November 28, 1914
I am sorry that, as you say in your letter of October 16, just received, you are disappointed that I "do not write you more about the war." Dear child, I am not seeing any of it. We are settled down here to a life that is nearly normal—much more normal than I dreamed could be possible forty miles from the front. We are still in the zone of military operations, and probably shall be until spring, at least. Our communications with the outside world are frequently cut. We get our mail with great irregularity. Even our local mail goes to Meaux, and is held there five days, as the simplest way of exercising the censorship. It takes nearly ten days to get an answer to a letter to Paris.
All that I see which actually reminds me of the war—now that we are used to the absence of the men—I see on the route nationale, when I drive down to Couilly. Across the fields it is a short and pretty walk. Amélie makes it in twenty minutes. I could, if it were not for climbing that terrible hill to get back.
Besides, the mud is inches deep. I have a queer little four-wheeled cart, covered, if I want to unroll the curtains. I call it my perambulator, and really, with Ninette hitched in, I am like an overgrown baby in its baby carriage, and any nurse I ever knew would push a perambulator faster than that donkey drags mine. Yet it just suits my mood. I sit comfortably in it, and travel slowly—time being non-existent—so slowly that I can watch the wheat sprout, and gaze at the birds and the view and the clouds. I do hold on to the reins—just for looks—though I have no need to, and I doubt if Ninette suspects me of doing anything so foolish. On the road I always meet officers riding along, military cars flying along, army couriers spluttering along on motor-cycles, heavy motor transports groaning up hill, or thundering down, and now and then a long train of motor-ambulances. Almost any morning, at nine, I can see the long line of camions carrying the revitaillement towards the front, and the other afternoon, as I was driving up the hill, I met a train of ambulances coming down. The big grey things slid, one after another, around the curve of the Demi-Lune, and simply flew by me, raising such a cloud of dust that after I had counted thirty, I found I could not see them, and the continual tooting of the horns began to make Ninette nervous—she had never seen anything like that before— so, for fear she might do some trick she never had done in her life, like shying, and also for fear that the drivers, who were rushing by exactly in the middle of the road, might not see me in the dust, or a car might skid, I slid out, and led my equipage the rest of the way. I do assure you these are actually all the war signs we see, though, of course, we still hear the cannon.
But, though we don't see it, we feel it in many ways. My neighbors feel it more than I do! For one example—the fruit crop this year has been an absolute loss. Luckily the cassis got away before the war was declared, but we hear it was a loss to the buyers, and it was held in the Channel ports, necessarily, and was spoiled. But apples and pears had no market. In ordinary years purchasers come to buy the trees, and send their own pickers and packers, and what was not sold in that way went to the big Saturday market at Meaux. This year there is no market at Meaux. The town is still partly empty, and the railroad cannot carry produce now. This is a tragic loss to the small cultivator, though, as yet, he is not suffering, and he usually puts all such winnings into his stocking.
We still have no coal to speak of. I am burning wood in the salon— and green wood at that. The big blaze—when I can get it—suits my house better than the salamandre did. But I cannot get a temperature above 42 Fahrenheit. I am used to sixty, and I remember you used to find that too low in Paris. I blister my face, and freeze my back, just as we used to in the old days of glorious October at the farm in New Sharon, where my mother was born, and where I spent my summers and part of the autumn in my school-days.
You might think it would be easy to get wood. It is not. The army takes a lot of it, and those who, in ordinary winters, have wood to sell, have to keep it for themselves this year. Père has cut down all the old trees he could find—old prune trees, old apple trees, old chestnut trees—and it is not the best of firewood. I hated to see even that done, but he claimed that he wanted to clear a couple of pieces of land, and I try to believe him. Did you ever burn green wood? If you have, enough said!
Unluckily—since you expect me to write often—I am a creature of habit.
I never could write as you can, with a pad on my knees, huddled over the fire. I suppose that I could have acquired the habit if I had begun my education at the Sorbonne, instead of polishing off there. I remember when I first began to haunt that university, eighteen years ago, how amazed I was to see the students huddled into a small space with overcoats and hats on their knees, a note-book on top of them, an ink-pot in one hand and a pen in the other, and, in spite of obstacles, absorbed in the lecture. I used to wonder if they had ever heard of "stylos," even while I understood, as I never had done before, the real love of learning that marks the race. Alas! I have to be halfway comfortable before I can half accomplish anything.
I am thankful to say that the temperature has been moderating a little, and life about me has been active. One day it was the big threshing- machine, and the work was largely done by women, and the air was full of throbbing and dust. Yesterday it was the cider-press, and I stood about, at Amélie's, in the sun, half the afternoon, watching the motor hash the apples, and the press squeeze out the yellow juice, which rushed foaming into big vats. Did you ever drink cider like that?
It is the only way I like it. It carried me back to my girlhood and the summers in the Sandy River valley. I don't know why it is, of late, that my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection. Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the country. It may be true that life is a circle, and as one approaches the end the beginning becomes visible, and associated with both the beginning and end of mine there is a war. However it is to be explained, there remains the fact that my middle distances are getting wiped out.
In these still nights, when I cannot sleep, I think more often than of anything else of the road running down the hill by the farm at New Sharon, and of the sounds of the horses and wagons as they came down and crossed the wooden bridge over the brook, and of the voices—so strange in the night—as they passed. There were more night sounds in those memories than I ever hear here—more crickets, more turnings over of Nature, asleep or awake. I rarely hear many night sounds here. From sundown, when people go clattering by in their wooden shoes from the fields, to daylight, when the birds awake, all is silence. I looked out into the moonlight before I closed my shutters last night. I might have been alone in the world. Yet I like it.
The country is lovely here in winter—so different from what I remember of it at home. My lawn is still green, so is the corbeille d'argent in the garden border, which is still full of silvery bunches of bloom, and will be all winter. The violets are still in bloom. Even the trees here never get black as they do in New England, for the trunks and branches are always covered with green moss. That is the dampness. Of course, we never have the dry invigorating cold that makes a New England winter so wonderful. I don't say that one is more beautiful than the other, only that each is different in its charm. After all, Life, wherever one sees it, is, if one has eyes, a wonderful pageant, the greatest spectacular melodrama I can imagine. I'm glad to have seen it. I have not always had an orchestra stall, but what of that? One ought to see things at several angles and from several elevations, you know.
December 5, 1914
We have been having some beautiful weather.
Yesterday Amélie and I took advantage of it to make a pilgrimage across the Marne, to decorate the graves on the battlefield at Chambry. Crowds went out on All Soul's Day, but I never like doing anything, even making a pilgrimage, in a crowd.
