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A HILLTOP ON THE MARNE

(PROM A MEDALLION BV THEODORE SPICBR-SIMSON)
8ixe of original 3 jtf inches in diameter

:/. :■. '

A HILLTOP ON
THE MARNE

BEING LETTERS WRITTEN
JUNE 3 SEPTEMBER 8, I914

BY

Mildred Aldricb

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

■/. AhXikid Octobtr npS

TO MY GRANDMOTHER

JUDITH TRASK BAKER

THAT STAUNCH NEW ENGLANDER AND

PIONEER UNIVER3ALIST

TO THE MEMORY OF WHOSE COURAGE

AND EXAMPLE I OWE A DEBT

OF ETERNAL GRATITUDE

\

\"

r,

V

ILLUSTRATIONS

Medallion Portrait of the Author by

Theodore Spicer-Simson Frontispiece

The House on the Hilltop 8

The Salon from the Front Door i 6

A Part of the Panorama from the Lawn 102

The Road to the Marnb 134

Taken from the point where the author stopped with
the captain of the bicycle corps

Map of the Surrounding Country End paper

A HILLTOP ON THE MARNE

J

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 ac-
tive, younger, more interested in life, less
burdened with your past — feel that it is
cowardly on my part to seek a quiet ref-
uge 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 ob-

1 3 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

jects 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 — interest-
ing. 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 per-
sistence in choosing for so many years the
most seductive city in the world, and say-
ing, "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 mor-

1 4i

A Hilltop on the Marne

bid 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 expect-

; ing it, but I am going to make a bold bid

j 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 strug-
gling 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 mat-
ter any other American — never heard of
Huiry. Yet it is a little hamlet less than
thirty miles from Paris. It is in that dis-
trict between Paris and Meaux little known
to the ordinary traveler. It only consists of

[ 5.1

A Hilltop on the Marne

less than a dozen rude farm-houses, less
than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux,
which, with a fair cathedral, and a beau-
tiful chestnut-shaded promenade on the
banks of the Marne, spanned just there by
lines 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 Bos-
suet 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 "sepa-
ration," 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 consider-
ably 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 build-
ing a fair sized salon, into which the front

[6]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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.

AH the rooms on the ground floor are
paved in red tiles, and the staircase is built
right in the salon. The ceilings are raft-
ered. 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

[ 7l

A Hilltop on the Marne

situation. The house stands in a small gar-
den, 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 wonder-
ful 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-Ger-
main. 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 val-
ley 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 Ville-
noy, 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

[ 8 J

\

\

A Hilltop on the Marne

and Voisins, — and beyond them the trees
that border the canal.

On the other side of the Marne the un-
dulating 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, Chauco-
nin, 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 guide-
book celebrates them. No railroad ap-
proaches 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 nation ale, — 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 de-
tached, from foundation to clock-tower.

This is a rolling country of grain fields,
orchards, masses of black-currant bushes,

[9 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 as-
sure you, h does more than smile these
lovely June mornings. I am up every morn-
ing 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 townB just
smiling in the early light, a thin strip of
river here and there, dimpling and danc-
ing, 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

[ 10]

A Hilltop on the Marne

a little narrow-gauge road running from
there to Crecy-la-Chapelle. Halfway be-
tween 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 Mer-
ovingian 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 reluc-
tantly put up a plea for my health, and
hope for a sympathetic hearing?

If I am to live much longer, — and I am

[ ii 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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

[ 12 }

- A Hilltop on the Marne

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, re-
treat is not cut off. I have sworn no eter-
nal oath not to change my mind again.

In any case you have no occasion to
worry about me : I Ve a head full of memo-
ries. 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 im-
possible. I shall not be lonely. No one
who reads is ever that. I may miss talk-
ing. Perhaps that is a good thing. I may
have talked too much. That does happen.

Remember one thing — I am not in-
accessible. 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, 1 91 4.

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 per-
fect 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 won-
der if either I or it ever lived anywhere
else. The shabby old furniture with which
you were long so familar just slipped
right into place. I had not a stick too lit-
tle, and could not have placed another
piece. I call that "bull luck."

I have always told you — you have not
I 14 I

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 char-
acteristic, 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 shut-
ters 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.

