English soldiers were at the Demi-Lune.  The infantry was 
camped there, and the artillery had descended to Couilly and was 
mounting the hill on the other side of the Morin--between us and 
Paris.

I said a sort of "Hm," and told her to ask Pere to harness at once.  
As we had no idea of the hours of the trains, or even if there were 
any, it was best to get to Esbly as early as possible.  It was nine 
o'clock when we arrived, to find that there should be a train at half 
past.  The station was full.  I hunted up the chef de gare, and asked 
him if I could be sure of being able to return if I went up to Paris.

He looked at me in perfect amazement.

"You want to come back?" he asked.

"Sure," I replied.

"You can," he answered, "if you take a train about four o'clock.  That 
may be the last."

I very nearly said, "Jiminy-cricket!"

The train ran into the station on time, but you never saw such a 
sight.  It was packed as the Brookline street-cars used to be on the 
days of a baseball game.  Men were absolutely hanging on the roof; 
women were packed on the steps that led up to the imperials to the 
third-class coaches.  It was a perilous-looking sight.  I opened a 
dozen coaches--all packed, standing room as well as seats, which is 
ordinarily against the law.  I was about to give it up when a man said 
to me, "Madame, there are some coaches at the rear that look as if 
they were empty."

I made a dash down the long platform, yanked open a door, and 
was about to ask if I might get in, when I saw that the coach was full 
of wounded soldiers in khaki, lying about on the floor as well as the 
seats.  I was so shocked that if the station master, who had run after 
me, had not caught me I should have fallen backward.

"Sh! madame," he whispered, "I'll find you a place"; and in another 
moment I found myself, with Amelie, in a compartment where there 
were already eight women, a young man, two children, and heaps of 
hand-luggage--bundles in sheets, twine bags just bulging, paper 
parcels, and valises.  Almost as soon as we were in, the train pulled 
slowly out of the station.

I learned from the women that Meaux was being evacuated.  No 
one was remaining but the soldiers in the barracks and the 
archbishop.  They had been ordered out by the army the night 
before, and the railroad was taking them free.  They were escaping 
with what they could carry in bundles, as they could take no 
baggage.  Their calm was remarkable-not a complaint from any 
one.  They were of all classes, but the barriers were down.

The young man had come from farther up the line-a newspaper 
chap, who had given me his seat, and was sitting on a bundle.  I 
asked him if he knew where the Germans were, and he replied that 
on this wing they were at Compiegne, that the center was 
advancing on Coulommier, but he did not know where the Crown 
Prince's division was.

I was glad I had made the effort to get to town, for this began to look 
as if they might succeed in arriving before the circle of steel that 
surrounds Paris, and God knows what good that seventy-five miles 
of fortifications will be against the long-range cannon that battered 
down Liege.  I had only one wish--to get back to my hut on the hill; I 
did not seem to want anything else.

Just before the train ran into Lagny--our first stop--I was surprised to 
see British soldiers washing their horses in the river, so I was not 
surprised to find the station full of men in khaki.  They were sleeping 
on the benches along the wall, and standing about, in groups.  As to 
many of the French on the train this was their first sight of the men 
in khaki, and as there were Scotch there in their kilts, there was a 
good deal of excitement.

The train made a long stop in the effort to put more people into the 
already overcrowded coaches.  I leaned forward, wishing to get 
some news, and the funny thing was that I could not think how to 
speak to those boys in English.  You may think that an affectation.  It 
wasn't.  Finally I desperately sang out:--

"Hulloa, boys."

You should have seen them dash for the window.  I suppose that 
their native tongue sounded good to them so far from home.

"Where did you come from?" I asked.

"From up yonder--a place called La Fere," one of them replied.

"What regiment?" I asked.

"Any one else here speak English?" he questioned, running his 
eyes along the faces thrust out of the windows.  

I told him no one did.

"Well," he said, "we are all that is left of the North Irish Horse and a 
regiment of Scotch Borderers."

"What are you doing here?"

"Retreating--and waiting for orders.  How far are we from Paris?"

I told him about seventeen miles.  He sighed, and remarked that he 
thought they were nearer, and as the train started I had the idea in 
the back of my head that these boys actually expected to retreat 
inside the fortifications.  La! la!

Instead of the half-hour the train usually takes to get up from here to 
Paris, we were two hours.

I found Paris much more normal than when I was there two weeks 
ago, though still quite unlike itself; every one perfectly calm and no 
one with the slightest suspicion that the battle line was so near--
hardly more than ten miles beyond the outer forts.  I transacted my 
business quickly--saw only one person, which was wiser than I knew 
then, and caught the four o'clock train back--we were almost the 
only passengers.

I had told Pere not to come after us--it was so uncertain when we 
could get back, and I had always been able to get a carriage at the 
hotel in Esbly.

We reached Esbly at about six o'clock to find the stream of 
emigrants still passing, although the roads were not so crowded as 
they had been the previous day.  I ran over to the hotel to order the 
carriage--to be told that Esbly was evacuated, the ambulance had 
gone, all the horses had been sold that afternoon to people who 
were flying.  There I was faced with a walk of five miles--lame and 
tired.  Just as I had made up my mind that what had to be done 
could be done,--die or no die,--Amelie came running across the 
street to say:--

"Did you ever see such luck? Here is the old cart horse of Cousine 
Georges and the wagon!"

Cousine Georges had fled, it seems, since we left, and her horse 
had been left at Esbly to fetch the schoolmistress and her husband.  
So we all climbed in.  The schoolmistress and her husband did not 
go far, however.  We discovered before we had got out of Esbly that 
Couilly had been evacuated during the day, and that a great many 
people had left Voisins; that the civil government had gone to 
Coutevroult; that the Croix Rouge had gone.  So the schoolmistress 
and her husband, to whom all this was amazing news, climbed out 
of the wagon, and made a dash back to the station to attempt to get 
back to Paris.  I do hope they succeeded.

Amelie and I dismissed the man who had driven the wagon down, 
and jogged on by ourselves.  I sat on a board in the back of the 
covered cart, only too glad for any sort of locomotion which was not 
"shank's mare."

Just after we left Esbly I saw first an English officer, standing in his 
stirrups and signaling across a field, where I discovered a 
detachment of English artillery going toward the hill.  A little farther 
along the road we met a couple of English officers--pipes in their 
mouths and sticks in their hands--strolling along as quietly and 
smilingly as if there were no such thing as war.  Naturally I wished to 
speak to them.  I was so shut in that I could see only directly in front 
of me, and if you ever rode behind a big cart horse I need not tell 
you that although he walks slowly and heavily he walks steadily, and 
will not stop for any pulling on the reins unless he jolly well chooses> 
As we approached the officers, I leaned forward and said, "Beg your 
pardon," but by the time they realized that they had been addressed 
in English we had passed.  I yanked at the flap at the back of the 
cart, got it open a bit, looked out to find them standing in the middle 
of the road, staring after us in amazement.

The only thing I had the sense to call out was:--

"Where 'd you come from?"

One of them made an emphatic gesture with his stick, over his 
shoulder in the direction from which they had come.

"Where are you going?" I called.

He made the same gesture toward Esbly, and then we all laughed 
heartily, and by that time we were too far apart to continue the 
interesting conversation, and that was all the enlightenment I got out 
of that meeting.  The sight of them and their cannon made me feel a 
bit serious.  I thought to myself: "If the Germans are not expected 
here--well, it looks like it." We finished the journey in silence, and I 
was so tired when I got back to the house that I fell into bed, and 
only drank a glass of milk that Amelie insisted on pouring down my 
throat.




XII



September 8, 1914.


You can get some idea of how exhausted I was on that night of 
Wednesday, September 2, when I tell you that I waked the next 
morning to find that I had a picket at my gate.  I did not know until 
Amelie came to get my coffee ready the next morning--that was 
Thursday, September 3--can it be that it is only five days ago! She 
also brought me news that they were preparing to blow up the 
bridges on the Marne; that the post-office had gone; that the English 
were cutting the telegraph wires.

While I was taking my coffee, quietly, as if it were an everyday 
occurrence, she said: "Well, madame, I imagine that we are going 
to see the Germans.  Pere is breaking an opening into the 
underground passage under the stable, and we are going to put all 
we can out of sight.  Will you please gather up what you wish to 
save, and it can be hidden there?"

I don't know that I ever told you that all the hill is honeycombed with 
those old subterranean passages, like the one we saw at Provins.  
They say that they go as far as Crecy-en-Brie, and used to connect 
the royal palace there with one on this hill.

Naturally I gave a decided refusal to any move of that sort, so far as 
I was concerned.  My books and portraits are the only things I 
should be eternally hurt to survive.  To her argument that the books 
could be put there,--there was room enough,--I refused to listen.  I 
had no idea of putting my books underground to be mildewed.  
Besides, if it had been possible I would not have attempted it--and it 
distinctly was impossible.  I felt a good deal like the Belgian refugies 
I had seen,--all so well dressed; if my house was going up, it was 
going up in its best clothes.  I had just been uprooted once--a horrid 
operation--and I did not propose to do it again so soon.  To that my 
mind was made up.

Luckily for me--for Amelie was as set as I was--the argument was 
cut short by a knock at the front door.  I opened it to find standing 
there a pretty French girl whom I had been seeing every day, as, 
morning and evening, she passed my gate to and from the railway 
station.  Sooner or later I should have told you about her if all this 
excitement had not put it out of my mind and my letters.  I did not 
know her name.  I had never got to asking Amelie who she was, 
though I was a bit surprised to find any one of her type here where I 
had supposed there were only farmers and peasants.

She apologized for presenting herself so informally: said she had 
come, "de la parte de maman," to ask me what I proposed to do.  I 
replied at once, "I am staying."

She looked a little surprised: said her mother wished to do the 
same, but that her only brother was with the colors; that he had 
confided his young wife and two babies to her, and that the 
Germans were so brutal to children that she did not dare risk it.

"Of course, you know," she added, "that every one has left Couilly; 
all the shops are closed, and nearly every one has gone from 
Voisins and Quincy.  The mayor's wife left last night.  Before going 
she came to us and advised us to escape at once, and even found 
us a horse and cart--the trains are not running.  So mother thought 
that, as you were a foreigner, and all alone, we ought not to go 
without at least offering you a place in the wagon--the chance to go 
with us."

I was really touched, and told her so, but explained that I should 
stay.  She was rather insistent--said her mother would be so 
distressed at leaving me alone with only a little group of women and 
children about me, who might, at the last moment, be panic-
stricken.

I explained to her as well as I could that I was alone in the world, 
poor myself, and that I could not see myself leaving all that I 
valued,--my home; to have which I had made a supreme effort, and 
for which I had already a deep affection,--to join the band of 
refugies, shelterless, on the road, or to look for safety in a city, 
which, if the Germans passed here, was likely to be besieged and 
bombarded.  I finally convinced her that my mind was made up.  I 
had decided to keep my face turned toward Fate rather than run 
away from it.  To me it seemed the only way to escape a panic--a 
thing of which I have always had a horror.

Seeing that nothing could make me change my mind, we shook 
hands, wished each other luck, and, as she turned away, she said, 
in her pretty French: "I am sorry it is disaster that brought us 
together, but I hope to know you better when days are happier"; and 
she went down the hill.

When I returned to the dining-room I found that, in spite of my 
orders, Amelie was busy putting my few pieces of silver, and such 
bits of china from the buffet as seemed to her valuable,--her ideas 
and mine on that point do not jibe,--into the waste-paper baskets to 
be hidden underground.

I was too tired to argue.  While I stood watching her there was a 
tremendous explosion.  I rushed into the garden.  The picket, his 
gun on his shoulder, was at the gate.