You can realize how near it is, and what an easy trip it will be in normal times, when I tell you that we left Esbly for Meaux at half past one—only ten minutes by train—and were back in the station at Meaux at quarter to four, and had visited Monthyon, Villeroy, Neufmontier, Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry, and Vareddes.
The authorities are not very anxious to have people go out there. Yet nothing to prevent is really done. It only takes a little diplomacy. If I had gone to ask for a passport, nine chances out of ten it would have been refused me. I happened to know that the wife of the big livery- stable man at Meaux, an energetic—and, incidentally, a handsome— woman, who took over the business when her husband joined his regiment, had a couple of automobiles, and would furnish me with all the necessary papers. They are not taxi-cabs, but handsome touring- cars. Her chauffeur carries the proper papers. It seemed to me a very loose arrangement, from a military point of view, even although I was assured that she did not send out anyone she did not know. However, I decided to take advantage of it.
While we were waiting at the garage for the car to be got out, and the chauffeur to change his coat, I had a chance to talk with a man who had not left Meaux during the battle, and I learned that there were several important families who had remained with the Archbishop and aided him to organize matters for saving the city, if possible, and protect the property of those who had fled, and that the measures which those sixty citizens, with Archbishop Marbeau at their head, took for the safety of the poor, the care for the wounded and dead, is already one of the proudest documents in the annals of the historic town.
But never mind all these things, which the guides will recite for you, I imagine, when you come over to make the grand tour of Fighting France, for on these plains about Meaux you will have to start your pilgrimage.
I confess that my heart beat a little too rapidly when, as we ran out of Meaux, and took the route départmentale of Senlis, a soldier stepped to the middle of the road and held up his gun—baionette au canon.
We stopped.
Were we after all going to be turned back? I had the guilty knowledge that there was no reason why we should not be. I tried to look magnificently unconcerned as I leaned forward to smile at the soldier. I might have spared myself the effort. He never even glanced inside the car. The examination of the papers was the most cursory thing imaginable—a mere formality. The chauffeur simply held his stamped paper towards the guard. The guard merely glanced at it, lifted his gun, motioned us to proceed—and we proceeded.
It may amuse you to know that we never even showed the paper again. We did meet two gendarmes on bicycles, but they nodded and passed us without stopping.
The air was soft, like an early autumn day, rather than December as you know it. There was a haze in the air, but behind it the sun shone. You know what that French haze is, and what it does to the world, and how, through it, one gets the sort of landscape painters love. With how many of our pilgrimages together it is associated! We have looked through it at the walls of Provins, when the lindens were rosy with the first rising of the sap; we have looked through it at the circular panorama from the top of the ruined tower of Montlhéry; we have looked through it across Jean Jacques Rousseau's country, from the lofty terrace of Montmorency, and from the platform in front of the prison of Philippe Auguste's unhappy Danish wife, at Etampes, across the valley of the Juine; and from how many other beautiful spots, not to forget the view up the Seine from the terrace of the Tuileries.
Sometime, I hope, we shall see these plains of the Marne together. When we do, I trust it will be on just such another atmospheric day as yesterday.
As our road wound up the hill over the big paving-stones characteristic of the environs of all the old towns of France, everything looked so peaceful, so pretty, so normal, that it was hard to realize that we were moving towards the front, and were only about three miles from the point where the German invasion was turned back almost three months ago to a day, and it was the more difficult to realize as we have not heard the cannon for days.
A little way out of Meaux, we took a road to the west for Chauconin, the nearest place to us which was bombarded, and from a point in the road I looked back across the valley of the Marne, and I saw a very pretty white town, with red roofs, lying on the hillside. I asked the chauffeur:
"What village is that over there?"
He glanced around and replied: "Quincy."
It was my town. I ought not to have been surprised. Of course I knew that if I could see Chauconin so clearly from my garden, why, Chauconin could see me. Only, I had not thought of it.
Amélie and I looked back with great interest. It did look so pretty, and it is not pretty at all—the least pretty village on this side of the hill. "Distance" does, indeed, "lend enchantment." When you come to see me I shall show you Quincy from the other side of the Marne, and never take you into its streets. Then you'll always remember it as a fairy town.
It was not until we were entering into Chauconin that we saw the first signs of war. The approach through the fields, already ploughed, and planted with winter grain, looked the very last thing to be associated with war. Once inside the little village—we always speak of it as "le petit Chauconin "—we found destruction enough. One whole street of houses was literally gutted. The walls stand, but the roofs are off and doors and windows gone, while the shells seem burned out. The destruction of the big farms seems to have been pretty complete. There they stood, long walls of rubble and plaster, breeched; ends of farm buildings gone; and many only a heap of rubbish. The surprising thing to me was to see here a house destroyed, and, almost beside it, one not even touched. That seemed to prove that the struggle here was not a long one, and that a comparatively small number of shells had reached it.
Neufmortier was in about the same condition. It was a sad sight, but not at all ugly. Ruins seem to "go" with the French atmosphere and background. It all looked quite natural, and I had to make an effort to shake myself into a becoming frame of mind. If you had been with me I should have asked you to pinch me, and remind me that "all this is not yet ancient history," and that a little sentimentality would have become me. But Amélie would never have understood me.
It was not until we were driving east again to approach Penchard that a full realization of it came to me. Penchard crowns the hill just in the centre of the line which I see from the garden. It was one of the towns bombarded on the evening of September 5, and, so far as I can guess, the destruction was done by the French guns which drove the Germans out that night.
They say the Germans slept there the night of September 4, and were driven out the next day by the French soixante-quinze, which trotted through Chauconin into Penchard by the road we had just come over.
I enclose you a carte postale of a battery passing behind the apse of the village church, just as a guarantee of good faith.
But all signs of the horrors of those days have been obliterated. Penchard is the town in which the Germans exercised their taste for wilful nastiness, of which I wrote you weeks ago. It is a pretty little village, beautifully situated, commanding the slopes to the Marne on one side, and the wide plains of Barcy and Chambry on the other. It is prosperous looking, the home of sturdy farmers and the small rentiers. It has an air of humble thrift, with now and then a pretty garden, and here and there suggestions of a certain degree of greater prosperity, an air which, in France, often conceals unexpected wealth.
You need not look the places up unless you have a big map. No guide-book ever honored them.
From Penchard we ran a little out to the west at the foot of the hill, on top of which stand the white walls of Montyon, from which, on September 5, we had seen the first smoke of battle.
