On the Edge of the War Zone From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes

ber 25

e you. But I have really been

, Amélie came down with one of her sick headache

e look worse than a first-class bilious attack I have never met it. One can walk round and do things when one is suffering all sorts of pain, o

istress, "had a right to be attended to-had a right to expect it." I did not see that either. I told her that her

à la Camille, only Amélie would not have seen the joke. I did look old and seedy. But what of that? Of course Amélie does not kno

stion of mistress and maid, that this was one of those times, that she had been a trump and a brick, and other nice thing

and also, it may be, owing to the long run she took, of which I wrote you in my letter of last week, it is

treasures, touching everything with a queer sensation-it had all become so very precious. All the time my thoughts flew back to the past. That is the prettiest thing about

that is to say, the near-by towns, like those in the plain, and on the hilltops from which the Germans were driven before the 1

coming back slowly, in family groups. Day after day, and night after night the flocks of sheep, droves of cattle, carts with pigs in them, people in carts leading now an

but, at any rate, they have found their tongues. The slow procession has been passing for a fortnight now, and at almost

. But it is a part of the strange result of war, borne in on me by my own frame of mind, that

the morale of the country, because they would surely not have been allowed to come back by the military authorities if t

ting astride the telegraph poles, pipes in mouth, putting up the wires they cut down a fortnight ago. The next day our post-office opened, and then I got newspapers. I can tell you I devoured them. I read Joffre's order of the day. What puzzled me was t

as really a decisive fight, and that it was considered won by the English and French-in a rainstorm-

d anecdotes such as we shall never see. We get a meagre "communiqué official" and have to be co

ilk and eggs. Rabbits and chickens run about in the roads simply asking to be potted. There is no petrol, but I, luckily, had a stock of candles, and I love candlelight-it suits my house better than lamps. It is over a fortnight since we had sugar or butter or cof

reading or writing impossible-I am not yet habituated to it-I went for a walk. I took the ro

woods, until the wheat fields are reached, and then rising from the plain, gently, to the high suspensi

here is no bridge here across the Marne; the nearest in one direction is at the Iles-lès-Villenoy, and in the other at Meaux. So, as the Germans could not have crossed the Marne here, the canal bridge was not destroyed, though

ced had von Kluck's army succeeded in crossing the Marne at Meaux, and it was patrolled and guarded by

private estate belonging to the proprietor of the plaster quarries at Mareuil, to a ferry, beside which was th

t of them sunk. A few of them, drawn up on the bank, were splintered into kindling wood. This work of destruction had been done, most effectively, by the English. They had not left a stick anywhere

exhausted. So they took her in for the night, and the next morning Père harnessed Ninette and took her and her weary dogs to Meaux. It was over two hours each way for Ninette, but it was better than seeing a

w exactly what had happe

h. Père was told that an appeal was made to the English commanders to save the old landmarks if possible, and although at that time it seemed to no one at all likely that they could be save

ee lines of mills lying from bank to bank? I know you will be glad they are saved. It would have been a pity to destroy that beautiful view. I am afraid that we are in an epoch where we shall have to thank Fat

say about a thousand of the poor were hidden carefully in the cellars. It had fourteen thousand inha

s a power. No figure is so familiar in the picturesque old streets, especially on market day, Saturday, as this tall, powerful-looking man in his soutane and barrette, with his air of authority, familiar yet dignified. He

full of wounded picked up under his direction and cared for as well as his resources permitted. He has written his na

iltering back to us from t

n. Trees and houses dumbly tell their own tales. The roads are terribly cut up, but road builders are already at work. Huge trees have been broken off like twigs, but even there men are at work, uprooting them and cutting the wo

devastation of the German occupation, with its deliberate and filthy defilement of the houses, which defies words, and will leave a blot for all time on the records of the race so vile-minded as to have achieved it. The deliberate ingenuity of the nastiness

hat the Germans did in all these small towns w

me to go into detail regar

any wrong to the race which in this war seems

as they have accepted the rest-with courage, and that they have at once gone to work to remove all the

packed my little hat-trunk and caref

rs in the salon-hat, cape, and gloves on i

aps I dreaded to find, locked in it, a too vivid recollection of the day I closed it. It ma

far as I can know myself, I cannot find in my mind any signs, even, of

gs to write you. But nothing

l

er 2,

I liked doing the work well enough,-for a little while. But I had quite all I wanted of it before the fortnight was over. I felt like

ch she had stored her household treasures a month ago, and I passed a rare afternoon. I spent a good part of it

ave needed them. But when I got them back, it about finished my attempts at sobriety. I told her to put them on the dining-ro

ractically all their clothes, except what they had on their backs and one change. I had not given it much thought, though I do

gine it is little good that will do them. All her linen is damp and sme

inished saying naughty words about herself, and declaring that "Madame was right not to upset her house," and that the next time the Boches thought of coming here they would be welcome to anything she had. "For

t was not cured by opening up my waste-baskets and laying out

uffet,-just as color notes-no value at all. There were bits of silver, and nearly all the plated stuff. There was an old painted fan, several strings of bea

gh when the English were here-not that they cared. They were quite willing to stir their

y that it had

if most of the people I saw flying four weeks ago might not have found themselves

e park in front of the burning hotel, with the lace waist of an evening frock in one hand, and a small bottle of alcohol in the other. She explained

been drummed out and came back to find my house a ruin, my books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china and plated ware

ion?" The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it across as our railroad is to "hand

to reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with me. It is the law of Nature. Material things, like the friend

in which to rest my weary spirit, I should have ended by deliberately sitting myself down on the edge of a bat

st of them, he went on working in the fields all through the menacing days. I can't make out whether he had no realization of actual danger, or whether that was his way of meeting it. Anyway, he disappeared on the morning the

euil, close to the route de Pavé du Roi, and on the morning that the battle began he was digging potatoes there. Sudde

with fear to run, and there was nothing to hide behind. So he began walking across th

es, and called out to him, in French, to stop. H

. He managed to obey. By the time he got t

time he could speak the idea had come to him to pretend that he was not French-that he was a refugee-that he did not know the country,-was lost,-in

d find out he had lied and harm his old wife, or perhaps destroy the town. So he had hidden down by the canal until h

ch work on the Aisne; that Manoury is holding the line in front of us from Compiègne to Soissons, with Castelnau to the north of him, with his left wing resting on the Somme; that Maud'huy was behind Albert; and that Rheims cathedral had been persistently and brutally shelled since Se

ss in the end, and so convinced that, even if it takes the whole world to do it, they wil

th, and all those wonderful animals sitting up so bravely on the lacework of the parapet? Such a wave of pity goes over me when I think that not only is it destroyed, but that future generations are deprived of seeing it; that one of the greatest achievements of the hands of man, a work which has withstood so many wars in what we called "savage times," before any claims were made for "Kultur," should have b