"What was that?" I called out to him.

"Bridge," he replied.  "The English divisions are destroying the 
bridges on the Marne behind them as they cross.  That means that 
another division is over."

I asked him which bridge it was, but of course he did not know.  
While I was standing there, trying to locate it by the smoke, an 
English officer, who looked of middle age, tall, clean-cut, rode down 
the road on a chestnut horse, as slight, as clean-cut, and well 
groomed as himself.  He rose in his stirrups to look off at the plain 
before he saw me.  Then he looked at me, then up at the flags flying 
over the gate,--saw the Stars and Stripes,--smiled, and dismounted.

"American, I see," he said.

I told him I was.

"Live here?" said he.

I told him that I did.

"Staying on?" he asked.

I answered that it looked like it.

He looked me over a moment before he said, "Please invite me into 
your garden and show me that view."

I was delighted.  I opened the gate, and he strolled in and sauntered 
with a long, slow stride--a long-legged stride--out on to the lawn and 
right down to the hedge, and looked off.

"Beautiful," he said, as he took out his field-glass, and turned up the 
map case which hung at his side.  "What town is that?" he asked, 
pointing to the foreground.

I told him that it was Mareuil-on-the-Marne.

"How far off is it?" he questioned.

I told him that it was about two miles, and Meaux was about the 
same distance beyond it.

"What town is that?" he asked, pointing to the hill.

I explained that the town on the horizon was Penchard--not really a 
town, only a village; and lower down, between Penchard and 
Meaux, were Neufmortier and Chauconin.

All this time he was studying his map.

"Thank you.  I have it," he said.  "It is a lovely country, and this is a 
wonderful view of it, the best I have had."

For a few minutes he stood studying it in silence--alternatively 
looking at his map and then through his glass.  Then he dropped his 
map, put his glasses into the case, and turned to me--and smiled.  
He had a winning smile, sad and yet consoling, which lighted up a 
bronzed face, stern and weary.  It was the sort of smile to which 
everything was permitted.

"Married?" he said.

You can imagine what he was like when I tell you that I answered 
right up, and only thought it was funny hours after--or at least I 
shook my head cheerfully.

"You don't live here alone?" he asked.

"But I do," I replied.

He looked at me bravely a moment, then off at the plain.

"Lived here long?" he questioned.

I told him that I had lived in this house only three months, but that I 
had lived in France for sixteen years.

Without a word he turned back toward the house, and for half a 
minute, for the first time in my life, I had a sensation that it looked 
strange for me to be an exile in a country that was not mine, and 
with no ties.  For a penny I would have told him the history of my life.  
Luckily he did not give me time.  He just strode down to the gate, 
and by the time he had his foot in the stirrup I had recovered.

"Is there anything I can do for you, captain?" I asked.

He mounted his horse, looked down at me.  Then he gave me 
another of his rare smiles.

"No," he said, "at this moment there is nothing that you can do for 
me, thank you; but if you could give my boys a cup of tea, I imagine 
that you would just about save their lives." And nodding to me, he.  
said to the picket, "This lady is kind enough to offer you a cup of 
tea," and he rode off, taking the road down the hill to Voisins.

I ran into the house, put on the kettle, ran up the road to call Amelie, 
and back to the arbor to set the table as well as I could.  The whole 
atmosphere was changed.  I was going to be useful.

I had no idea how many men I was going to feed.  I had only seen 
three.  To this day I don't know how many I did feed.  They came 
and came and came.  It reminded me of hens running toward a 
place where another hen has found something good.  It did not take 
me many minutes to discover that these men needed something 
more substantial than tea.  Luckily I had brought back from Paris an 
emergency stock of things like biscuit, dry cakes, jam, etc., for even 
before our shops were closed there was mighty little in them.  For an 
hour and a half I brewed pot after pot of tea, opened jar after jar of 
jam and jelly, and tin after tin of biscuit and cakes, and although it 
was hardly hearty fodder for men, they put it down with a relish.  I 
have seen hungry men, but never anything as hungry as these 
boys.

I knew little about military discipline--less about the rules of active 
service; so I had no idea that I was letting these hungry men--and 
evidently hunger laughs at laws--break all the regulations of the 
army.  Their guns were lying about in any old place; their kits were 
on the ground; their belts were unbuckled.  Suddenly the captain 
rode up the road and looked over the hedge at the scene.  The men 
were sitting on the benches, on the ground, anywhere, and were all 
smoking my best Egyptian cigarettes, and I was running round as 
happy as a queen, seeing them so contented and comfortable.

It was a rude awakening when the captain rode up the street.

There was a sudden jumping up, a hurried buckling up of belts, a 
grab for kits and guns, and an unceremonious cut for the gate.  I 
heard a volley from the officer.  I marked a serious effort on the part 
of the men to keep the smiles off their faces as they hurriedly got 
their kits on their backs and their guns on their shoulders, and, 
rigidly saluting, dispersed up the hill, leaving two very straight men 
marching before the gate as if they never in their lives had thought 
of anything but picket duty.

The captain never even looked at me, but rode up the hill after his 
men.  A few minutes later he returned, dismounted at the gate, tied 
his horse, and came in.  I was a bit confused.  But he smiled one of 
those smiles of his, and I got right over it.

"Dear little lady," he said, "I wonder if there is any tea left for me?"

Was there! I should think so; and I thought to myself, as I led the 
way into the dining-room, that he was probably just as hungry as his 
men.

While I was making a fresh brew he said to me:--

"You must forgive my giving my men Hades right before you, but 
they deserved it, and know it, and under the circumstances I 
imagine they did not mind taking it.  I did not mean you to give them 
a party, you know.  Why, if the major had ridden up that hill--and he 
might have--and seen that party inside your garden, I should have 
lost my commission and those boys got the guardhouse.  These 
men are on active service."

Then, while he drank his tea, he told me why he felt a certain 
indulgence for them--these boys who were hurried away from 
England without having a chance to take leave of their families, or 
even to warn them that they were going.

"This is the first time that they have had a chance to talk to a woman 
who speaks their tongue since they left England; I can't begrudge it 
to them and they know it.  But discipline is discipline, and if I had let 
such a breach of it pass they would have no respect for me.  They 
understand.  They had no business to put their guns out of their 
hands.  What would they have done if the detachment of Uhlans we 
are watching for had dashed up that hill--as they might have?"

Before I could answer or remark on this startling speech there was a 
tremendous explosion, which brought me to my feet, with the 
inevitable,--

"What's that?"

He took a long pull at his tea before he replied quietly,-

"Another division across the Marne."

Then he went on as if there had been no interruption:--

"This Yorkshire regiment has had hard luck.  Only one other 
regiment in the Expedition has had worse.  They have marched 
from the Belgian frontier, and they have been in four big actions in 
the retreat--Mons, Cambrai, Saint-Quentin, and La Fere.  Saint-
Quentin was pretty rough luck.  We went into the trenches a full 
regiment.  We came out to retreat again with four hundred men--
and I left my younger brother there."

I gasped; I could not find a word to say.  He did not seem to feel it 
necessary that I should.  He simply winked his eyelids, stiffened his 
stern mouth, and went right on; and I forgot all about the Uhlans:--

"At La Fere we lost our commissary on the field.  It was burned, and 
these lads have not had a decent feed since--that was three days 
ago.  We have passed through few towns since, and those were 
evacuated,--drummed out and fruit from the orchards on the 
roadsides is about all they have had--hardly good feed for a 
marching army in such hot weather.  Besides, we were moving 
pretty fast--but in order--to get across the Marne, toward which we 
have been drawing the Germans, and in every one of these battles 
we have been fighting with one man to their ten."

I asked him where the Germans were.

"Can't say," he replied.

"And the French?"

"No idea.  We've not seen them--yet.  We understood that we were 
to be reinforced at Saint-Quentin by a French detachment at four 
o'clock.  They got there at eleven--the battle was over--and lost.  But 
these boys gave a wonderful account of themselves, and in spite of 
the disaster retreated in perfect order."

Then he told me that at the last moment he ordered his company to 
lie close in the trench and let the Germans come right up to them, 
and not to budge until he ordered them to give them what they hate
--the bayonet.  The Germans were within a few yards when a 
German automobile carrying a machine gun bore down on them 
and discovered their position, but the English sharpshooters picked 
off the five men the car carried before they could fire a shot, and 
after that it was every man for himself--what the French call "sauve 
qui peut."

The Uhlans came back to my mind, and it seemed to me a good 
time to ask him what he was doing here.  Oddly enough, in spite of 
the several shocks I had had, and perhaps because of his manner, I 
was able to do it as if it was the sort of tea-table conversation to 
which I had always been accustomed.

"What are you doing here?" I said.

"Waiting for orders," he answered.

"And for Uhlans?"

"Oh," replied he, "if incidentally while we are sitting down here to 
rest, we could rout out a detachment of German cavalry, which our 
aeroplane tells us crossed the Marne ahead of us, we would like to.  
Whether this is one of those flying squads they are so fond of 
sending ahead, just to do a little terrorizing, or whether they escaped 
from the battle of La Fere, we don't know.  I fancy the latter, as they 
do not seem to have done any harm or to have been too anxious to 
be seen."

I need not tell you that my mind was acting like lightning.  I 
remembered, in the pause, as I poured him another cup of tea, and 
pushed the jam pot toward him, that Amelie had heard at Voisins 
last night that there were horses in the woods near the canal; that 
they had been heard neighing in the night; and that we had jumped 
to the conclusion that there were English cavalry there.  I mentioned 
this to the captain, but for some reason it did not seem to make 
much impression on him; so I did not insist, as there was something 
that seemed more important which I had been getting up the 
courage to ask him.  It had been on my lips all day.  I put it.

"Captain," I asked, "do you think there is any danger in my staying 
here?"

He took a long drink before he answered:--

"Little lady, there is danger everywhere between Paris and the 
Channel.  Personally--since you have stayed until getting away will 
be difficult--I do not really believe that there is any reason why you 
should not stick it out.  You may have a disagreeable time.  But I 
honestly believe you are running no real risk of having more than 
that.  At all events, I am going to do what I can to assure your 
personal safety.  As we understand it--no one really knows anything 
except the orders given out--it is not intended that the Germans 
shall cross the Marne here.  But who knows? Anyway, if I move on, 
each division of the Expeditionary Force that retreats to this hill will 
know that you are here.  If it is necessary, later, for you to leave, you 
will be notified and precautions taken for your safety.  You are not 
afraid?"

I could only tell him, "Not yet," but I could not help adding, "Of 
course I am not so stupid as to suppose for a moment that you 
English have retreated here to amuse yourselves, or that you have 
dragged your artillery up the hill behind me just to exercise your 
horses or to give your gunners a pretty promenade."

He threw back his head and laughed aloud for the first time, and I 
felt better.

"Precautions do not always mean a battle, you know"; and as he 
rose to his feet he called my attention to a hole in his coat, saying, 
"It was a miracle that I came through Saint-Quentin with a whole 
skin.  The bullets simply rained about me.  It was pouring--I had on a 
mackintosh--which made me conspicuous as an officer, if my height 
had not exposed me.  Every German regiment carries a number of 
sharpshooters whose business is to pick off the officers.  However, 
it was evidently not my hour."

As we walked out to the gate I asked him if there was anything else I 
could do for him.

"Do you think," he replied, "that you could get me a couple of fresh 
eggs at half-past seven and let me have a cold wash-up?"

"Well, rather," I answered, and he rode away.

As soon as he was gone one of the picket called from the road to 
know if they could have "water and wash."

I told them of course they could--to come right in.