I am sure that I wrote some weeks ago how puzzled I was when I read Joffre's famous ordre du jour, at the beginning of the Marne offensive, to find that it was dated September 6, whereas we had seen the battle begin on the 5th. Here I found what I presume to be the explanation, which proves that the offensive along the rest of the line on the 6th had been a continuation simply of what we saw that Saturday afternoon.
At the foot of the hill crowned by the walls of Montyon lies Villeroy— today the objective point for patriotic pilgrimages. There, on the 5th of September, the 276th Regiment was preparing its soup for lunch, when, suddenly, from the trees on the heights, German shells fell amongst them, and food was forgotten, while the French at St. Soupplet on the other side of the hill, as well as those at Villeroy, suddenly found themselves in the thick of a fight—the battle we saw.
They told me at Villeroy that many of the men in the regiments engaged were from this region, and here the civilians dropped their work in the fields and snatched up guns which the dead or wounded soldiers let fall and entered the fight beside their uniformed neighbors. I give you that picturesque and likely detail for what it is worth.
At the foot of the hill between Montyon and Villeroy lies the tomb in which two hundred of the men who fell here are buried together. Among them is Charles Péguy, the poet, who wore a lieutenant's stripes, and was referred to by his companions on that day as "un glorieux fou dans sa bravoure." This long tomb, with its crosses and flags and flowers, was the scene on All Soul's Day of the commemorative ceremony in honor of the victory, and marks not only the beginning of the battle, but the beginning of its triumph.
From this point we drove back to the east, almost along the line of battle, to the hillside hamlet of Barcy, the saddest scene of desolation on this end of the great fight.
It was a humble little village, grouped around a dear old church, with a graceful square tower supporting a spire. The little church faced a small square, from which the principal street runs down the hill to the open country across which the French "push" advanced. No house on this street escaped. Some of them are absolutely destroyed. The church is a mere shell. Its tower is pierced with huge holes. Its bell lies, a wreck, on the floor beneath its tower. The roof has fallen in, a heaped-up mass of débris in the nave beneath. Its windows are gone, and there are gaping wounds in its side walls. Oddly enough, the Chemin de la Croix is intact, and some of the peasants look on that as a miracle, in spite of the fact that the High Altar is buried under a mass of tiles and plaster.
The doors being gone, one could look in, over the temporary barrier, to the wreck inside, and by putting a donation into the contribution box for the restauration fund it was possible to enter—at one's own risk—by a side door. It was hardly worth while, as one could see no more than was visible from the doorways, and it looked as if at any minute the whole edifice would crumble. However, Amélie wanted to go inside, and so we did.
We entered through the mairie, which is at one side, into a small courtyard, where the school children were playing under the propped- up walls as gaily as if there had never been a bombardment.
The mairie had fared little better than the church, and the schoolroom, which has its home in it, had a temporary roofing, the upper part being wrecked.
The best idea that I got of the destruction was, however, from a house almost opposite the church. It was only a shell, its walls alone standing. As its windows and doors had been blown out, we could look in from the street to the interior of what had evidently been a comfortable country house. It was now like an uncovered box, in the centre of which there was a conical shaped heap of ashes as high as the top of the fireplace. We could see where the stairs had been, but its entire contents had been burned down to a heap of ashes—burned as thoroughly as wood in a fireplace. I could not have believed in such absolute destruction if I had not seen it.
While we were gazing at the wreck I noticed an old woman leaning against the wall and watching us. Out of her weather-beaten, time- furrowed old face looked a pair of dark eyes, red-rimmed and blurred with much weeping. She was rubbing her distorted old hands together nervously as she watched us. It was inevitable that I should get into conversation with her, and discover that this wreck had been, for years, her home, that she had lived there all alone, and that everything she had in the world—her furniture, her clothing, and her savings—had been burned in the house.
You can hardly understand that unless you know these people. They keep their savings hidden. It is the well-known old story of the French stocking which paid the war indemnity of 1870. They have no confidence in banks. The State is the only one they will lend to, and the fact is one of the secrets of French success.
If you knew these people as I do, you would understand that an old woman of that peasant type, ignorant of the meaning of war, would hardly be likely to leave her house, no matter how many times she was ordered out, until shells began to fall about her. Even then, as she was rather deaf, she probably did not realize what was happening, and went into the street in such fear that she left everything behind her.
From Barcy we drove out into the plain, and took the direction ofChambry, following the line of the great and decisive fight ofSeptember 6 and 7.
We rolled slowly across the beautiful undulating country of grain and beet fields. We had not gone far when, right at the edge of the road, we came upon an isolated mound, with a rude cross at its head, and a tiny tricolore at its foot—the first French grave on the plain.
We motioned the chauffeur to stop, and we went on, on foot.
First the graves were scattered, for the boys lie buried just where they fell—cradled in the bosom of the mother country that nourished them, and for whose safety they laid down their lives. As we advanced they became more numerous, until we reached a point where, as far as we could see, in every direction, floated the little tricolore flags, like fine flowers in the landscape. They made tiny spots against the far-off horizon line, and groups like beds of flowers in the foreground, and we knew that, behind the skyline, there were more.
Here and there was a haystack with one grave beside it, and again there would be one, usually partly burned, almost encircled with the tiny flags which said: "Here sleep the heroes."
It was a disturbing and a thrilling sight. I give you my word, as I stood there, I envied them. It seemed to me a fine thing to lie out there in the open, in the soil of the fields their simple death has made holy, the duty well done, the dread over, each one just where he fell defending his mother-land, enshrined forever in the loving memory of the land he had saved, in graves to be watered for years, not only by the tears of those near and dear to them, but by those of the heirs to their glory—the children of the coming generation of free France.
You may know a finer way to go. I do not. Surely, since Death is, it is better than dying of old age between clean sheets. Near the end of the route we came to the little walled cemetery of Chambry, the scene of one of the most desperate struggles of the 6th and 7th of September. You know what the humble village burying-grounds are like. Its wall is about six feet high, of plaster and stone, with an entrance on the road to the village. To the west and northwest the walls are on the top of a bank, high above the crossroads. I do not know the position of the pursuing French army. The chauffeur who drove us could not enlighten us. As near as I could guess, from the condition of the walls, I imagine that the French artillery must have been in the direction of Penchard, on the wooded hills.
The walls are pierced with gun holes, about three feet apart, and those on the west and southwest are breeched by cannon and shell- fire. Here, after the position had been several times stormed by artillery, the Zouaves made one of the most brilliant bayonet charges of the day, dashing up the steep banks and through the breeched walls. Opposite the gate is another steep bank where can still be seen the improvised gun positions of the French when they pushed the retreat across the plain.