I 15 1

A Hilltop on the Makne

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 cud-
dled 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 ijemmede 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
[ 16 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 beauti-
fully, as I am a blessing to her, a new in-
terest 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 stag-
gered 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

I 17 1

\

A Hilltop on the Marne

— well along in his seventies. He is a na-
tive 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 univer-
sal for women in such places to have "his-
tories." You will see an old woman with a
bronzed face — sometimes still handsome,
[ 18]

A Hilltop on the Marne

often the reverse — in her short skirt, her
big apron tied round where a waist is not,
her still beautiful hair concealed in a col-
ored 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 founda-
tion of her fortune dates back to an affaire
du cc^ur, 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. Every-
thing 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 Mau-
passant look tame.

You have no idea how little money these
people spend. It must hurt them terribly

[ 19 1

A Hilltop ok the Marne

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 goitfg to the guillo-
tine 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 news-
paper, 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

I [ 20 ]

I
5

A Hilltop on the Marne

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
is n'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 con-
nect 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

[ 21 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

Couilly when I take that line, or when I
want to do an errand or go to the laun-
dress, 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.

I 22 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

My garden would make you chortle
with glee. You will have to take it by de-
grees, as I do. I have a sort of bowing ac-
quaintance 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

[ 23 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 rea-
sons, to myself. At any rate, all passers
| keep at a respectful distance from me and

him.
I Our usual walk is down the hill to the

j 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,

[ 24 j

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 bor-
dering 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 pano-
rama. 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 ser-
vie" — 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

[ *S 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 edu-
cated 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.
I 26}

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 * cream-
son 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 did n'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 ab-
sorbed 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 differ-

[ 27 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

ence 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 re-
turn 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 un-
cover before a shrine. But it is the land of
the young, the energetic, and the ambi-
tious, 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.

[ 29 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 t; nasty. Of course I do not deny
that I shall miss the inspiration of your
contradictions — or do you call it re-
partee? 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 wan-
dered 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 mis-
fortune and not his fault.

The truth is I did look in many more
familiar directions before fortunate acci-
dent led me here. I had an idea that I
wanted to live on the heights of Mont-
[ 30 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

morency, 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 tak-
ing 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 at-
tracted 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 Ram-
bouillet. 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 acci-
dentally 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 jnyself
well?

[ 31 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 Meauz. 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 pictur-
esque. 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-auz-
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 war-
rant wrung from the dying old king, her
royal lover, there is an open-air theater,
and there, on Sundays, the actors of the

1 32 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

Theatre Franfais 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 play-
house. 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 foot-
bridge, that pulls up, just to remind you
that it was once a royal city, with draw-
bridge 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
{hick walls are now pierced with windows, in

I 33 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 Ram-
bouillet estate where his father, the Duke
de Toulouse, one of Louis XIV's illegiti-
mate sons, died, where the Duke de Pen-
thievre 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 im-
agination into play, as very few vestiges
of the old days remain. I still get just as
much fun out of // y avait une fois 9 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 "Qa sonne a
Bouleurs" It will be the church bells at

[ 34 J

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 dis-
tance, as they have rung over the valley
for years. They sound so sad in the still
air that the expression, Qa 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, " Qa sonne
a Bouleurs" ^

I could show you something more mod-
ern 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-Perisr, 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,

[ 35 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 tjie road, much nearer
than I wish it were. Luckily it is rarely
occupied. Still, when it is, it is over-occu-
pied. 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 rec-
ord, 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

[ 36 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 £tats-Unis
(Massachusetts), 28,000 habitants."

Is n'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 assas-
sination 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 hap-
pier 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 in-
herit, and who could only have kept the

[ 37 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 ar- '
rive 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 re-
member 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 pave-
ment nearly drove me frantic. To offset it
I have memories of the Champs-filysees
and the Place de PHotel 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

[ 39 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

day. There was not even a ringing of
bells. The only difference there was to me
was that Amelie drove Pere over to Cou-
tevroult, 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 primi-
tive 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 proces-
sion, 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 charac-
ter, but I was sorry it was not gayer. Still,
it was so picturesque that it made me re-
gret anew, what I have so many times re-

[40 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

gretted 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 rail-
road, 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 pro-
cession, 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 grand-
child 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 national*
to Meaux. Pere walked ahead, — he could
not be accused of marching, — fiddling
away for dear life. The pretty young god-
mother carried the baby, in its wonder-
ful christening finery, walking between
the grandmother and the father, and the
guests, all in their gayest clothes, followed