He said that they could not do that, but that if they could have water 
at the gate--and I did not mind--they could wash up in relays in the 
road.  So Pere came and drew buckets and buckets of water, and 
you never saw such a stripping and such a slopping, as they 
washed and shaved--and with such dispatch.  They had just got 
through, luckily, when, at about half-past six, the captain rode 
hurriedly down the hill again.  He carried a slip of white paper in his 
hand, which he seemed intent on deciphering.

As I met him at the gate he said:--

"Sorry I shall miss those eggs--I've orders to move east," and he 
began to round up his men.

I foolishly asked him why.  I felt as if I were losing a friend.

"Orders," he answered.  Then he put the slip of paper into his 
pocket, and leaning down he said:--

"Before I go I am going to ask you to let my corporal pull down your 
flags.  You may think it cowardly.  I think it prudent.  They can be 
seen a long way.  It is silly to wave a red flag at a bull.  Any needless 
display of bravado on your part would be equally foolish."

So the corporal climbed up and pulled down the big flags, and 
together we marched them off to the stable.  When I returned to the 
gate, where the captain was waiting for the rest of the picket to 
arrive, I was surprised to find my French caller of the morning 
standing there, with a pretty blonde girl, whom she introduced as her 
sister-in-law.  She explained that they had started in the morning, 
but that their wagon had been overloaded and broken down and 
they had had to return, and that her mother was "glad of it." It was 
perfectly natural that she should ask me to ask the "English officer if 
it was safe to stay." I repeated the question.  He looked down at 
them, asked if they were friends of mine.  I explained that they were 
neighbors and acquaintances only.

"Well," he said, "I can only repeat what I said to you this morning--I 
think you are safe here.  But for God's sake, don't give it to them as 
coming from me.  I can assure your personal safety, but I cannot 
take the whole village on my conscience." I told him that I would not 
quote him.

All this time he had been searching in a letter-case, and finally 
selected an envelope from which he removed the letter, passing me 
the empty cover.

"I want you," he said, "to write me a letter--that address will always 
reach me.  I shall be anxious to know how you came through, and 
every one of these boys will be interested.  You have given them 
the only happy day they have had since they left home.  As for me--
if I live--I shall some time come back to see you.  Good-bye and 
good luck." And he wheeled his horse and rode up the hill, his boys 
marching behind him; and at the turn of the road they all looked 
back and I waved my hand, and I don't mind telling you that I 
nodded to the French girls at the gate and got into the house as 
quickly as I could--and wiped my eyes.  Then I cleared up the tea-
mess.  It was not until the house was in order again that I put on my 
glasses and read the envelope that the captain had given me:--

Capt.  T.  E.  Simpson,
King's Own Yorkshire L. I. VIth Infantry Brigade,
15th Division, British Expeditionary Force.

And I put it carefully away in my address book until the time should 
come for me to write and tell "how I came through"; the phrase did 
disturb me a little.

I did not eat any supper.  Food seemed to be the last thing I wanted.  
I sat down in the study to read.  It was about eight when I heard the 
gate open.  Looking out I saw a man in khaki, his gun on his 
shoulder, marching up the path.  I went to the door.

"Good-evening, ma'am," he said.  "All right?"

I assured him that I was.

"I am the corporal of the guard," he added.  "The commander's 
compliments, and I was to report to you that your road was picketed 
for the night and that all is well."

I thanked him, and he marched away, and took up his post at the 
gate, and I knew that this was the commander's way of letting me 
know that Captain Simpson had kept his word.  I had just time while 
the corporal stood at the door to see "Bedford" on his cap, so I 
knew that the new regiment was from Bedfordshire.

I sat up awhile longer, trying to fix my mind on my book, trying not to 
look round constantly at my pretty green interior, at all my books, 
looking so ornamental against the walls of my study, at all the 
portraits of the friends of my life of active service above the shelves, 
and the old sixteenth-century Buddha, which Oda Neilson sent me 
on my last birthday, looking so stoically down from his perch to 
remind me how little all these things counted.  I could not help 
remembering at the end that my friends at Voulangis had gone--that 
they were at that very moment on their way to Marseilles, that 
almost every one else I knew on this side of the water was either at 
Havre waiting to sail, or in London, or shut up in Holland or 
Denmark; that except for the friends I had at the front I was alone 
with my beloved France and her Allies.  Through it all there ran a 
thought that made me laugh at last--how all through August I had 
felt so outside of things, only suddenly to find it right at my door.  In 
the back of my mind--pushed back as hard as I could--stood the 
question--what was to become of all this?

Yet, do you know, I went to bed, and what is more I slept well.  I was 
physically tired.  The last thing I saw as I closed up the house was 
the gleam of the moonlight on the muskets of the picket pacing the 
road, and the first thing I heard, as I waked suddenly at about four, 
was the crunching of the gravel as they still marched there.

I got up at once.  It was the morning of Friday, the 4th of September.  
I dressed hurriedly, ran down to put the kettle on, and start the 
coffee, and by five o'clock I had a table spread in the road, outside 
the gate, with hot coffee and milk and bread and jam.  I had my 
lesson, so I called the corporal and explained that his men were to 
come in relays, and when the coffee-pot was empty there was more 
in the house; and I left them to serve themselves, while I finished 
dressing.  I knew that the officers were likely to come over, and one 
idea was fixed in my mind: I must not look demoralized.  So I put on 
a clean white frock, white shoes and stockings, a big black bow in 
my hair, and I felt equal to anything--in spite of the fact that before I 
dressed I heard far off a booming-could it be cannon ?--and more 
than once a nearer explosion,--more bridges down, more English 
across.

It was not much after nine when two English officers strolled down 
the road--Captain Edwards and Major Ellison, of the Bedfordshire 
Light Infantry.  They came into the garden, and the scene with 
Captain Simpson of the day before was practically repeated.  They 
examined the plain, located the towns, looked long at it with their 
glasses; and that being over I put the usual question, "Can I do 
anything for you?" and got the usual answer, "Eggs."

I asked how many officers there were in the mess, and he replied 
"Five"; so I promised to forage, and away they went.

As soon as they were out of sight the picket set up a howl for baths.  
These Bedfordshire boys were not hungry, but they had retreated 
from their last battle leaving their kits in the trenches, and were 
without soap or towels, or combs or razors.  But that was easily 
remedied.  They washed up in relays in the court at Amelie's--it was 
a little more retired.  As Amelie had put all her towels, etc., down 
underground, I ran back and forward between my house and hers 
for all sorts of things, and, as they slopped until the road ran tiny 
rivulets, I had to change shoes and stockings twice.  I was not 
conscious till afterward how funny it all was.  I must have been a 
good deal like an excited duck, and Amelie like a hen with a 
duckling.  When she was not twitching my sash straight, she was 
running about after me with dry shoes and stockings, and a chair, 
for fear "madame was getting too tired"; and when she was not 
doing that she was clapping my big garden hat on my head, for fear 
"madame would get a sunstroke." The joke was that I did not know 
it was hot.  I did not even know it was funny until afterward, when 
the whole scene seemed to have been by a sort of dual process 
photographed unconsciously on my memory.

When the boys were all washed and shaved and combed,--and 
they were so larky over it,--we were like old friends.  I did not know 
one of them by name, but I did know who was married, and who 
had children; and how one man's first child had been born since he 
left England, and no news from home because they had seen their 
mail wagon burn on the battlefield; and how one of them was only 
twenty, and had been six years in the army,--lied when he enlisted; 
how none of them had ever seen war before; how they had always 
wanted to, and "Now," said the twenty-years older, "I've seen it--
good Lord--and all I want is to get home," and he drew out of his 
breast pocket a photograph of a young girl in all her best clothes, 
sitting up very straight.

When I said, "Best girl?" he said proudly, "Only one, and we were to 
have been married in January if this hadn't happened.  Perhaps we 
may yet, if we get home at Christmas, as they tell us we may."

I wondered who he meant by "they." The officers did not give any 
such impression.

While I was gathering up towels and things before returning to the 
house, this youngster advanced toward me, and said with a half-shy 
smile, "I take it you're a lady."

I said I was glad he had noticed it--I did make such an effort.

"No, no," he said, "I'm not joking.  I may not say it very well, but I am 
quite serious.  We all want to say to you that if it is war that makes 
you and the women you live amongst so different from English 
women, then all we can say is that the sooner England is invaded 
and knows what it means to have a fighting army on her soil, and 
see her fields devastated and her homes destroyed, the better it will 
be for the race.  You take my word for it, they have no notion of what 
war is like; and there ain't no English woman of your class could 
have, or would have, done for us what you have done this morning.  
Why, in England the common soldier is the dirt under the feet of 
women like you."

I had to laugh, as I told him to wait and see how they treated them 
when war was there; that they probably had not done the thing 
simply because they never had had the chance.

"Well," he answered, "they'll have to change mightily.  Why, our own 
women would have been uncomfortable and ashamed to see a lot 
of dirty men stripping and washing down like we have done.  You 
haven't looked as if you minded it a bit, or thought of anything but 
getting us cleaned up as quick and comfortable as possible."

I started to say that I felt terribly flattered that I had played the role 
so well, but I knew he would not understand.  Besides, I was 
wondering if it were true.  I never knew the English except as 
individuals, never as a race.  So I only laughed, picked up my 
towels, and went home to rest.

Not long before noon a bicycle scout came over with a message 
from Captain Edwards, and I sent by him a basket of eggs, a cold 
chicken, and a bottle of wine as a contribution to the breakfast at the 
officers' mess; and by the time I had eaten my breakfast, the picket 
had been changed, and I saw no more of those boys.

During the afternoon the booming off at the east became more 
distinct.  It surely was cannon.  I went out to the gate where the 
corporal of the guard was standing, and asked him, "Do I hear 
cannon?" "Sure," he replied.  "Do you know where it is?" I asked.  
He said he hadn't an idea--about twenty-five or thirty miles away.  
And on he marched, up and down the road, perfectly indifferent to it.

When Amelie came to help get tea at the gate, she said that a man 
from Voisins, who had started with the crowd that left here 
Wednesday, had returned.  He had brought back the news that the 
sight on the road was simply horrible.  The refugies had got so 
blocked in their hurry that they could move in neither direction; cattle 
and horses were so tired that they fell by the way; it would take a 
general to disentangle them.  My! wasn't I glad that I had not been 
tempted to get into that mess!

Just after the boys had finished their tea, Captain Edwards came 
down the road, swinging my empty basket on his arm, to say 
"Thanks" for his breakfast.  He looked at the table at the gate.

"So the men have been having tea--lucky men--and bottled water! 
What extravagance!"

"Come in and have some, too," I said.

"Love to," he answered, and in he came.

While I was making the tea he walked about the house, looked at 
the pictures, examined the books.  Just as the table was ready there 
was a tremendous explosion.  He went to the door, looked off, and 
remarked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, "Another 
division across.  That should be the last."

"Are all the bridges down?" I asked.

"All, I think, except the big railroad bridge behind you--Chalifert.  
That will not go until the last minute."

I wanted to ask, "When will it be the 'last minute'--and what does the 
'last minute' mean?"--but where was the good? So we went into the 
dining-room.  As he threw his hat on to a chair and sat down with a 
sigh, he said, "You see before you a very humiliated man.  About 
half an hour ago eight of the Uhlans we are looking for rode right 
into the street below you, in Voisins.  We saw them, but they got 
away.  It is absolutely our own stupidity."