The cemetery is filled with new graves against the wall, for many of the officers are buried here—nearly all of the regiment of Zouaves, which was almost wiped out in the charge before the position was finally carried,—it was taken and lost several times.
From here we turned east again towards Vareddes, along a fine road lined with enormous old trees, one of the handsomest roads of the department. Many of these huge trees have been snapped off by shells as neatly as if they were mere twigs. Along the road, here and there, were isolated graves.
Vareddes had a tragic experience. The population was shockingly abused by the Germans. Its aged priest and many other old men were carried away, and many were shot, and the town badiy damaged.
We had intended to go through Vareddes to the heights beyond, where the heroes of the 133d, 246th, 289th, and of the regiment which began the battle at Villeroy—the 276th—are buried. But the weather had changed, and a cold drizzle began to fall, and I saw no use in going on in a closed car, so we turned back to Meaux.
It was still light when we reached Meaux, so we gave a look at the old mills—and put up a paean of praise that they were not damaged beyond repair—on our way to the station.
As we came back to Esbly I strained my eyes to look across to the hill on which my house stands,—I could just see it as we crawled across the bridge at the Iles-lès-Villenoy,—and felt again the miracle of the battle which swept so near to us.
In my innermost heart I had a queer sensation of the absurdity of my relation to life. Fate so often shakes its fist in my face, only to withhold the blow within a millimetre of my nose. Perhaps I am being schooled to meet it yet.
I brought back one fixed impression—how quickly Time had laid its healing hand on this one battlefield. I don't know what will be the effect out there where the terrible trench war is going on. But here, where the fighting turned, never to return—at least we believe it never will—it has left no ugly traces. The fields are cleaned, the roads are repaired. Rain has fallen on ruins and washed off all the marks of smoke. Even on the road to Vareddes the thrifty French have already carried away and fagotted the wrecked trees, and already the huge, broken trunks are being uprooted, cut into proper length, and piled neatly by the roadside to be seasoned before being carted away. There was nothing raw about the scene anywhere. The villages were sad, because so silent and empty.
I had done my best to get a tragic impression. I had not got it. I had brought back instead an impression heroic, uplifting, altogether inspiring.
By the time you come over, and I lead you out on that pilgrimage, it will be even more beautiful. But, alas, I am afraid that day is a long way off.
December 30, 1914
I would wish above all things, if some fairy gave me the chance, to be a hibernating animal this year, during which the weather has almost called an armistice along our front, locked from the Swiss border to the sea.
There is but one consolation, and that is that, costly and terrible as have been the first four months of the war, three of the great aims of the German strategy have been buried too deep ever to be dug up— their hope of a short war is gone; they did not get to Paris, and now know that they never will; they did not, and never can get to Calais, and, in spite of their remarkable feats, and their mighty strength, in the face of those three facts even their arrogance cannot write "victory" against their arms.
I have to confess that I am almost as cold as the boys out there in the rain and the mud. I have managed to get a little coal—or what is called coal this year. It is really charbon de forge—a lot of damp, black dust with a few big lumps in it, which burns with a heavy, smelly, yellow smoke. In normal times one would never dignify it by the name of coal, but today we are thankful to get it, and pay for it as if it were gold. It will only burn in the kitchen stove, and every time we put any on the fire, my house, seen from the garden, appears like some sort of a factory. Please, therefore, imagine me living in the kitchen. You know the size of a compact French kitchen. It is rather close quarters for a lady of large ideas.
The temperature of the rest of the house is down almost to zero. Luckily it is not a cold winter, but it is very damp, as it rains continually. I have an armchair there, a footstool, and use the kitchen table as a desk; and even then, to keep fairly warm, I almost sit on top of the stove, and I do now and then put my feet in the oven.
I assure you that going to bed is a ceremony. Amélie comes and puts two hot bricks in the foot of the bed. I undress in the kitchen, put on felt shoes, and a big wrap, and, with my hotwater bottle in one hand and a book in the other, I make a dash for the arctic regions, and Amélie tidies up the kitchen, locks the doors behind her, and takes the keys away with her.
I am cosy and comfy in bed, and I stay there until Amélie has built the fire and got the house in order in the morning.
My getting up beats the lever de Marie Antoinette in some of its details, though she was accustomed to it, and probably minded less than I do. I am not really complaining, you know. But you want to know about my life—so from that you can imagine it. I shall get acclimated, of course. I know that.
I was in Paris for Christmas—not because I wanted to go, but because the few friends I have left there felt that I needed a change, and clinched the matter by thinking that they needed me. Besides I wanted to get packages to the English boys who were here in September, and it was easier to do it from Paris than from here.
While I was waiting for the train at Esbly I had a conversation with a woman who chanced to sit beside me on a bench on the quai, which seemed to me significant.
Today everyone talks to everyone. All the barriers seem to be down. We were both reading the morning paper, and so, naturally, got to talking. I happened to have an English paper, in which there was a brief account of the wonderful dash made by the Royal Scots at Petit Bois and the Gordon Highlanders at Maeselsyeed Spur, under cover of the French and British artillery, early in the month, and I translated it for her. It is a moral duty to let the French people get a glimpse of the wonderful fighting quality of the boys under the Union Jack.
In the course of the conversation she said, what was self-evident, "You are not French?" I told her that I was an American. Then she asked me if I had any children, and received a negative reply.
She sighed, and volunteered that she was a widow with an only son who was "out there," and added: "We are all of us French women of a certain class so stupid when we are young. I adore children. But I thought I could only afford to have one, as I wanted to do so much for him. Now if I lose that one, what have I to live for? I am not the sort of woman who can marry again. My boy is a brave boy. If he dies he will die like a brave man, and not begrudge the life he gives for his country. I am a French mother and must offer him as becomes his mother. But it was silly of me to have but this one. I know, now that it is too late, that I could have done as well, and it may be better, with several, for I have seen the possibilities demonstrated among my friends who have three or four."
Of course I did not say that the more she had, the more she might have had to lose, because I thought that if, in the face of a disaster like this, French women were thinking such thoughts—and if one does, hundreds may—it might be significant.
I had a proof of this while in Paris. I went to a house where I have been a visitor for years to get some news of a friend who had an apartment there. I opened the door to the concierge's loge to put my question. I stopped short. In the window, at the back of the half dark room, sat the concierge, whom I had known for nearly twenty years, a brave, intelligent, fragile woman. She was sitting there in her black frock, gently rocking herself backward and forward in her chair. I did not need to put a question. One knows in these days what the unaccustomed black dress means, and I knew that the one son I had seen grow from childhood, for whom she and the father had sacrificed everything that he might be educated, for whom they had pinched and saved—was gone.