[ 4i 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 unat-
tractive. 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 com-

I 42 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

plet de velours — which is to say my vel-
veteens. 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 land-
scape 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 actu-
ally 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 be-
lieved 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 £ault of that nasty
affair in Servia. I have a dim recollection
that I was very flippant about it in my last

U3 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

letter to you. After all, woman proposes
and politics upset her proposition. There
seems to be no quick remedy for habit,
more '$ 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 news-
paper 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 " alarm-
ists" were right. Germany has not been
turning her nation into an army just to
divert her population, nor spending her

[ 4S 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

last mark on ships just to amuse herself,
and keep Prince Henry busy.

I am sitting here this morning, as I sup-
pose 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

[ 46 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

that she sorely needed. But now that Ger-
many 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 con-
quered 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

l 47 1

A Hilltop on the Marne |

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 cham-
petre — who is the only thing in the way of
a policeman that we have — marched up
the road beating his drum. At every cross-
road 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 real-
ized that it was not so easy as I had thought
to separate myself from Life. We stood

I 49 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

there together — a little group of women
— and silently read it through — this com-
man,d 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 an
revolt, 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 Jiave,
had she wished, held stupid Austria back

[So]

! I

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 fly-
ing between Paris and the frontier. Every-
thing that flies seems to go right over my
roof. Early this morning I saw two ma-
chines 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 ma-

[ 5* ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

chine. 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 peo-
ple 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 centu-
ries 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, look-
ing 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 hori-
zon 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-com-
pelling to remember how these cars in the
air change all military tactics. It will be
almost impossible to make any big move-

[ S3 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

ment 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 impos-
sible this time that the Germans can pass
the frontier, and get by Verdun and Toul.
All the same, that other people were think-
ing 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 pre-
I S4l

A Hilltop on the Marne

paring 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 logi-
cal. It is like chemical action — given cer-
tain 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

[ 55 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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.

■ •** *"i*- *v<r»

it

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 inter-
mittent 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 watch-
ing the aeroplanes flying over my head, and

[ 57 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

wishing so hard that I knew what they 1
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 thrill-
ing 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 dissen-
sion — 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 de-
liriously, and waving handkerchiefs, in-
spired by the marching soldiers, with guns
on their shoulders, and the strains of mar-
tial music, varied with the then popular
"The girl I left behind me," or, "When

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 DeschanePs terse, re-
markable 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 hap-
pened 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

I 59 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 PArmee"; 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 rail-
way 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

[ 60 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

nationale from Couilly to Meaux, and 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 star-
ing 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

[ 61 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 bit-
ter 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 enter-
prise. 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

I62 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 naturali-
zation 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-

I 63 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 tow-
els, 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 tow-
els, 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 any-
thing. 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

[ 64]

A Hilltop on the Marne

point of view regarding this race — tra-
ditionally so gay, so indifferent to many
things that you consider moral, so fond of
their individual comfort and personal pleas-
ure, 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 musi-
cians his music is his life and he adds hand-
somely 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 with-
out 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

[ 6s 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

for her can keep her alive. It is a compelling
idea, is n'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 rail-
road, the construction department. He is
used to hardships. War is as good as any-
thing 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 coun-
try'; 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 is n'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

[66]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 con-
fess 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
168 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 merchan-
dise 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.

[ 69 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 hus-
band is over seventy. His own work in his
fields and orchard would seem too much
for him. Yet he and Amelie ind the don-
key are in the field by three o'clock every
morning, and by nine o'clock he is march-
ing 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

[ 70 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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, trot-
ting 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 omnivo-

[ 7i 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

rous 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

[ 7* J

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 fly-
ing, 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 pass*
port 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,

1 74]

A Hilltop on the Marne

as there we ran inside the wire entangle-
ments 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 ammuni-
tion wagons, and cannons. We were being
constantly held up to let trainloads of sol-
diers 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 re-
membered the remark of the woman re-
garding 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

[ 75 1

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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 foreign-
ers, struggling like people in a panic to
escape. In spite of the sad news — Brussels
occupied Thursday, Namur fallen Mon-
day — 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 for-
eigners. No French people that I saw
seemed to have any such feeling.