"Well," I explained to him, "I fancy I can tell you where they are 
hiding.  I told Captain Simpson so last night." And I explained to him 
that horses had been heard in the woods at the foot of the hill since 
Tuesday; that there was a cart road, rough and winding, running in 
toward Conde for over two miles; that it was absolutely screened by 
trees, had plenty of water, and not a house in it,--a shelter for a 
regiment of cavalry.  And I had the impertinence to suggest that if 
the picket had been extended to the road below it would have been 
impossible for the Germans to have got into Voisins.

"Not enough of us," he replied.  "We are guarding a wide territory, 
and cannot put our pickets out of sight of one another." Then he 
explained that, as far as he knew from his aeroplane men, the 
detachment had broken up since it was first discovered on this side 
of the Marne.  It was reported that there were only about twenty-four 
in this vicinity; that they were believed to be without ammunition; and 
then he dropped the subject, and I did not bother him with questions 
that were bristling in my mind.

He told me how sad it was to see the ruin of the beautiful country 
through which they had passed, and what a mistake it had been 
from his point of view not to have foreseen the methods of Germans 
and drummed out all the towns through which the armies had 
passed.  He told me one or two touching and interesting stories.  
One was of the day before a battle, I think it was Saint-Quentin.  The 
officers had been invited to dine at a pretty chateau near which they 
had bivouacked.  The French family could not do too much for 
them, and the daughters of the house waited on the table.  Almost 
before the meal was finished the alerte sounded, and the battle was 
on them.  When they retreated by the house where they had been 
so prettily entertained such a few hours before, there was not one 
stone standing on another, and what became of the family he had 
no idea.

The other that I remember was of the way the Germans passed the 
river at Saint-Quentin and forced the battle at La Fere on them.  The 
bridge was mined, and the captain was standing beside the 
engineer waiting to give the order to touch off the mine.  It was a 
nasty night--a Sunday (only last Sunday, think of that!)--and the rain 
was coming down in torrents.  Just before the Germans reached the 
bridge he ordered it blown up.  The engineer touched the button.  
The fuse did not act.  He was in despair, but the captain said to him, 
"Brace up, my lad--give her another chance." The second effort 
failed like the first.  Then, before any one could stop him, the en-
gineer made a dash for the end of the bridge, drawing his revolver 
as he ran, and fired six shots into the mine, knowing that, if he 
succeeded, he would go up with the bridge.  No good, and he was 
literally dragged off the spot weeping with rage at his failure--and the 
Germans came across.

All the time we had been talking I had heard the cannonade in the 
distance--now at the north and now in the east.  This seemed a 
proper moment, inspired by the fact that he was talking war, of his 
own initiative, to put a question or two, so I risked it.

"That cannonading seems much nearer than it did this morning," I 
ventured.  

"Possibly," he replied.

"What does that mean?" I persisted.

"Sorry I can't tell you.  We men know absolutely nothing.  Only three 
men in this war know anything of its plans,--Kitchener, Joffre, and 
French.  The rest of us obey orders, and know only what we see.  
Not even a brigade commander is any wiser.  Once in a while the 
colonel makes a remark, but he is never illuminating."

"How much risk am I running by remaining here?"

He looked at me a moment before he asked, "You want to know the 
truth?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Well, this is the situation as near as I can work it out.  We infer from 
the work we were given to do--destroying bridges, railroads, 
telegraphic communications--that an effort is to be made here to 
stop the march on Paris; in fact, that the Germans are not to be 
allowed to cross the Marne at Meaux, and march on the city by the 
main road from Rheims to the capital.  The communications are all 
cut.  That does not mean that it will be impossible for them to pass; 
they've got clever engineers.  It means that we have impeded them 
and may stop them.  I don't know.  Just now your risk is nothing.  It 
will be nothing unless we are ordered to hold this hill, which is the 
line of march from Meaux to Paris.  We have had no such order yet.  
But if the Germans succeed in taking Meaux and attempt to put their 
bridges across the Marne, our artillery, behind you there on the top 
of the hill, must open fire on them over your head.  In that case the 
Germans will surely reply by bombarding this hill." And he drank his 
tea without looking to see how I took it.

I remember that I was standing opposite him, and I involuntarily 
leaned against the wall behind me, but suddenly thought, "Be 
careful.  You'll break the glass in the picture of Whistler's Mother, 
and you'll be sorry." It brought me up standing, and he didn't notice.  
Isn't the mind a queer thing?

He finished his tea, and rose to go.  As he picked up his cap he 
showed me a hole right through his sleeve--in one side, out the 
other-and a similar one in his puttee, where the ball had been 
turned aside by the leather lacing of his boot.  He laughed as he 
said, "Odd how near a chap comes to going out, and yet lives to 
drink tea with you.  Well, good-bye and good luck if I don't see you 
again."

And off he marched, and I went into the library and sat down and sat 
very still.

It was not more than half an hour after Captain Edwards left that the 
corporal came in to ask me if I had a window in the roof.  I told him 
that there was, and he asked if he might go up.  I led the way, 
picking up my glasses as I went.  He explained, as we climbed the 
two flights of stairs, that the aeroplane had reported a part of the 
Germans they were hunting "not a thousand feet from this house." I 
opened the skylight.  He scanned in every direction.  I knew he 
would not see anything, and he did not.  But he seemed to like the 
view, could command the roads that his posse was guarding, so he 
sat on the window ledge and talked.  The common soldier is far 
fonder of talking than his officer and apparently he knows more.  If 
he doesn't, he thinks he does.  So he explained to me the situation 
as the "men saw it." I remembered what Captain Edwards had told 
me, but I listened all the same.  He told me that the Germans were 
advancing in two columns about ten miles apart, flanked in the west 
by a French division pushing them east, and led by the English 
drawing them toward the Marne.  "You know," he said, "that we are 
the sacrificed corps, and we have known it from the first--went into 
the campaign knowing it.  We have been fighting a force ten times 
superior in numbers, and retreating, doing rear-guard action, 
whether we were really outfought or not--to draw the Germans 
where Joffre wants them.  I reckon we've got them there.  It is great 
strategy-Kitchener's, you know."

Whether any of the corporal's ideas had any relation to facts I shall 
never know until history tells me, but I can assure you that, as I 
followed the corporal downstairs, I looked about my house--and, 
well, I don't deny it, it seemed to me a doomed thing, and I was 
sorry for it.  However, as I let him out into the road again, I pounded 
into myself lots of things like "It hasn't happened yet"; "Sufficient 
unto the day"; and, "What isn't to be, won't be"; and found I was 
quite calm.  Luckily I did not have much time to myself, for I had 
hardly sat down quietly when there was another tap at the door and 
I opened to find an officer of the bicycle corps standing there.

"Captain Edwards's compliments," he said, "and will you be so kind 
as to explain to me exactly where you think the Uhlans are hidden?"

I told him that if he would come down the road a little way with me I 
would show him.

"Wait a moment," he said, holding the door.  "You are not afraid?"

I told him that I was not.

"My orders are not to expose you uselessly.  Wait there a minute."

He stepped back into the garden, gave a quick look overhead,--I 
don't know what for, unless for a Taube.  Then he said, "Now, you 
will please come out into the road and keep close to the bank at the 
left, in the shadow.  I shall walk at the extreme right.  As soon as I 
get where I can see the roads ahead, at the foot of the hill, I shall 
ask you to stop, and please stop at once.  I don't want you to be 
seen from the road below, in case any one is there.  Do you 
understand ?"

I said I did.  So we went into the road and walked silently down the 
hill.  Just before we got to the turn, he motioned me to stop and 
stood with his map in hand while I explained that he was to cross 
the road that led into Voisins, take the cart track down the hill past 
the washhouse on his left, and turn into the wood road on that side.  
At each indication he said, "I have it." When I had explained, he 
simply said, "Rough road?"

I said it was, very, and wet in the dryest weather.

"Wooded all the way?" he asked.

I told him that it was, and, what was more, so winding that you could 
not see ten feet ahead anywhere between here and Conde.

"Humph," he said.  "Perfectly clear, thank you very much.  Please 
wait right there a moment."

He looked up the hill behind him, and made a gesture in the air with 
his hand above his head.  I turned to look up the hill also.  I saw the 
corporal at the gate repeat the gesture; then a big bicycle corps, 
four abreast, guns on their backs, slid round the corner and came 
gliding down the hill.  There was not a sound, not the rattle of a 
chain or a pedal.

"Thank you very much," said the captain.  "Be so kind as to keep 
close to the bank."

When I reached my gate I found some of the men of the guard 
dragging a big, long log down the road, and I watched them while 
they attached it to a tree at my gate, and swung it across to the 
opposite side of the road, making in that way a barrier about five 
feet high.  I asked what that was for? "Captain's orders," was the 
laconic reply.  But when it was done the corporal took the trouble to 
explain that it was a barricade to prevent the Germans from making 
a dash up the hill.

"However," he added, "don't you get nervous.  If we chase them out 
it will only be a little rifle practice, and I doubt if they even have any 
ammunition."

As I turned to go into the house, he called after me,--

"See here, I notice that you've got doors on all sides of your house.  
Better lock all those but this front one."

As all the windows were barred and so could be left open, I didn't 
mind; so I went in and locked up.  The thing was getting to be funny 
to me,--always doing something, and nothing happening.  I suppose 
courage is a cumulative thing, if only one has time to accumulate, 
and these boys in khaki treated even the cannonading as if it were 
all "in the day's work."

It was just dusk when the bicycle corps returned up the hill.  They 
had to dismount and wheel their machines under the barricade, and 
they did it so prettily, dismounting and remounting with a precision 
that was neat.

"Nothing," reported the captain.  "We could not go in far,--road too 
rough and too dangerous.  It is a cavalry job."

All the same, I am sure the Uhlans are there.




XIII



September 8, 1914.


I had gone to bed early on Friday night, and had passed an uneasy 
night.  It was before four when I got up and opened my shutters.  It 
was a lovely day.  Perhaps I have told you that the weather all last 
week was simply perfect.

I went downstairs to get coffee for the picket, but when I got out to 
the gate there was no picket there.  There was the barricade, but 
the road was empty.  I ran up the road to Amelie's.  She told me that 
they had marched away about an hour before.  A bicyclist had 
evidently brought an order.  As no one spoke English, no one 
understood what had really happened.  Pere had been to Couilly--
they had all left there.  So far as any one could discover there was 
not an English soldier, or any kind of a soldier, left anywhere in the 
commune.

This was Saturday morning, September 5, and one of the loveliest 
days I ever saw.  The air was clear.  The sun was shining.

The birds were singing.  But otherwise it was very still.  I walked out 
on the lawn.  Little lines of white smoke were rising from a few 
chimneys at Joncheroy and Voisins.  The towns on the plain, from 
Monthyon and Penchard on the horizon to Mareuil in the valley, 
stood out clear and distinct.  But after three days of activity, three 
days with the soldiers about, it seemed, for the first time since I 
came here, lonely; and for the first time I realized that I was actually 
cut off from the outside world.  All the bridges in front of me were 
gone, and the big bridge behind me.  No communication possibly 
with the north, and none with the south except by road over the hill 
to Lagny.  Esbly evacuated, Couilly evacuated, Quincy evacuated.  
All the shops closed.  No government, no post-office, and absolutely 
no knowledge of what had happened since Wednesday.  I had a 
horrible sense of isolation.

Luckily for me, part of the morning was killed by what might be 
called an incident or a disaster or a farce--just as you look at it.  First 
of all, right after breakfast I had the proof that I was right about the 
Germans.  Evidently well informed of the movements of the English, 
they rode boldly into the open.  Luckily they seemed disinclined to 
do any mischief.  Perhaps the place looked too humble to be 
bothered with.  They simply asked--one of them spoke French, and 
perhaps they all did--where they were, and were told, "Huiry, 
commune of Quincy." They looked it up on their maps, nodded, and 
asked if the bridges on the Marne had been destroyed, to which I 
replied that I did not know,--I had not been down to the river.  Half a 
truth and half a lie, but goodness knows that it was hard enough to 
have to be polite.  They thanked me civilly enough and rode down 
the hill, as they could not pass the barricade unless they had wished 
to give an exhibition of "high school." Wherever they had been they 
had not suffered.  Their horses were fine animals, and both horses 
and men were well groomed and in prime condition.