I said the few words one can say—I could not have told five minutes later what they were—and her only reply was like the speech of the woman of another class that I had met at Esbly.
"I had but the one. That was my folly. Now I have nothing—and I have a long time to live alone."
It would have been easy to weep with her, but they don't weep. I have never seen fewer tears in a great calamity. I have read in newspapers sent me from the States tales of women in hysterics, of women fainting as they bade their men goodbye. I have never seen any of it. Something must be wrong with my vision, or my lines must have fallen in brave places. I can only speak of what I see and hear, and tears and hysterics do not come under my observation.
I did not do anything interesting in Paris. It was cold and grey and sad. I got my packages off to the front. They went through quickly, especially those sent by the English branch post-office, near the Etoile, and when I got home, I found the letters of thanks from the boys awaiting me. Among them was one from the little corporal who had pulled down my flags in September, who wrote in the name of the C company, Yorkshire Light Infantry, and at the end of the letter he said: "I am sorry to tell you that Captain Simpson is dead. He was killed leading his company in a charge, and all his men grieved for him."
That gave me a deep pang. I remembered his stern, bronzed, but kindly face, which lighted up so with a smile, as he sat with me at tea on that memorable Wednesday afternoon, and of all that he did so simply to relieve the strain on our nerves that trying day. I know nothing about him—who he was—what he had for family—he was just a brave, kindly, human being, who had met me for a few hours, passed on—and passed out. He is only one of thousands, but he is the one whose sympathetic voice I had heard and who, in all the hurry and fatigue of those hard days, had had time to stop and console us here, and whom I had hoped to see again; and I grieved with his men for him.
I could not write last week. I had no heart to send the usual greetings of the season. Words still mean something to me, and when I sat down, from force of habit, to write the letters I have been accustomed to send at this season, I simply could not. It seemed to me too absurd to even celebrate the anniversary of the days when the angel hosts sang in the skies their "Peace on earth, good will to men" to herald the birth of Him who added to religion the command, "Love one another," and man, only forty miles away, occupied in wholesale slaughter. We have a hard time juggling to make our pretensions and our acts fit.
If this cold and lack of coal continues I am not likely to see much or write much until the spring campaign opens. Here we still hear the guns whenever Rheims or Soissons are bombarded, but no one ever, for a minute, dreams that they will ever come nearer.
Though I could not send you any greetings last week, I can say, with all my heart, may 1915 bring us all peace and contentment!
January 21, 1915
I have been trying to feel in a humor to write all this month, but what with the changeable weather, a visit to Paris, and the depression of the terrible battle at Soissons,—so near to us—I have not had the courage. All the same, I frankly confess that it has not been as bad as I expected. I begin to think things are never as bad as one expects.
Do you know that it is not until now that I have had a passport from my own country? I have never needed one. No one here has ever asked me for one, and it was only when I was in Paris a week ago that an American friend was so aghast at the idea that I had, in case of accident, no real American protection, that I went to the Embassy, for the first time in my life, and asked for one, and seriously took the oath of allegiance. I took it so very seriously that it was impressed on me how careless we, who live much abroad, get about such things.
I know that many years ago, when I was first leaving the States, it was suggested that such a document might be useful as an identification, and I made out my demand, and it was sent after me to Rome. I must have taken the oath at that time, but it was in days of peace, and it made no impression on me. But this time I got a great big choke in my throat, and looked up at the Stars and Stripes over the desk, and felt more American than I ever felt in my life. It cost me two dollars, and I felt the emotion was well worth the money, even at a high rate of exchange.
I did practically nothing else in Paris, except to go to one or two of the hospitals where I had friends at work.
Paris is practically normal. A great many of the American colony who fled in September to Bordeaux and to London have returned, and the streets are more lively, and the city has settled down to live through the war with outward calm if no gaiety. I would not have believed it would be possible, in less than five months, and with things going none too well at the front, that the city could have achieved this attitude.
When I got back, I found that, at least, our ambulance was open.
It is only a small hospital, and very poor. It is set up in the salle de récréation of the commune, which is beside the church and opposite the mairie, backed up against the wall of the park of the Château de Quincy. It is really a branch of the military hospital at Meaux, and it is under the patronage of the occupant of the Château de Quincy, who supplies such absolute necessities as cannot be provided from the government allowance of two francs a day per bed. There are twenty- eight beds.
Most of the beds and bedding were contributed by the people in the commune. The town crier went about, beating his drum, and making his demand at the crossroads, and everyone who could spare a bed or a mattress or a blanket carried his contribution to the salle. The wife of the mayor is the directress, the doctor from Crécy-en-Brie cares for the soldiers, with the assistance of Soeur Jules and Soeur Marie, who had charge of the town dispensary, and four girls of the Red Cross Society living in the commune.
The installation is pathetically simple, but the room is large and comfortable, with four rows of beds, and extra ones on the stage, and it is heated by a big stove. Naturally it gets more sick and slightly wounded than serious cases, but the boys seem very happy, and they are affectionately cared for. There is a big court for the convalescents, and in the spring they will have the run of the park.
About the twelfth we had a couple of days of the worst cannonading since October. It was very trying. I stood hours on the lawn listening, but it was not for several days that we knew there had been a terrible battle at Soissons, just forty miles north of us.
There is a great difference of opinion as to how far we can hear the big guns, but an officer on the train the other day assured me that they could be heard, the wind being right, about one hundred kilometres—that is to say, eighty miles—so you can judge what it was like here, on the top of the hill, half that distance away by road, and considerably less in a direct line.
Our official communiqué, as usual, gave us no details, but one of the boys in our town was wounded, and is in a near-by ambulance, where he has been seen by his mother; she brings back word that it was, as he called it, "a bloody slaughter in a hand-to-hand fight." But of course, nothing so far has been comparable to the British stand at Ypres. The little that leaks slowly out regarding that simply makes one's heart ache with the pain of it, only to rebound with the glory.
Human nature is a wonderful thing, and the locking of the gate to Calais, by the English, will, I imagine, be, to the end of time, one of the epics, not of this war alone, but of all war. Talk about the "thin red line." The English stood, we are told, like a ribbon to stop the German hordes,—and stopped them.
It almost seems a pity that, up to date, so much secrecy has been maintained. I was told last week in Paris that London has as yet no dream of the marvellous feat her volunteer army achieved—a feat that throws into the shade all the heroic defenses sung in the verse of ancient times. Luckily these achievements do not dull with years.