Apart from the excitement which pre-

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vailed 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 con-
tinue until women, and men unfit for mili-
tary 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. How-
ever, 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

[ 77 1

\

V

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 introduc-
tion 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 intermit-
tently. That reminds me, do read Leon
Daudet's " Fantomes et Vivantes " — the
first volumes of his memoirs. He is a ter-
rible example of "Le fils a papa." I don't
know why it is that a vicious writer, ab-
solutely lacking in reverence, can hold
one's attention so much better than a
kindly one can. In this book Daudet sim-

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1 A Hilltop on the Marne

ply 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 re-
sult. I am sure even now, when the Ger-
mans 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, "civiliza-
tion" 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

[ 79]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 to-
day, in the twentieth century, when in-
telligent people have long been striving
after a spiritual explanation of the mean-
ing of life, trying to prove its upward trend,
trying to beat out of it materialism, en-
deavoring to find in altruism a road to hap-
piness, 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 gov-
ernment ever permitted to be made. The
theory that the death penalty was a pre-
ventive of murder has long ago been ex-
ploded. 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

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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 consola-
tion. 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 happi-
ness 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 to-

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A Hilltop on the Marne

day? 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 pass-
ing 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 de-
livery wagons of the Louvre, the Bon
Marche, the Printemps, Petit- Saint-
Thomas, La Belle Jardiniere, Potin — all

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A Hilltop on the Marne

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 at-
tempt 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 inevit-
able "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 un-
less the Germans are beaten to a finish on
the Rhine and the allied armies cross Ger-
many 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."

1 84]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 (evi-
dently 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 evac-
uating the towns to the north of us.

t 8s J

A Hilltop on the Marne

I handed the basket of fruit I was hold-
ing into a coach of the train just pulling
into the station, and threw my last pack-
age 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 peo-
ple sitting aloft; there were carriages; there
were automobiles with the occupants
crowded in among bundles done up in
sheets; there were women pushing over-
loaded handcarts ; there were women push-
ing 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
there was a man on horseback, riding along
the line, trying to keep it moving in order
and to encourage the weary. Every one

[86]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 horse-
back, 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 discon-
certing.

[ 87 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 proces-
sion behind us were not still in our ears.

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

[ 88 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

Sure enough, when Amelie came to get
breakfast, she announced that the English
soldiers were at the Demi-Lune. The in-
fantry was camped there, and the artillery
had descended to Couilly and was mount-
ing 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 gate, 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;

[ 89 ]

a

A Hilltop on the Marne

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, "Ma-
dame, 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 '11 find
you a place"; and in another moment I
found myself, with Amelie, in a compart-
ment 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 remain-
ing but the soldiers in the barracks and the

[90]

A Hilltop on the Marne

archbishop. They had been ordered out by
the army the night before, and the rail-
road 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 com-
plaint 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 any-
thing else.

Just before the train ran into Lagny —
our first stop — I was surprised to see

[ 9i 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 over-
crowded coaches. I leaned forward, wish-
ing 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 was n'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.

[92 ]

u

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 pas-
sengers.

I had told Pere not to come after us —
it was so uncertain when we could get

[93 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 fly-
ing. 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 srtreet 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;

1 94]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 di-
rectly 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,

" [ 95 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

I leaned forward and said, "Beg your par-
don," 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 con-
tinue 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 5, 1914.

You can get some idea of how exhausted
I was on that night of Wednesday, Sep-
tember 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 morn-
ing — that was Thursday, September 3 —
can it be that it is only five days ago! She
also brought me news that they were pre-
paring to blow up the bridges on the Marne;
that the post-office had gone; that the Eng-
lish 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 break-
ing an opening into the underground pas-
sage 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

[97 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 con-
cerned. 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 pos-
sible 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

[ 98 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 Ame-
lie who she was, though I was a bit sur-
prised 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 may-
or'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

I 99 1

•* .»

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 rifugies, 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 con-
vinced her that my mind was made up. I
had decided to keep my face turned to-
ward 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

[ ioo ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 under-
ground.

I was too tired to argue. While I stood
watching her there was a tremendous ex-
plosion. 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 di-
visions 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 stand-
ing 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

I ioi 1

A Hilltop on the Marnk

he saw me. Then he looked at me, then up
at the flags flying over the gate, — saw
the Stars and Stripes, — smiled, and dis-
mounted.