The other event was distressing, but about that I held my tongue.

Just after the Germans were here, I went down the road to call on 
my new French friends at the foot of the hill, to hear how they had 
passed the night, and incidentally to discover if there were any 
soldiers about.  Just in the front of their house I found an English 
bicycle scout, leaning on his wheel and trying to make himself 
understood in a one-sided monosyllabic dialogue, with the two girls 
standing in their window.

I asked him who he was.  He showed his papers.  They were all 
right--an Irishman--Ulster--Royal Innisfall Fusiliers--thirteen years in 
the service.

I asked him if there were any English soldiers left here.  He said 
there was still a bicycle corps of scouts at the foot of the hill, at 
Couilly.  I thought that funny, as Pere had said the town was 
absolutely deserted.  Still, I saw no reason to doubt his word, so 
when he asked me if I could give him his breakfast, I brought him 
back to the house, set the table in the arbor, and gave him his 
coffee and eggs.  When he had finished, he showed no inclination 
to go--said he would rest a bit.  As Amelie was in the house, I left 
him and went back to make the call my encounter with him had 
interrupted.  When I returned an hour later, I found him fast asleep 
on the bench in the arbor, with the sun shining right on his head.  
His wheel, with his kit and gun on it was leaning up against the 
house.  It was nearly noon by this time, and hot, and I was afraid he 
would get a sunstroke; so I waked him and told him that if it was a 
rest he needed,--and he was free to take it,--he could go into the 
room at the head of the stairs, where he would find a couch and lie 
down comfortably.  He had sleepily obeyed, and must have just 
about got to sleep again, when it occurred to me that it was hardly 
prudent to leave an English bicycle with a khaki-covered kit and a 
gun on it right on the terrace in plain sight of the road up which the 
Germans had ridden so short a time before.  So I went to the foot of 
the stairs, called him, and explained that I did not care to touch the 
wheel on account of the gun, so he had better come down and put it 
away, which he did.  I don't know whether it was my saying 
"Germans" to him that explained it, but his sleepiness seemed 
suddenly to have disappeared, so he asked for the chance to wash 
and shave; and half an hour later he came down all slicked up and 
spruce, with a very visible intention of paying court to the lady of the 
house.  Irish, you see,--white hairs no obstacle.  I could not help 
laughing.  "Hoity-toity," I said to myself, "I am getting all kinds of 
impressions of the military."

While I was, with amusement, putting up fences, the gardener next 
door came down the hill in great excitement to tell me that the 
Germans were on the road above, and were riding down across 
Pere's farm into a piece of land called "la terre blanche," where Pere 
had recently been digging out great rocks, making it an ideal place 
to hide.  He knew that there was an English scout in my house and 
thought I ought to know.  I suppose he expected the boy in khaki to 
grab his gun and capture them all.  I thanked him and sent him 
away.  I must say my Irishman did not seem a bit interested in the 
Germans.  His belt and pistol lay on the salon table, where he put 
them when he came downstairs.  He made himself comfortable in 
an easy chair, and continued to give me another dose of his 
blarney.  I suppose I was getting needlessly nervous.  It was really 
none of my business what he was doing here.  Still he was a bit too 
sans gene.

Finally he began to ask questions.  "Was I afraid?" I was not.  "Did I 
live alone?" I did.  As soon as I had said it, I thought it was stupid of 
me, especially as he at once said,--"If you are, yer know, I'll 
come back here to sleep to-night.  I'm perfectly free to come and go 
as I like,--don't have to report until I 'm ready."

I thought it wise to remind him right here that if his corps was at the 
foot of the hill, it was wise for him to let his commanding officer know 
that the Germans, for whom two regiments had been hunting for 
three days, had come out of hiding.  I fancy if I had not taken that 
tack he'd have settled for the day.

"Put that thing on," I said, pointing to his pistol; "get your wheel out 
of the barn, and I'll take a look up the road and see that it's clear.  I 
don't care to see you attacked under my eyes."

I knew that there was not the slightest danger of that, but it sounded 
businesslike.  I am afraid he found it so, because he said at once, 
"Could you give me a drink before I go?"

"Water?" I said.

"No, not that."

I was going to say "no" when it occurred to me that Amelie had told 
me that she had put a bottle of cider in the buffet, and--well, he was 
Irish, and I wanted to get rid of him.  So I said he could have a glass 
of cider, and I got the bottle, and a small, deep champagne glass.  
He uncorked the bottle, filled a brimming glass, recorked the bottle, 
drank it off, and thanked me more earnestly than cider would have 
seemed to warrant.  While he got his wheel out I went through the 
form of making sure the road was free.  There was no one in sight.  
So I sent him away with directions for reaching Couilly without going 
over the part of the hill where the Uhlans had hidden, and drew a 
sigh of relief when he was off.  Hardly fifteen minutes later some one 
came running up from Voisins to tell me that just round the corner 
he had slipped off his wheel, almost unconscious,--evidently drunk.  
I was amazed.  He had been absolutely all right when he left me.  
As no one understood a word he tried to say, there was nothing to 
do but go and rescue him.  But by the time I got to where he had 
fallen off his wheel, he was gone,--some one had taken him away,--
and it was not until later that I knew the truth of the matter, but that 
must keep until I get to the way of the discovery.

All this excitement kept me from listening too much to the cannon, 
which had been booming ever since nine o'clock.  Amelie had been 
busy running between her house and mine, but she has, among 
other big qualities, the blessed habit of taking no notice.  I wish it 
were contagious.  She went about her work as if nothing were 
hanging over us.  I walked about the house doing little things 
aimlessly.  I don't believe Amelie shirked a thing.  It seemed to me 
absurd to care whether the dusting were done or not, whether or not 
the writing-table was in order, or the pictures straight on the wall.

As near as I can remember, it was a little after one o'clock when the 
cannonading suddenly became much heavier, and I stepped out 
into the orchard, from which there is a wide view of the plain.  I gave 
one look; then I heard myself say, "Amelie,"--as if she could help,--
and I retreated.  Amelie rushed by me.  I heard her say, "Mon Dieu." 
I waited, but she did not come back.  After a bit I pulled myself 
together, went out again, and followed down to the hedge where 
she was standing, looking off to the plain.

The battle had advanced right over the crest of the hill.  The sun 
was shining brilliantly on silent Mareuil and Chauconin, but 
Monthyon and Penchard were enveloped in smoke.  From the 
eastern and western extremities of the plain we could see the 
artillery fire, but owing to the smoke hanging over the crest of the hill 
on the horizon, it was impossible to get an idea of the positions of 
the armies.  In the west it seemed to be somewhere near Claye, 
and in the east it was in the direction of Barcy.  I tried to remember 
what the English soldiers had said,--that the Germans were, if 
possible, to be pushed east, in which case the artillery at the west 
must be either the French of English.  The hard thing to bear was, 
that it was all conjecture.

So often, when I first took this place on the hill, I had looked off at 
the plain and thought, "What a battlefield!" forgetting how often the 
Seine et Marne had been that from the days when the kings lived at 
Chelles down to the days when it saw the worst of the invasion of 
1870.  But when I thought that, I had visions very different from what 
I was seeing.  I had imagined long lines of marching soldiers, 
detachments of flying cavalry, like the war pictures at Versailles and 
Fontainebleau.  Now I was actually seeing a battle, and it was 
nothing like that.  There was only noise, belching smoke, and long 
drifts of white clouds concealing the hill.

By the middle of the afternoon Monthyon came slowly out of the 
smoke.  That seemed to mean that the heaviest firing was over the 
hill and not on it,--or did it mean that the battle was receding? If it 
did, then the Allies were retreating.  There was no way to discover 
the truth.  And all this time the cannon thundered in the southeast, in 
the direction of Coulommiers, on the route into Paris by Ivry.

Naturally I could not but remember that we were only seeing the 
action on the extreme west of a battle-line which probably extended 
hundreds of miles.  I had been told that Joffre had made a frontier of 
the Marne.  But alas, the Meuse had been made a frontier-but the 
Germans had crossed it, and advanced to here in little less than a 
fortnight.  If that--why not here? It was not encouraging.

A dozen times during the afternoon I went into the study and tried to 
read.  Little groups of old men, women, and children were in the 
road, mounted on the barricade which the English had left.  I could 
hear the murmur of their voices.  In vain I tried to stay indoors.  The 
thing was stronger than I, and in spite of myself, I would go out on 
the lawn and, field-glass in hand, watch the smoke.  To my 
imagination every shot meant awful slaughter, and between me and 
the terrible thing stretched a beautiful country, as calm in the 
sunshine as if horrors were not.  In the field below me the wheat 
was being cut.  I remembered vividly afterward that a white horse 
was drawing the reaper, and women and children were stacking and 
gleaning.  Now and then the horse would stop, and a woman, with 
her red handkerchief on her head, would stand, shading her eyes a 
moment, and look off.  Then the white horse would turn and go 
plodding on.  The grain had to be got in if the Germans were 
coming, and these fields were to be trampled as they were in 1870.  
Talk about the duality of the mind--it is sextuple.  I would not dare tell 
you all that went through mine that long afternoon.

It was just about six o'clock when the first bomb that we could really 
see came over the hill.  The sun was setting.  For two hours we saw 
them rise, descend, explode.  Then a little smoke would rise from 
one hamlet, then from another; then a tiny flame--hardly more than 
a spark--would be visible; and by dark the whole plain was on fire, 
lighting up Mareuil in the foreground, silent and untouched.  There 
were long lines of grain-stacks and mills stretching along the plain.  
One by one they took fire, until, by ten o'clock, they stood like a 
procession of huge torches across my beloved panorama.

It was midnight when I looked off for the last time.  The wind had 
changed.  The fires were still burning.  The smoke was drifting 
toward us--and oh! the odor of it! I hope you will never know what it 
is like.

I was just going to close up when Amelie came to the door to see if I 
was all right.  My mind was in a sort of riot.  It was the suspense--the 
not knowing the result, or what the next day might bring.  You know, 
I am sure, that physical fear is not one of my characteristics.  Fear 
of Life, dread of Fate, I often have, but not the other.  Yet somehow, 
when I saw Amelie standing there, I felt that I needed the sense of 
something living near me.  So I said, "Amelie, do you want to do me 
a great service?"

She said she 'd like to try.

"Well, then," I replied, "don't you want to sleep here to-night?"

With her pretty smile, she pulled her nightdress from under her arm: 
that was what she had come for.  So I made her go to bed in the big 
bed in the guest-chamber, and leave the door wide open; and do 
you know, she was fast asleep in five minutes, and she snored, and 
I smiled to hear her, and thought it the most comforting sound I had 
ever heard.

As for me, I did not sleep a moment.  I could not forget the poor 
fellows lying dead out there in the starlight--and it was such a 
beautiful night.




XIV



September 8, 1914.


It was about my usual time, four o'clock, the next morning,--Sunday, 
September 6,--that I opened my blinds.  Another lovely day.  I was dressed and 
downstairs when, a little before five, the battle recommenced.