On top of the Soissons affair came its result: the French retreat across the Aisne caused by the rising of the floods which carried away the bridges as fast as the engineers could build them, and cut off part of the French, even an ambulance, and, report says, the men left across the river without ammunition fought at the end with the butts of their broken guns, and finally with their fists.
Of course this brings again that awful cry over the lack of preparation, and lack of ammunition.
It is a foolish cry today, since the only nation in the world ready for this war was the nation that planned and began it.
Even this disaster—and there is no denying that it is one—does not daunt these wonderful people. They still see two things, the Germans did not get to Paris, nor have they got to Calais, so, in spite of their real feats of arms—one cannot deny those—an endeavor must be judged by its purpose, and, so judged, the Germans have, thus far, failed. Luckily the French race is big enough to see this and take heart of grace. God knows it needs to, and thank Him it can.
Don't you imagine that I am a bit down. I am not. I am cold. But, when I think of the discomfort in the hurriedly constructed trenches, where the men are in the water to their ankles, what does my being cold in a house mean? Just a record of discomfort as my part of the war, and it seems, day after day, less important. But oh, the monotony and boredom of it! Do you wonder that I want to hibernate?
March 23, 1915
Can it be possible that it is two months since I wrote to you? I could not realize it when I got your reproachful letter this morning. But I looked in my letter-book, and found that it was true.
The truth is—I have nothing to write about. The winter and its discomforts do not inspire me any more than the news from the front does, and no need to tell you that does not make one talkative.
It has been a damp and nasty and changeable winter—one of the most horrid I ever experienced. There has been almost no snow. Almost never has the ground frozen, and not only is there mud, mud everywhere, but freshets also. Today the Marne lies more like an open sea than a river across the fields in the valley. One can imagine what it is like out there in the trenches.
We have occasional lovely sunny days, when it is warmer out-of- doors than in—and when those days came, I dug a bit in the dirt, planted tulips and sweet peas.
Sometimes I have managed to get fuel, and when that happened, I was ever so cosy in the house. Usually, when the weather was at its worst, I had none, and was as nicely uncomfortable as my worst enemy could ask.
As a rule my days have been divided into two parts. In the forenoon I have hovered about the gate watching for the newspaper. In the afternoon I have re-chewed the news in the vain endeavor to extract something encouraging between the lines,—and failed. Up to date I have not found anything tangible to account for such hope as continues to "spring eternal" in all our breasts. It springs, however, the powers be thanked. At present it is as big an asset as France has.
A Zeppelin got to Paris last night. We are sorry, but we'll forget it as soon as the women and children are buried. We are sorry, but it is not important.
Things are a bit livened up here. Day before yesterday a regiment of dragoons arrived. They are billeted for three months. They are men from the midi, and, alas! none too popular at this moment. Still, they have been well received, and their presence does liven up the place. This morning, before I was up, I heard the horses trotting by for their morning exercise, and got out of bed to watch them going along the hill. After the deadly tiresome waiting silence that has reigned here all winter, it made the hillside look like another place.
Add to that the fact that the field work has begun, and that, when the sun shines, I can go out on the lawn and watch the ploughs turning up the ground, and see the winter grain making green patches everywhere—and I do not need to tell you that, with the spring, my thoughts will take a livelier turn. The country is beginning to look beautiful. I took my drive along the valley of the Grande Morin in the afternoon yesterday. The wide plains of the valley are being ploughed, and the big horses dragging ploughs across the wide fields did look lovely—just like a Millet or a Daubigny canvas.
Since I wrote you I have been across to the battlefield again, to accompany a friend who came out from Paris. It was all like a new picture. The grain is beginning to sprout in tender green about the graves, which have been put in even better order than when I first saw them. The rude crosses of wood, from which the bark had not even been stripped, have been replaced by tall, carefully made crosses painted white, each marked with a name and number. Each single grave and each group of graves has a narrow footpath about it, and is surrounded by a wire barrier, while tiny approaches are arranged to each. Everywhere military signs are placed, reminding visitors that these fields are private property, that they are all planted, and entreating all politely to conduct themselves accordingly, which means literally, "keep off the wheat."
The German graves, which, so far as I remember, were unmarked when I was out there nearly four months ago, have now black disks with the number in white.
You must not mind if I am dull these days. I have been studying a map of the battle-front, which I got by accident. It is not inspiring. It makes one realize what there is ahead of us to do. It will be done—but at what a price!
Still, spring is here, and in spite of one's self, it helps.
May 18, 1915
All through the month of April I intended to write, but I had not the courage.
All our eyes were turned to the north where, from April 22 toThursday, May 13—five days ago—we knew the second awful battle atYpres was going on. It seems to be over now.
What with the new war deviltry, asphyxiating gas—with which the battle began, and which beat back the line for miles by the terror of its surprise—and the destruction of the Lusitania on the 7th, it has been a hard month. It has been a month which has seen a strange change of spirit here.
I have tried to impress on you, from the beginning, that odd sort of optimism which has ruled all the people about me, even under the most trying episodes of the war. Up to now, the hatred of the Germans has been, in a certain sense, impersonal. It has been a racial hatred of a natural foe, an accepted evil, just as the uncalled-for war was. It had wrought a strange, unexpected, altogether remarkable change in the French people. Their faces had become more serious, their bearing more heroic, their laughter less frequent, and their humor more biting. But, on the day, three weeks ago, when the news came of the first gas attack, before which the Zouaves and the Turcos fled with blackened faces and frothing lips, leaving hundreds of their companions dead and disfigured on the road to Langtmarck, there arose the first signs of awful hatred that I had seen.
I frankly acknowledge that, considering the kind of warfare the world is seeing today, I doubt very much if it is worse to be asphyxiated than to be blown to pieces by an obus. But this new and devilish arm which Germany has added to the horrors of war seemed the last straw, and within a few weeks, I have seen grow up among these simple people the conviction that the race which planned and launched this great war has lost the very right to live; and that none of the dreams of the world which looked towards happiness can ever be realized while Prussia exists, even if the war lasts twenty years, and even if, before it is over, the whole world has to take a hand in it.
Into this feeling, ten days ago, came the news of the destruction of the Lusitania.
We got the news here on the 8th. It struck me dumb.
For two or three days I kept quietly in the house. I believe the people about me expected the States to declare war in twenty-four hours. My neighbors who passed the gate looked at me curiously as they greeted me, and with less cordiality as the days went by. It was as if they pitied me, and yet did not want to be hard on me, or hold me responsible.