"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 fore-
ground.

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.

[ 102 ]

7" -

t£s< „ g

■^

^

"^v J

<^

^wj

A Hilltop on the Marne

"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 Pen-
chard 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 con-
soling, 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.

[ 103 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

" 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 stir-
rup I had recovered.

" Is there anything I can do for you, cap-
tain?" 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,

I 104 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 an-
other 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 hun-
gry 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 hun-
gry men — and evidently hunger laughs
at laws — break all the regulations of the

1 105 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 sit-
ting on the benches, on the ground, any-
where, and were all smoking my best Egyp-
tian cigarettes, and I was running round
as happy as a queen, seeing them so con-
tented and comfortable.

It was a rude awakening when the cap-
tain rode up the street.

There was a sudden jumping up, a hur-
ried 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

I 106]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 de-
served it, and know it, and under the cir-
cumstances 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

[ 107 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

speaks their tongue since they left Eng-
land ; 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 un-
derstand. 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 ex-
plosion, 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

[ 108 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 rein-
forced at Saint-Quentin by a French de-
tachment at four o'clock. They got there

[ 109 J

A Hilltop on toe Marne

at eleven — the battle was over — and
lost. But these boys gave a wonderful ac-
count 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 or-
' dered them to give them what they hate —
the bayonet. The Germans were within a
few yards when a German automobile car-
rying a machine gun bore down on them
and discovered their position, but the Eng-
lish 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 pent."

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

I iiol

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 tco anxioiis to be seen."

1 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 neigh-
ing 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 ? "

[ I" 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

He took a long drink before he an-
swered : —

"Little lady, there is danger every-
where 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 be-
lieve 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 ex-

[ "2 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

ercise 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 die 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."

[ "3 I

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 lean-
ing 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

[ H4 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 sur-
prised to find my French caller of the morn-
ing 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.

I US 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

All this time he had been searching in
a letter-case, and finally selected an en-
velope 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 : —

CapU T. E. Simpson,

King's Own Yorkshire L. J.

13th Infantry Brigade,

15th Division,
British Expeditionary Force,

[ "6 1

. A Hilltop on the Marne

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 " Bed-
ford" 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 inte-

[ 117 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

rior, at all my books, looking so ornamen-
tal 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 six-
teenth-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 Den-
mark; 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

[ 118 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 demor-
alized. 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 can-
non? — and more than once a nearer ex-
plosion, — more bridges down, more Eng-
lish across.

It was not much after nine when two
English officers strolled down the road —
Captain Edwards and Major Ellison, of

t 119 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 any-
thing 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 Bed-
fordshire 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

t 120 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

a hen with a duckling. When she was not
twitching my sash straight, she was run-
ning 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 uncon-
sciously 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, "IVe seen it — good Lord —
and all I want is to get home," and he drew

I 121 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 had n'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 impres-
sion.

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

[ 122 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 strip-
ping and washing down like we have done.
You have n'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 flat-
tered that I had played the role so well,
but I knew he would not understand. Be-
sides, I was wondering if it were true. I
never knew the English except as indi-
viduals, 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

I "3 I

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 had n't an idea — about
twenty-five or thirty miles away. And on
he marched, up and down the road, per-
fectly 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! was n't I glad that I had not
been tempted to get into that mess !

I 1*4 ]

"l

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 re-
marked, 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
1 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 be-
fore you a very humiliated man. About

I 12s I

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 stupid-
ity."

"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 ab-
solutely 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 Ger-
mans 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

[ 126 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 alette sounded, and the battle
was on them. When they retreated by the
house where they had been so prettily en-
tertained 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 cap-

[ 127 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

tain was standing beside the engineer wait-
ing 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 but-
ton. The fuse did not act. He was in de-
spair, 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 eggt. 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.

[ 128 ]

it
ti
it

A Hilltop on the Marne

Pos8ibly, ,, 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, — Kitch-
ener, 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 re-
maining 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 Ger-
mans are not to be allowed to cross the
Marne at Meaux, and march on the city
by the main road from Rheims to the cap-
ital. The communications are all cut.
That does not mean that it will be impos-
sible for them to pass; they've got clever
engineers. It means that we have impeded
them and may stop them. I don't know.