I rushed out on the lawn and looked off.  It had moved east--behind 
the hill between me and Meaux.  All I could see was the smoke 
which hung over it.  Still it seemed nearer than it had the day before.  
I had just about room enough in my mind for one idea--"The 
Germans wish to cross the Marne at Meaux, on the direct route into 
Paris.  They are getting there.  In that case to-day will settle our fate.  
If they reach the Marne, that battery at Coutevroult will come into 
action,"--that was what Captain Edwards had said,--"and I shall be 
in a direct line between the two armies."

Amelie got breakfast as if there were no cannon, so I took my 
coffee, and said nothing.  As soon as it was cleared away, I went up 
into the attic, and quietly packed a tiny square hat-trunk.  I was 
thankful that this year's clothes take up so little room.  I put in 
changes of underwear, stockings, slippers, an extra pair of low-
heeled shoes, plenty of handkerchiefs,--just the essentials in the 
way of toilette stuff,--a few bandages and such emergency things, 
and had room for two dresses.  When it was packed and locked, it 
was so light that I could easily carry it by its handle on top.  I put my 
long black military cape, which I could carry over my shoulder, on it, 
with hat and veil and gloves.  Then I went down stairs and 
shortened the skirt of my best walking-suit, an/d hung it and its 
jacket handy.  I was ready to fly,--if I had to,--and in case of that 
emergency nothing to do for myself.

I had got ail this done systematically when my little French friend--I 
call her Mile.  Henriette now--came to the door to say that she 
simply "could not stand another day of it." She had put, she said, all 
the ready money they had inside her corset, and a little box which 
contained all her dead father's decorations also, and she was ready 
to go.  She took out the box and showed the pretty jeweled things,--
his cross of the Legion d'Honneur, his Papal decoration, and 
several foreign orders,--her father, it seems, was an officer in the 
army, a great friend of the Orleans family, and grandson of an 
officer of Louis XVI's Imperial Guard.  She begged me to join them 
in an effort to escape to the south.  I told her frankly that it seemed 
to me impossible, and I felt it safer to wait until the English officers at 
Coutevroult notified us that it was necessary.  It would be as easy 
then as now--and I was sure that it was safer to wait for their advice 
than to adventure it for ourselves.  Besides, I had no intention of 
leaving my home and all the souvenirs of my life without making 
every effort I could to save them up to the last moment.  In addition 
to that, I could not see myself joining that throng of homeless 
refugies on the road, if I could help it.

"But," she insisted, "you cannot save your house by staying.  We 
are in the same position.  Our house is full of all the souvenirs of my 
father's family.  It is hard to leave all that--but I am afraid--terribly 
afraid for the children."

I could not help asking her how she proposed to get away.  So far 
as I knew there was not a carriage to be had.

She replied that we could start on foot in the direction of Melun, and 
perhaps find an automobile: we could share the expense.  Together 
we could find a way, and what was more, that I could share my 
optimism and courage with them and that would help.

That made me laugh, but I didn't think it necessary to explain to her 
that, once away from the shelter of my own walls, I should be just as 
liable to a panic as any one else, or that I knew we should not find a 
conveyance, or, worse still, that her money and her jewels would 
hardly be safe inside her corset if she were to meet with some of the 
Uhlans who were still about us.

Amelie had not allowed me to carry a sou on me, nor even my 
handbag since we knew they were here.  Such things as that have 
been hidden-all ready to be snatched up--ever since I came home 
from Paris last Wednesday--only four days ago, after all!

Poor Mile.  Henriette went away sadly when she was convinced that 
my mind was made up.

"Good-bye," she called over the hedge.  "I seem to be always taking 
leave of you." 

I did not tell Amelie anything about this conversation.  What was the 
good? I fancy it would have made no difference to her.  I knew 
pretty well to what her mind was made up.  Nothing in the world 
would have made Pere budge.  He had tried it in 1870, and had 
been led to the German post with a revolver at his head.  He did not 
have any idea of repeating the experience.  It was less than half an 
hour later that Mile.  Henriette came up the hill again.  She was 
between tears and laughter.

"Mother will not go," she said.  "She says if you can stay we must.  
She thinks staying is the least of two evils.  We can hide the babies 
in the cave if necessary, and they may be as safe there as on the 
road."

I could not help saying that I should be sorry if my decision 
influenced theirs.  I could be responsible for myself.  I could not bear 
to have to feel any responsibility for others in case I was wrong.  But 
she assured me that her mother had been of my opinion from the 
first.  "Only," she added, "if I could have coaxed you to go, she 
would have gone too."

This decision did not add much to my peace of mind all that long 
Sunday.  It seems impossible that it was only day before yesterday.  
I think the suspense was harder to bear than that of the day before, 
though all we could see of the battle were the dense clouds of 
smoke rising straight into the air behind the green hill under such a 
blue sky all aglow with sunshine, with the incessant booming of the 
cannon, which made the contrasts simply monstrous.

I remember that it was about four in the afternoon when I was sitting 
in the arbor under the crimson rambler, which was a glory of bloom, 
that Pere came and stood near by on the lawn, looking off.  With his 
hands in the pockets of his blue apron, he stood silent for a long 
time.  Then he said, "Listen to that.  They are determined to pass.  
This is different from 1870.  In 1870 the Germans marched through 
here with their guns on their shoulders.  There was no one to 
oppose them.  This time it is different.  It was harvest-time that year, 
and they took everything, and destroyed what they did not take.  
They bedded their horses in the wheat."

You see Pere's father was in the Franco-Prussian War, and his 
grandfather was with Napoleon at Moscow, where he had his feet 
frozen.  Pere is over seventy, and his father died at ninety-six.  Poor 
old Pere just hates the war.  He is as timid as a bird--can't kill a 
rabbit for his dinner.  But with the queer spirit of the French farmer 
he has kept right on working as if nothing were going on.  All day 
Saturday and all day Sunday he was busy digging stone to mend 
the road.

The cannonading ceased a little after six--thirteen hours without 
intermission.  I don't mind confessing to you that I hope the war is 
not going to give me many more days like that one.  I'd rather the 
battle would come right along and be done with it.  The suspense of 
waiting all day for that battery at Coutevroult to open fire was simply 
nasty.

I went to bed as ignorant of how the battle had turned as I was the 
night before.  Oddly enough, to my surprise, I slept, and slept well.




XV



September 8, 1914.


I did not wake on the morning of Monday, September 7,--
yesterday,--until I was waked by the cannon at five.  I jumped out of 
bed and rushed to the window.  This time there could be no doubt of 
it: the battle was receding.  The cannonading was as violent, as 
incessant, as it had been the day before, but it was surely farther 
off--to the northeast of Meaux.  It was another beautiful day.  I never 
saw such weather.

Amelie was on the lawn when I came down.  "They are surely 
retreating," she called as soon as I appeared.

"They surely are," I replied.  "It looks as if they were somewhere 
near Lizy-sur-I'Ourcq," and that was a guess of which I was proud a 
little later.  I carry a map around these days as if I were an army 
officer.

As Amelie had not been for the milk the night before, she started off 
quite gayly for it.  She has to go to the other side of Voisins.  It takes 
her about half an hour to go and return; so--just for the sake of 
doing something--I thought I would run down the hill and see how 
Mile.  Henriette and the little family had got through the night.

Amelie had taken the road across the fields.  It is rough walking, but 
she doesn't mind.  I had stopped to tie a fresh ribbon about my cap,--
a tri-color,--and was about five minutes behind her.  I was about 
halfway down the hill when I saw Amelie coming back, running, 
stumbling, waving her milk-can and shouting, "Madame--un 
anglais, un anglais." And sure enough, coming on behind her, his 
face wreathed in smiles, was an English bicycle scout, wheeling his 
machine.  As soon as he saw me, he waved his cap, and Amelie 
breathlessly explained that she had said, "Dame americaine" and 
he had dismounted and followed her at once.

We went together to meet him.  As soon as he was near enough, 
he called out, "Good-morning.  Everything is all right.  Germans 
been as near you as they will ever get.  Close shave."

"Where are they?" I asked as we met.

"Retreating to the northeast--on the Ourcq."

I could have kissed him.  Amelie did.  She simply threw both arms 
round his neck and smacked him on both cheeks, and he said, 
"Thank you, ma'am," quite prettily; and, like the nice clean English 
boy he was, he blushed.

"You can be perfectly calm," he said.  "Look behind you."

I looked, and there along the top of my hill I saw a long line of 
bicyclists in khaki.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, a little alarmed.  For a moment 
I thought that if the English had returned, something was going to 
happen right here.

"English scouts," he replied.  "Colonel Snow's division, clearing the 
way for the advance.  You've a whole corps of fresh French troops 
coming out from Paris on one side of you, and the English troops 
are on their way to Meaux."

"But the bridges are down," I said.

"The pontoons are across.  Everything is ready for the advance.  I 
think we've got 'em." And he laughed as if it were all a game of 
cricket.

By this time we were in the road.  I sent Amelie on for the milk.  He 
wheeled his machine up the hill beside me.  He asked me if there 
was anything they could do for me before they moved on.  I told him 
there was nothing unless he could drive out the Uhlans who were 
hidden near us.

He looked a little surprised, asked a few questions--how long they 
had been there? where they were? how many? and if I had seen 
them? and I explained.

"Well," he said, "I'll speak to the colonel about it.  Don't you worry.  If 
he has time he may get over to see you, but we are moving pretty 
fast."

By this time we were at the gate.  He stood leaning on his wheel a 
moment, looking over the hedge.

"Live here with your daughter?" he asked.

I told him that I lived here alone with myself.

"Wasn't that your daughter I met?"

I didn't quite fall through the gate backwards.  I am accustomed to 
saying that I am old.  I am not yet accustomed to have people 
notice it when I do not call their attention to it.  Amelie is only ten 
years younger than I am, but she has got the figure and bearing of a 
girl.  The lad recovered himself at once, and said, "Why, of course 
not,--she doesn't speak any English." I was glad that he didn't even 
apologize, for I expect that I look fully a hundred and something.  So 
with a reiterated "Don't worry--you are all safe here now," he 
mounted his wheel and rode up the hills.

I watched him making good time across to the route to Meaux.  
Then I came into the house and lay down.  I suddenly felt horribly 
weak.  My house had taken on a queer look to me.  I suppose I had 
been, in a sort of subconscious way, sure that it was doomed.  As I 
lay on the couch in the salon and looked round the room, it 
suddenly appeared to me like a thing I had loved and lost and 
recovered--resurrected, in fact; a living thing to which a miracle had 
happened.  I even found myself asking, in my innermost soul, what I 
had done to deserve this fortune.  How had it happened, and why, 
that I had come to perch on this hillside, just to see a battle, and 
have it come almost to my door, to turn back and leave me and my 
belongings standing here untouched, as safe as if there were no 
war,--and so few miles away destruction extending to the frontier.

The sensation was uncanny.  Out there in the northeast still boomed 
the cannon.  The smoke of the battle still rose straight in the still air.  
I had seen the war.  I had watched its destructive bombs.  For three 
days its cannon had pounded on every nerve in my body; but none 
of the horror it had sowed from the eastern frontier of Belgium to 
within four miles of me, had reached me except in the form of a 
threat.  Yet out there on the plain, almost within my sight, lay the 
men who had paid with their lives--each dear to some one--to hold 
back the battle from Paris--and incidentally from me.  The relief had 
its bitterness, I can tell you.  I had been prepared to play the whole 
game.  I had not even had the chance to discover whether or not I 
could.  You, who know me fairly well, will see the irony of it.  I am 
eternally hanging round dans les coulisses, I am never in the play.  I 
instinctively thought of Captain Simpson, who had left his brother in 
the trenches at Saint-Quentin, and still had in him the kindly 
sympathy that had helped me so much.