You know well enough how I feel about these things. I have no sentimentality about the war. A person who had that, and tried to live here so near it, would be on the straight road to madness. If the world cannot stop war, if organized governments cannot arrive at a code of morals which applies to nations the same law of right and wrong which is enforced on individuals, why, the world and humanity must take the consequences, and must reconcile themselves to the belief that such wars as this are as necessary as surgical operations. If one accepts that point of view—and I am ready to do so,—then every diabolical act of Germany will rebound to the future good of the race, as it, from every point of view, justifies the hatred which is growing up against Germany. We are taught that it is right, moral, and, from every point of view, necessary to hate evil, and, in this 20th century, Germany is the most absolute synonym of evil that history has ever seen. Having stated that fact, it does not seem to me that I need say anything further on the subject.
In the meantime, I have gone on imitating the people about me. They are industriously tilling their fields. I continue cutting my lawn, planting my dahlias, pruning my roses, tying up my flowering peas, and watching my California poppies grow like the weeds in the fields.
When I am not doing that, with a pot in one hand, and the tongs in the other, I am picking slugs out of the flower-beds and giving them a dose of boiling water, or lugging about a watering-pot. I do it energetically, but my heart is not in it, though the garden is grateful all the same, and is as nice a symbol of the French people as I can imagine.
We have the dragoons still with us. They don't interest me hugely—not as the English did when they retreated here last September, nor as the French infantry did on their way to the battlefield. These men have never been in action yet. Still they lend a picturesqueness to the countryside, though to me it is, as so much of the war has been, too much like the decor of a drama. Every morning they ride by the gate, two abreast, to exercise their lovely horses, and just before noon they come back. All the afternoon they are passing in groups, smoking, chatting, and laughing, and, except for their uniforms, they do not suggest war, of which they actually know as little as I do.
After dinner, in the twilight, for the days are getting long, and the moon is full, I sit on the lawn and listen to them singing in the street at Voisins, and they sing wonderfully well, and they sing good music. The other evening they sang choruses from "Louise" and "Faust," and a wonderful baritone sang "Vision Fugitive." The air was so still and clear that I hardly missed a note.
A week ago tonight we were aroused late in the evening, it must have been nearly midnight, by an alerte announcing the passing of a Zeppelin. I got up and went out-of-doors, but neither heard nor saw anything, except a bicycle going over the hill, and a voice calling "Lights out." Evidently it did not get to Paris, as the papers have been absolutely dumb.
One thing I have done this week. When the war began I bought, as did nearly everyone else, a big map of Germany and the battle-fronts surrounding it, and little envelopes of tiny British, Belgian, French, Montenegrin, Servian, Russian, German, and Austrian flags, mounted on pins. Every day, until the end of last week, I used to put the flags in place as well as I could after studying the day's communiqué.
I began to get discouraged in the hard days of last month, when day after day I was obliged to retreat the Allied flags on the frontier, and when the Russian offensive fell down, I simply tore the map off the wall, and burned it, flags and all.
Of course I said to myself, in the spirit I have caught from the army, "All these things are but incidents, and will have no effect on the final result. A nation is not defeated while its army is still standing up in its boots, so it is folly to bother over details."
Do you ever wonder what the poets of the future will do with this war? Is it too stupendous for them, or, when they get it in perspective, can they find the inspiration for words where now we have only tightened throats and a great pride that, in an age set down as commercial, such deeds of heroism could be?
Who will sing the dirge of General Hamilton in the little cemetery of Lacouture last October, when the farewell salute over his grave was turned to repel a German attack, while the voice of the priest kept on, calm and clear, to the end of the service? Who will sing the destruction of the Royal Scots, two weeks later, in the battle of Ypres? Who will sing the arrival of General Moussy, and of the French corps on the last day of that first battle of Ypres, when a motley gathering of cooks and laborers with staff officers and dismounted cavalry, in shining helmets, flung themselves pellmell into a bayonet charge with no bayonets, to relieve the hard-pressed English division under General Bulfin? And did it. Who will sing the great chant in honor of the 100,000 who held Ypres against half a million, and locked the door to the Channel? Who will sing the bulldog fighting qualities of Rawlinson's 7th division, which held the line in those October days until reinforcements came, and which, at the end of the fight, mustered 44 officers out of 400, and only 2336 men out of 23,000? Who will sing the stirring scene of the French Chasseurs, advancing with bugles and shouting the "Marseillaise," to storm and take the col de Bonhomme in a style of warfare as old as French history? And these are but single exploits in a war now settled down to sullen, dull trench work, a war only in the early months of what looks like years of duration.
Doesn't it all make your blood flow fast? You see it tempts me to make an oration. You must overlook my eloquence! One does—over here, in the midst of it—feel such a reverence for human nature today. The spirit of heroism and self-sacrifice lives still amongst us. A world of machinery has not yet made a race incapable of greatness. I have a feeling that from the soil to which so many thousands of men have voluntarily returned to save their country's honor must spring up a France greater than ever. It is the old story of Atlas. Besides, "What more can a man do"—you know the rest. It is one of the things that make me sorry to feel that our own country is evidently going to avoid a movement which might have been at once healthy and uplifting. I know that you don't like me to say that, but I'll let it go.
June 1, 1915
Well, I have really had a very exciting time since I last wrote you. I have even had a caller. Also my neighbor at Voulangis, on the top of the hill, on the other side of the Morin, has returned from the States, to which she fled just before the Battle of the Marne. I even went to Paris to meet her. To tell you the actual truth, for a few days, I behaved exactly as if there were no war. I had to pinch myself now and then to remind myself that whatever else might be real or unreal, the war was very actual.
I must own that Paris seems to get farther and farther from it every day. From daybreak to sunset I found it hard to realize that it was the capital of an invaded country fighting for its very existence, and the invader no farther from the Boulevards than Noyon, Soissons, and Rheims—on a battle-front that has not changed more than an inch or two—and often an inch or two in the wrong direction—since last October.
I could not help thinking, as I rode up the Champs-Elysées in the sun —it was Sunday—how humiliated the Kaiser, that crowned head of Terrorizers, would be if he could have seen Paris that day.
Children were playing under the trees of the broad mall; automobiles were rushing up and down the avenue; crowds were sitting all along the way, watching the passers and chatting; all the big hotels, turned into ambulances, had their windows open to the glorious sunny warmth, and the balconies were crowded with invalid soldiers and white-garbed nurses; not even arms in slings or heads in bandages looked sad, for everyone seemed to be laughing; nor did the crippled soldiers, walking slowly along, add a tragic note to the wonderful scene.
It was strange—it was more than strange. It seemed to me almost unbelievable.
I could not help asking myself if it could last.