I 129 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 op-
posite 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 did n't notice. Is n'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

[ 130 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 ex-
plained, 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 any-
thing, 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 com-
mon soldier is far fonder of talking than
his officer and apparently he knows more.
If he does n't, he thinks he does. So he
explained to me the situation as the "men
saw it." I remembered what Captain Ed-
wards 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 di-

[ 131 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

vision 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 know-
ing it. We have been fighting a force ten
times superior in numbers, and retreat-
ing, 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 J 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 has n'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

I 132 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 use-
lessly. 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 Tiill. 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

I 133 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 diyest
weathen

"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 cap-
tain. "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,

[ 134]

■: -f

j A Hilltop on the Marne

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."

A$ all the windows were barred and so
could be left open, I did n't mind ; so I
went in and locked up. The thing was get-
ting to be funny to me, — always doing
something, and nothing happening. I sup-
pose 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

[ 135 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

returned up the hill. They had to dis-
mount and wheel their machines under the
barricade, and they did it so prettily, dis-
mounting 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 5, 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 bar-
ricade, 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 com-
mune.

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

I' 137 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 communica-
tion possibly with the north, and none with
the south except by road over the hill to
Lagny. Esbly evacuated, Couilly evacu-
ated, Quincy evacuated. All the shops
closed. No government, no post-office, and
absolutely no knowledge of what had hap-
pened 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

I 138 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

into the open. Luckily they seemed dis-
inclined 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 suf-
fered. 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 incident-
ally to discover if there were any soldiers
about. Just in the front of their house I

I 139 J

A Hilltop on the Marne

found an English bicycle scout, leaning on
his wheel and trying to make himself un-
derstood in a one-sided monosyllabic dia-
logue, with the two girls standing in their
window.

I asked him who he was. He showed his
papers. They were all right — an Irish-
man — 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 de-
serted. 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,

I 140 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 Eng-
lish 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 ex-
plained 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 tc\
have disappeared, so he asked for th^
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."

I 141 1

A Hilltop on the Marns

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 '11 come
back here to sleep to-night. I 'm perfectly

[ 142 ]

A Hilltop on the Makne

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 command-
ing 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 '11 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 business-
like. 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 oc-
curred 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 un-

1 143 j

A Hilltop on the Marne

corked 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 fif-
teen 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 under-
stood 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 mat-
ter, but that must keep until I get to the
way of the discovery.

AH this excitement kept me from listen-
ing too much to the cannon, which had
been booming ever since nine o'clock. Ame-
lie had been busy running between her

[ 144 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 be-
lieve 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, "Ame-
lie," — as if she could help, — and I re-
treated. 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 fol-
lowed 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 bril-
liantly on silent Mareuil and Chauconin,
but Monthyon and Penchard were en-
veloped in smoke. From the eastern and

[ 145 1

A Hilltop on the Marks

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 Eng-
lish 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 or 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.

i h6 i.

► A Hilltop on the Marne

By the middle of the afternoon Mon-
thyon 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 south-
east, 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 prob-
ably 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 chil-
dren 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

1 147]

A Hilltop on the Marne

in hand, watch the smoke. To my imagina-
tion every shot meant awful slaughter, and
between me and the terrible thing stretched
a beautiful country, as calm in the sun-
shine as if horrors were not. In the field
below me the wheat was being cut. I re-
membered 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 mo-
ment, and look off. Then the white horse
would turn and go plodding on. The grain
had to be got in if the Germans were com-
ing, and these fields were to be trampled
as they were in 1870. Talk about the dual-
ity 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, ex-
plode. 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

[ 148 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 Ame-
lie 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

[ 149 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 6, 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 be-
tween 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 noth-
ing. As soon as it was cleared away, I went

[ 151 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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, slip-
pers, an extra pair of low-heeled shoes,
plenty of handkerchiefs, — just the essen-
tials 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, and 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 all 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, —

i is* i

A Hilltop on the Marne

his cross of the Legion d'Honntur, 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 XVFs
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 im-
possible, 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 ad-
venture 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 sou-
venirs of my father's family. It is hard to
leave all that — but I am afraid — ter-
ribly afraid for the children."

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

[ 153 I

A Hilltop on the Marne

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

That made me laugh, but I did n'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."