When Amelie returned, she said that every one was out at the 
Demi-Lune to watch the troups going to Meaux, and that the boys in 
the neighborhood were already swimming the Marne to climb the hill 
to the battlefield of Saturday.  I had no curiosity to see one scene or 
the other.  I knew what the French boys were like, with their stern 
faces, as well as I knew the English manner of going forward to the 
day's work, and the hilarious, macabre spirit of the French untried 
lads crossing the river to look on horrors as if it were a lark.

I passed a strangely quiet morning.  But the excitement was not all 
over.  It was just after lunch that Amelie came running down the 
road to say that we were to have a cantonnement de regiment on 
our hill for the night and perhaps longer--French reinforcements 
marching out from the south of Paris; that they were already coming 
over the crest of the hill to the south and could be seen from the 
road above; that the advance scouts were already here.  Before she 
had done explaining, an officer and a bicyclist were at the gate.  I 
suppose they came here because it was the only house on the road 
that was open.  I had to encounter the expressions of astonishment 
to which I am now quite accustomed--a foreigner in a little hole on 
the road to the frontier, in a partially evacuated country.  I answered 
all the usual questions politely; but when he began to ask how many 
men I could lodge, and how much room there was for horses in the 
outbuildings, Amelie sharply interfered, assuring him that she knew 
the resources of the hamlet better than I did, that she was used to 
"this sort of thing" and "madame was not"; and simply whisked him 
off.

I can assure you that, as I watched the work of billeting a regiment 
in evacuated houses, I was mighty glad that I was here, standing, a 
willing hostess, at my door, but giving to my little house a personality 
no unoccupied house can ever have to a passing army.  They 
made quick work, and no ceremony, in opening locked doors and 
taking possession.  It did not take the officer who had charge of the 
billeting half an hour, notebook in hand, to find quarters for his 
horses as well as his men.  Before the head of the regiment 
appeared over the hill names were chalked up on all the doors, and 
the number of horses on every door to barn and courtyard, and the 
fields selected and the number of men to be camped all over the 
hill.  Finally the officer returned to me.  I knew by his manner that 
Amelie, who accompanied him, had been giving him a "talking to."

"If you please, madame," he said, "I will see now what you can do 
for us"; and I invited him in.

I don't suppose I need to tell you that you would get very little idea of 
the inside of my house from the outside.  I am quite used now to the 
little change of front in most people when they cross the threshold.  
The officer nearly went on tiptoes when he got inside.  He mounted 
the polished stairs gingerly, gave one look at the bedroom part-way 
up, touched his cap, and said: "That will do for the chef-major.  We 
will not trouble you with any one else.  He has his own orderly, and 
will eat outside, and will be no bother.  Thank you very much, 
madame"; and he sort of slid down the stairs, tiptoed out, and wrote 
in chalk on the gatepost, "Weitzel."

By this time the advance guard was in the road and I could not 
resist going out to talk to them.  They had marched out from the 
south of Paris since the day before,--thirty-six miles,--without an idea 
that the battle was going on the Marne until they crossed the hill at 
Montry and came in sight of its smoke.  I tell you their faces were 
wreathed with smiles when they discovered that we knew the 
Germans were retreating.

Such talks as I listened to that afternoon--only yesterday--at my 
gate, from such a fluent, amusing, clever French chap,--a bicyclist in 
the ambulance corps,--of the crossing the Meuse and the taking, 
losing, re-taking, and re-losing of Charleroi.  Oddly enough these 
were the first real battle tales I had heard.

It suddenly occurred to me, as we chatted and laughed, that all the 
time the English were here they had never once talked battles.  Not 
one of the Tommies had mentioned the fighting.  We had talked of 
"home," of the girls they had left behind them, of the French children 
whom the English loved, of the country, its customs, its people, their 
courage and kindness, but not one had told me a battle story of any 
kind, and I had not once thought of opening the subject.  But this 
French lad of the ambulance corps, with his Latin eloquence and his 
national gift of humor and graphic description, with a smile in his 
eyes, and a laugh on his lips, told me stories that made me see how 
war affects men, and how often the horrible passes across the line 
into the grotesque.  I shall never forget him as he stood at the gate, 
leaning on his wheel, describing how the Germans crossed the 
Meuse--a feat which cost them so dearly that only their superior 
number made a victory out of a disaster.

"I suppose," he said, "that in the history of the war it will stand as a 
success--at any rate, they came across, which was what they 
wanted.  We could only have stopped them, if at all, by an awful 
sacrifice of life.  Joffre is not doing that.  If the Germans want to fling 
away their men by the tens of thousands--let them.  In the end we 
gain by it.  We can rebuild a country; we cannot so easily re-create a 
race.  We mowed them down like a field of wheat, by the tens of 
thousands, and tens of thousands sprang into the gaps.  They 
advanced shoulder to shoulder.  Our guns could not miss them, but 
they were too many for us.  If you had seen that crossing I imagine it 
would have looked to you like a disaster for Germany.  It was so 
awful that it became comic.  I remember one point where a bridge 
was mined.  We let the first divisions of artillery and cavalry come 
right across on to our guns--they were literally destroyed.  As the 
next division came on to the bridge--up it went--men, horses, guns 
dammed the flood, and the cavalry literally crossed on their own 
dead.  We are bold enough, but we are not so foolhardy as to throw 
away men like that.  They will be more useful to Joffre later."

It was the word "comic" that did for me.  There was no sign in the 
fresh young face before me that the horror had left a mark.  If the 
thought came to him that every one of those tens of thousands 
whose bodies dammed and reddened the flood was dear to some 
one weeping in Germany, his eyes gave no sign of it.  Perhaps it 
was as well for the time being.  Who knows?

I felt the same revolt against the effect of war when he told me of 
the taking and losing of Charleroi and set it down as the most 
"grotesque" sight he had ever seen.  "Grotesque" simply made me 
shudder, when he went on to say that even there, in the narrow 
streets, the Germans pushed on in "close order," and that the 
French mitrailleuses, which swept the street that he saw, made such 
havoc in their ranks that the air was so full of flying heads and arms 
and legs, of boots, and helmets, swords, and guns that it did not 
seem as if it could be real--"it looked like some burlesque"; and that 
even one of the gunners turned ill and said to his commander, who 
stood beside him: "For the love of God, colonel, shall I go on?" and 
the colonel, with folded arms, replied: "Fire away."

Perhaps it is lucky, since war is, that men can be like that.  When 
they cannot, what then? But it was too terrible for me, and I 
changed the subject by asking him if it were true that the Germans 
deliberately fired on the Red Cross.  He instantly became grave and 
prudent.

"Oh, well," he said, "I would not like to go on oath.  We have had our 
field ambulance destroyed.  But you know the Germans are often 
bad marksmen.  They've got an awful lot of ammunition.  They fire it 
all over the place.  They are bound to hit something.  If we screen 
our hospital behind a building and a shell comes over and blows us 
up, how can we swear the shell was aimed at us?"

Just here the regiment came over the hill, and I retreated inside the 
gate where I had pails of water ready for them to drink.  They were a 
sorry-looking lot.  It was a hot day.  They were covered with dirt, and 
you know the ill-fitting uniform of the French common soldier would 
disfigure into trampdom the best-looking man in the world.

The barricade was still across the road.  With their packs on their 
backs, their tin dippers in their hands for the drink they so needed, 
perspiring in their heavy coats, they crawled, line after line, under 
the barrier until an officer rode down and called sharply:--

"Halt!"

The line came to a standstill.

"What's that thing?" asked the officer sternly.

I replied that obviously it was a barricade.

"Who put it there?" he asked peremptorily, as if I were to blame.

I told him that the English did.

"When?"

I felt as if I were being rather severely cross-examined, but I 
answered as civilly as I could, "The night before the battle."

He looked at me for the first time--and softened his tone a bit--my 
white hair and beastly accent, I suppose--as he asked:

"What is it for?"

I told him it was to prevent a detachment of Uhlans from coming up 
the hill.  He hesitated a moment; then asked if it served any purpose 
now.  I might have told him that the Uhlans were still here, but I 
didn't, I simply said that I did not know that it did.  "Cut it down!" he 
ordered, and in a moment it was cut on one end and swung round 
against the bank and the regiment marched on.

It was just after that that I discovered the explanation of what had 
happened to my Irish scout on Saturday.  An exhausted soldier was 
in need of a stimulant, and one of his comrades, who was 
supporting him, asked me if I had anything.  I had nothing but the 
bottle out of which the Irish scout had drunk.  I rushed for it, poured 
some into the tin cup held out to me, and just as the poor fellow was 
about to drink, his comrade pulled the cup away, smelt it, and 
exclaimed, "Don't drink that--here, put some water in it.  That's not 
cider.  It's eau de vie des prunes."

I can tell you I was startled.  I had never tasted eau de vie des 
prunes,--a native brew, stronger than brandy, and far more 
dangerous,--and my Irishman had pulled off a full champagne glass 
at a gulp, and never winked.  No wonder he fell off his wheel.  The 
wonder is that he did not die on the spot.  I was humiliated.  Still, he 
was Irish and perhaps he didn't care.  I hope he didn't.  But only 
think, he will never know that I did not do it on purpose.  He was 
probably gloriously drunk.  Anyway, it prevented his coming back to 
make that visit he threatened me with.

The detachment of the regiment which staggered past my gate 
camped in the fields below me and in the courtyards at Voisins, and 
the rest of them made themselves comfortable in the fields at the 
other side of the hill and the outbuildings on Amelie's place, and the 
officers and the ambulance corps began to seek their quarters.

I was sitting in the library when my guest, Chef-Major Weitzel, rode 
up to the gate.  I had a good chance to look him over, as he 
marched up the path.  He was a dapper, upright, little chap.  He was 
covered with dust from his head to his heels.  I could have written 
his name on him anywhere.  Then I went to the door to meet him.  I 
suppose he had been told that he was to be lodged in the house of 
an American.  He stopped abruptly, halfway up the path, as I 
appeared, clicked his heels together, and made me his best bow, as 
he said:--

"I am told, madame, that you are so gracious as to offer me a bed."

I might have replied literally, "Offer? I had no choice," but I did not.  I 
said politely that if Monsieur le Chef-Major would take the trouble to 
enter, I should do myself the distinguished honor of conducting him 
to his chamber, having no servant for the moment to perform for 
him that service, and he bowed at me again, and marched in--no 
other word for it--and came up the stairs behind me.

As I opened the door of my guest-room, and stood aside to let him 
pass, I found that he had paused halfway up and was giving my 
raftered green salon and the library beyond a curious glance.  Being 
caught, he looked up at once and said: "So you are not afraid?" I 
supposed he was inspired by the fact that there were no signs of 
any preparations to evacuate.

I replied that I could not exactly say that, but that I had not been 
sufficiently afraid to run away and leave my house to be looted 
unless I had to.

"Well," he said, with a pleasant laugh, "that is about as good an 
account of himself as many a brave soldier can give the night 
before his first battle "; and he passed me with a bow and I closed 
the door.

Half an hour later he came downstairs, all shaved and slicked up--in 
a white sweater, white tennis shoes, with a silk handkerchief about 
his neck, and a fatigue cap set rakishly on the side of his head, as if 
there were no such thing as hot weather or war, while his orderly 
went up and brought his equipment down to the terrace, and began 
such a beating, brushing, and cleaning of boots as you never saw.