Every automobile which passed had at least one soldier in it. Almost every well-dressed woman had a soldier beside her. Those who did not, looked sympathetically at every soldier who passed, and now and then stopped to chat with the groups—soldiers on crutches, soldiers with canes, soldiers with an arm in a sling, or an empty sleeve, leading the blind, and soldiers with nothing of their faces visible but the eyes.
By every law I knew the scene should have been sad. But some law of love and sunshine had decreed that it should not be, and it was not.
It was not the Paris you saw, even last summer, but it was Paris with a soul, and I know no better prayer to put up than the cry that the wave of love which seemed to throb everywhere about the soldier boys, and which they seemed to feel and respond to, might not—with time—die down. I knew it was too much to ask of human nature. I was glad I had seen it.
In this atmosphere of love Paris looked more beautiful to me than ever. The fountains were playing in the Place de la Concorde, in the Tuileries gardens, at the Rond Point, and the gardens, the Avenue and the ambulances were bright with flowers. I just felt, as I always do when the sun shines on that wonderful vista from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre, that nowhere in the world was there another such picture, unless it be the vista from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe. When I drove back up the hill at sunset, with a light mist veiling the sun through the arch, I felt so grateful to the fate which had decreed that never again should the German army look on that scene, and that a nation which had a capital that could smile in the face of fate as Paris smiled that day, must not, cannot, be conquered.
Of course after dark it is all different. It is then that one realizes that Paris is changed. The streets are no longer brilliantly lighted. There are no social functions. The city seems almost deserted. One misses the brightness and the activity. I really found it hard to find my way about and recognize familiar street corners in the dark. A few days of it were enough for me, and I was glad enough to come back to my quiet hilltop. At my age habits are strong.
Also let me tell you things are slowly changing here. Little by little I can feel conditions closing up about me, and I can see "coming events" casting "their shadows before."
Let me give you a little example.
A week ago today my New York doctor came down to spend a few days with me. It was a great event for a lady who had not had a visitor for months. He wanted to go out to the battlefield, so I arranged to meet his train at Esbly, go on with him to Meaux, and drive back by road.
I started for Esbly in my usual sans gêne manner, and was disgusted with myself on arriving to discover that I had left all my papers at home. However, as I had never had to show them, I imagined it would make no difference.
I presented myself at the ticket-office to buy a ticket for Meaux, and you can imagine my chagrin when I was asked for my papers. I explained to the station-master, who knows me, that I had left them at home. He was very much distressed,—said he would take the responsibility of selling me a ticket if I wanted to risk it,—but the new orders were strict, and he was certain I would not be allowed to leave the station at Meaux.
Naturally, I did not want to take such a risk, or to appear, in any way, not to be en règle. So I took the doctor off the train, and drove back here for my papers, and then we went on to Meaux by road.
It was lucky I did, for I found everything changed at Meaux. In the first place, we could not have an automobile, as General Joffre had issued an order forbidding the circulation inside of the military zone of all automobiles except those connected with the army. We could have a little victoria and a horse, but before taking that, we had to go to the Préfet de Police and exhibit our papers and get a special sauf- conduit,—and we had to be diplomatic to get that.
Once started, instead of sliding out of the town past a guard who merely went through the formality of looking at the driver's papers, we found, on arriving at the entrance into the route de Senlis, that the road was closed with a barricade, and only one carriage could pass at a time. In the opening stood a soldier barring the way with his gun, and an officer came to the carriage and examined all our papers before the sentinel shouldered his musket and let us pass. We were stopped at all the cross-roads, and at that between Barcy and Chambry,—where the pedestal of the monument to mark the limit of the battle in the direction of Paris is already in place,—we found a group of a dozen officers—not noncommissioned officers, if you please, but captains and majors. There our papers, including American passports, were not only examined, but signatures and seals verified.
This did not trouble me a bit. Indeed I felt it well, and high time, and that it should have been done ten months ago.
It was a perfect day, and the battlefield was simply beautiful, with the grain well up, and people moving across it in all directions. These were mostly people walking out from Meaux, and soldiers from the big hospital there making a pilgrimage to the graves of their comrades. What made the scene particularly touching was the number of children, and the nurses pushing babies in their carriages. It seemed to me such a pretty idea to think of little children roaming about this battlefield as if it were a garden. I could not help wishing the nation was rich enough to make this place a public park.
In spite of only having a horse we made the trip easily, and got back here by dinner-time.
Two days later we had an exciting five minutes.
It was breakfast time. The doctor and I were taking our coffee out-of- doors, on the north side of the house, in the, shade of the ivy-clad wall of the old grange. There the solitude is perfect. No one could see us there. We could only see the roofs of the few houses at Joncheroy, and beyond them the wide amphitheatre-like panorama, with the square towers of the cathedral of Meaux at the east and Esbly at the west, and Mareuil-lès-Meaux nestled on the river in the foreground.
You see I am looking at my panorama again. One can get used to anything, I find.
It was about nine o'clock.
Suddenly there was a terrible explosion, which brought both of us to our feet, for it shook the very ground beneath us. We looked in the direction from which it seemed to come—Meaux—and we saw a column of smoke rising in the vicinity of Mareuil—only two miles away. Before we had time to say a word we saw a second puff, and then came a second explosion, then a third and a fourth. I was just rooted to my spot, until Amélie dashed out of the kitchen, and then we all ran to the hedge,—it was only a hundred feet or so nearer the smoke, and we could see women running in the fields,—that was all.
But Amélie could not remain long in ignorance like that. There was a staff officer cantoned at Voisins and he had telephonic communication with Meaux, so down the hill she went in search of news, and fifteen minutes later we knew that a number of Taubes had tried to reach Paris in the night, that there had been a battle in the air at Crépy-les-Valois, and one of these machines had dropped four bombs, evidently meant for Meaux, near Mareuil, where they had fallen in the fields and harmed no one.
We never got any explanation of how it happened that a Taube should be flying over us at that hour, in broad daylight, or what became of it afterward. Probably someone knows. If someone does, he is evidently not telling us.
Amélie's remark, as she returned to her kitchen, was: "Well, it was nearer than the battle. Perhaps next time—" She shrugged her shoulders, and we all laughed, and life went on as usual. Well, I've heard the whir-r of a German bomb, even if I did not see the machine that threw it.
The doctor did not get over laughing until he went back to Paris. I am afraid he never will get over guying me about the shows I get up to amuse my visitors. I expect that I must keep a controlling influence over him, or, before he is done joking, the invisible Taube will turn into a Zeppelin, or perhaps a fleet of airships.