At the library door he stopped, looked in, and said, "This is nice"; 
and before I could get together decent French enough to say that I 
was honored--or my house was--at his approval, he asked if he 
might be so indiscreet as to take the liberty of inviting some of his 
fellow officers to come into the garden and see the view.  Naturally I 
replied that Monsieur le Chef-Major was at home and his comrades 
would be welcome to treat the garden as if it were theirs, and he 
made me another of his bows and marched away, to return in five 
minutes, accompanied by half a dozen officers and a priest.  As 
they passed the window, where I still sat, they all bowed at me 
solemnly, and Chef-Major Weitzel stopped to ask if madame would 
be so good as to join them, and explain the country, which was new 
to them all.

Naturally madame did not wish to.  I had not been out there since 
Saturday night--was it less than forty-eight hours before? But 
equally naturally I was ashamed to refuse.  It would, I know, seem 
super-sentimental to them.  So I reluctantly followed them out.  They 
stood in a group about me--these men who had been in battles, 
come out safely, and were again advancing to the firing line as 
smilingly as one would go into a ballroom--while I pointed out the 
towns and answered their questions, and no one was calmer or 
more keenly interested than the Breton priest, in his long soutane 
with the red cross on his arm.  All the time the cannon was booming 
in the northeast, but they paid no more attention to it than if it were a 
threshing-machine.

There was a young lieutenant in the group who finally noticed a sort 
of reluctance on my part-which I evidently had not been able to 
conceal--to looking off at the plain, which I own I had been surprised 
to find as lovely as ever.  He taxed me with it, and I confessed, upon 
which he said:--

"That will pass.  The day will come--Nature is so made, luckily--when 
you will look off there with pride, not pain, and be glad that you saw 
what may prove the turning of the tide in the noblest war ever fought 
for civilization."

I wonder.

The chef-major turned to me--caught me looking in the other 
direction--to the west where deserted Esbly climbed the hill.

"May I be very indiscreet?" he asked.

I told him that he knew best.

"Well," he said, "I want to know how it happens that you--a 
foreigner, and a woman--happen to be living in what looks like exile
--all alone on the top of a hill--in war-time?"

I looked at him a moment--and--well, conditions like these make 
people friendly with one another at once.  I was, you know, never 
very reticent, and in days like these even the ordinary reticences of 
ordinary times are swept away.  So I answered frankly, as if these 
men were old friends, and not the acquaintances of an hour, that, as 
I was, as they could see, no longer young, very tired, and yet not 
weary with life, but more interested than my strength allowed.  I had 
sought a pleasant retreat for my old age,--not too far from the City of 
my Love,--and that I had chosen this hilltop for the sake of the 
panorama spread out before me; that I had loved it every day more 
than the day before; and that exactly three months after I had sat 
down on this hilltop this awful war had marched to within sight of my 
gate, and banged its cannon and flung its deadly bombs right under 
my eyes.

Do you know, every mother's son of them threw back his head--and 
laughed aloud.  I was startled.  I knew that I had shown 
unnecessary feeling--but I knew it too late.  I made a dash for the 
house, but the lieutenant blocked the way.  I could not make a 
scene.  I never felt so like it in my life.

"Come back, come back," he said.  "We all apologize.  It was a 
shame to laugh.  But you are so vicious and so personal about it.  
After all, you know, the gods were kind to you--it did turn back--
those waves of battle.  You had better luck than Canute."

"Besides," said the chef-major, "you can always say that you had 
front row stage box."

There was nothing to do to save my face but to laugh with them.  
And they were still laughing when they tramped across the road to 
dinner.  I returned to the house rather mortified at having been led 
into such an unnecessary display of feeling, but I suppose I had 
been in need of some sort of an outlet.

After dinner they came back to the lawn to lie about smoking their 
cigarettes.  I was sitting in the arbor.  The battle had become a duel 
of heavy artillery, which they all found "magnificent," these men who 
had been in such things.

Suddenly the chef-major leaped to his feet.

"Listen--listen--an aeroplane."

We all looked up.  There it was, quite low, right over our heads.

"A Taube!" he exclaimed, and before he had got the words out of 
his mouth, Crick-crack-crack snapped the musketry from the field 
behind us--the soldiers had seen it.  The machine began to rise.  I 
stood like a rock,--my feet glued to the ground,--while the regiment 
fired over my head.  But it was sheer will power that kept me steady 
among these men who were treating it as if it were a Fourteenth of 
July show.  I heard a ping.

"Touched," said the officer as the Taube continued to rise.  Another 
ping.

Still it rose, and we watched it sail off toward the hills at the 
southeast.

"Hit, but not hurt," sighed the officer, dropping down on the grass 
again, with a sigh.  "It is hard to bring them down at that height with 
rifles, but it can be done."

"Perhaps the English battery will get it," said I; "it is going right 
toward it."

"If there is an English battery up there," replied he, "that is probably 
what he is looking for.  It is hardly likely to unmask for a Taube.  I am 
sorry we missed it.  You have seen something of the war.  It is a pity 
you should not have seen it come down.  It is a beautiful sight."

I thought to myself that I preferred it should not come down in my 
garden.  But I had no relish for being laughed at again, so I did not 
say it.

Soon after they all went to bed,--very early,--and silence fell on the 
hilltop.  I took a look round before I went to bed.  I had not seen 
Amelie since the regiment arrived.  But she, who had done 
everything to spare me inconvenience, had fourteen officers 
quartered in her place, and goodness knows how many horses, so 
she had little time to do for me.

The hillside was a picture I shall never forget.  Everywhere men 
were sleeping in the open--their guns beside them.  Fires, over 
which they had cooked, were smouldering; pickets everywhere.  
The moon shed a pale light and made long shadows.  It was really 
very beautiful if one could have forgotten that to-morrow many of 
these men would be sleeping for good--"Life's fitful dream" over.




XVI



September 8, 1914.


This morning everything and everybody was astir early.  It was 
another gloriously beautiful day.  The birds were singing as if to split 
their throats.  There was a smell of coffee all over the place.  Men 
were hurrying up and down the hill, to and fro from the wash-house, 
bathing, washing out their shirts and stockings and hanging them on 
the bushes, rubbing down horses and douching them, cleaning 
saddles and accouterments.  There is a lot of work to be done by an 
army besides fighting.  It was all like a play, and every one was so 
cheerful.

The chef-major did not come down until his orderly called him, and 
when he did he looked as rosy and cheerful as a child, and 
announced that he had slept like one.  Soon after he crossed the 
road for his coffee I heard the officers laughing and chatting as if it 
were a week-end house party.

When Amelie came to get my breakfast she looked a wreck--I saw 
one of her famous bilious attacks coming.  

It was a little after eleven, while the chef-major was upstairs writing, 
that his orderly came with a paper and carried it up to him.  He 
came down at once, made me one of his pretty bows at the door of 
the library, and holding out a scrap of paper said:--

"Well, madame, we are going to leave you.  We advance at two."

I asked him where he was going.

He glanced at the paper in his hand, and replied:--

"Our orders are to advance to Saint-Fiacre,--a little east of Meaux,--
but before I go I am happy to relieve your mind on two points.  The 
French cavalry has driven the Uhlans out--some of them were 
captured as far east as Bouleurs.  And the English artillery has 
come down from the hill behind you and is crossing the Marne.  We 
follow them.  So you see you can sit here in your pretty library and 
read all these nice books in security, until the day comes--perhaps 
sooner than you dare hope--when you can look back to all these 
days, and perhaps be a little proud to have had a small part in it." 
And off he went upstairs.

I sat perfectly still for a long time.  Was it possible that it was only a 
week ago that I had heard the drum beat for the disarming of the 
Seine et Marne? Was there really going to come a day when all the 
beauty around me would not be a mockery? All at once it occurred 
to me that I had promised Captain Simpson to write and tell him how 
I had "come through." Perhaps this was the time.  I went to the foot 
of the stairs and called up to the chef-major.  He came to the door 
and I explained, asking him if, we being without a post-office, he 
could get a letter through, and what kind of a letter I could write, as I 
knew the censorship was severe.

"My dear lady," he replied, "go and write your letter,--write anything 
you like,--and when I come down I will take charge of it and 
guarantee that it shall go through, uncensored, no matter what it 
contains."

So I wrote to tell Captain Simpson that all was well at Huiry,--that we 
had escaped, and were still grateful for all the trouble he had taken.  
When the officer came down I gave it to him, unsealed.

"Seal it, seal it," he said, and when I had done so, he wrote, "Read 
and approved" on the envelope, and gave it to his orderly, and was 
ready to say "Good-bye."

"Don't look so serious about it," he laughed, as we shook hands.  
"Some of us will get killed, but what of that? I wanted this war.  I 
prayed for it.  I should have been sad enough if I had died before it 
came.  I have left a wife and children whom I adore, but I am ready 
to lay down my life cheerfully for the victory of which I am so sure.  
Cheer up.  I think my hour has not yet come.  I had three horses 
killed under me in Belgium.  At Charleroi a bomb exploded in a 
staircase as I was coming down.  I jumped--not a scratch to show.  
Things like that make a man feel immune--but Who knows?"

I did my best to smile, as I said, "I don't wish you courage--you have 
that, but--good luck."

"Thank you," he replied, "you've had that"; and away he marched, 
and that was the last I saw of him.

I had a strange sensation about these men who had in so few days 
passed so rapidly in and out of my life, and in a moment seemed 
like old friends.

There was a bustle of preparation all about us.  Such a harnessing 
of horses, such a rolling-up of half-dried shirts, but it was all orderly 
and systematic.  Over it all hung a smell of soup-kettles--the 
preparations for the midday meal, and a buzz of many voices as the 
men sat about eating out of their tin dishes.  I did wish I could see 
only the picturesque side of it.

It was two o'clock sharp when the regiment began to move.  No 
bands played.  No drum beat.  They just marched, marched, 
marched along the road to Meaux, and silence fell again on the 
hillside.

Off to the northeast the cannon still boomed,--it is still booming now 
as I write, and it is after nine o'clock.  There has been no sign of 
Amelie all day as I have sat here writing all this to you.  I have tried 
to make it as clear a statement of facts as I could.  I am afraid that I 
have been more disturbed in putting it down than I was in living it.  
Except on Saturday and Sunday I was always busy, a little useful, 
and that helped.  I don't know when I shall be able to get this off to 
you.  But at least it is ready, and I shall take the first opportunity I get 
to cable to you, as I am afraid before this you have worried, unless 
your geography is faulty, and the American papers are as reticent 
as ours.


THE END




APPENDIX



In connection with the foregoing narrative this order issued by 
General Joffre on September 4,1914, which has but just become 
available for publication, has special interest and significance:--

1. It is fitting to take advantage of the rash situation of the First 
German Army to concentrate upon it the efforts of the Allied Armies 
on the extreme left.  All dispositions will be made in the course of 
September S to start for the attack on September 6.

2. The disposition to be carried out by the evening of September 5 
will be:--

(a) All the available forces of the Sixth Army to be to the northeast of 
Meaux, ready to cross the Ourcq between Lizy-sur-Ourcq and May-
en-Multien, in the general direction of Chateau-Thierry.  The 
available elements of the First Cavalry Corps which are at hand will 
be placed for this operation under the orders of General Maunoury 
(commanding the Sixth Army).

(b) The British Army will be posted on the front of Changis-
Coulommiers, facing eastward, ready to attack in the general 
direction of Montmirail.

(c) The Fifth Army, closing a little to its left, will post itself on the 
general front of Courtacon-Esternay-Sezanne, ready to attack in 
the general direction from south to north, the Second Cavalry Corps 
securing the connection between the British Army and the Fifth 
Army.

(d) The Ninth Army will cover the right of the Fifth Army, holding the 
southern exits from the march of Saint-Gond and carrying part of its 
forces on to the plateau north of Sezanne.

3. The offensive will be taken by these different armies on 
September 6, beginning in the morning.