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A Hilltop on the Marne

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 be-

[ 155 J

• • * « »

A Hilltop on the Marne

fore 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

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A Hilltop on the Marne

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 be-
fore. Oddly enough, to my surprise, I
slept, and slept well.

XV

September 8, 1914.

I did not wake on the morning of Mon-
day, September 7, — yesterday, — until
I was waked by the cannon at five. I
jumped out of bed and rushed to the win-
dow. This time there could be no doubt
of it: the battle was receding. The can-
nonading 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 weathen

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-
TOurcq," 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

I IS8 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 does n'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 breath-
lessly 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 159]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 pret-
tily; 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

[ 160]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 colo-
nel 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, look-
ing 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 did n't quite fall through the gate back-
wards. 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 fig-
ure and bearing of a girl. The lad recovered
himself at once, and said, "Why, of course
not, — she does n't speak any English."
I was glad that he did n't even apologize,

[ 161 ]

A Hilltop on the Makne

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 hill.

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 hap-
pened. I even found myself asking, in my
innermost soul, what I had done to de-
serve 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 ex-
tending 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

[ 162 ]

A Hilltop on the Makne

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 pre-
pared 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 eter-
nally hanging round dans les coulisses, I am
never in the play. I instinctively thought
of Captain Simpson, who had left his bro-
ther 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 curi-
osity to see one scene or the other. I knew

I 163 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 re-
inforcements 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. Be-
fore 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 en-
counter 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

[ 164 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 pass-
ing army. They made quick work, and n6
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 quar-
ters for his horses as well as his men. Be-
fore 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 man-
ner 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.

[ 165 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 be-
fore, — thirty-six miles, — without an idea
that the battle was going on 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 after-
noon — only yesterday — at my gate,

[ 166]

A Hilltop on the Marne

from such a fluent, amusing, clever
French chap, — a bicyclist in the ambu-
lance 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 bat-
tles. Not one of the Tommies had men-
tioned 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 open-
ing 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

[ 167 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

that only their superior number made a
victory out of a disaster.

"I suppose," he said, "that in the his-
tory 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 sacri-
fice 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 coun-
try; 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 thou-
sands sprang into the gaps. They ad-
vanced 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

[ 168 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 gun-
ners turned ill and said to his commander,
who stood beside him: "For the love of

I 169 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

God, colonel, shall I go on?" and the colo-
nel, 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 deliber-
ately 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 am-
bulance destroyed. But you know the Ger-
mans 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 be-
hind 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.

[ 170 J

A HllLTOP ON THE MaRNE

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 bar-
rier 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 barri-
cade.

"Who put it there?" he asked peremp-
torily, 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, J suppose — as he
asked: —

"What is it for?"

I told him it was to prevent a detach-
ment of Uhlans from coming up the hill.
He hesitated a moment; then asked if it
served any purpose now. I might have

I I7i 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

told him that the Uhlans were still here,
but I did n't, I simply said that I did not
know that it did. "Cut it down!" he or-
dered, 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 did n't care. I hope

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A Hilltop on the Marne

he did n'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 them-
selves 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 dap-
per, upright, little chap. He was covered
with dust from his head to his heels. I
could have written his name on him any-
where. 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."

[ 173 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 con-
ducting 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 in-
spired 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 him-
self 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,

I 174]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 ter-
race, 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 min-
utes, 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.

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 reluc-
tance on my part — which I evidently had
not been able to conceal — to looking off
at the plain, which I own I had been sur-
prised 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

[ 176 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 an-
swered 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

( 177 1

A Hilltop on toe Marne

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 be-
fore; 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

I 178 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

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.

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A Hilltop on the Marne

Still it rose, and we watched it sail off to-
ward 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 un-
mask 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 every-
thing to spare me inconvenience, had four-
teen 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

I 180]

A Hilltop on the Marne

forget. Everywhere men were sleeping in
the open — their guns beside them. Fires,
over which they had cooked, were smoul-
dering; 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 every-
body was astir early. It was another glori-
ously 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 accou-
terments. 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.

[ 182 ]

j

A Hilltop <m the Marne

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 but 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. Wc 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

I 183 ]

A Hilltop on the Makne

it possible that it was only a week ago that
I had heard the drum beat for the dis-
arming 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." Per-
haps 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 ex-
plained, 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 es-
caped, 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."

[ 184 ]

A Hilltop on the Marne

"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 ex-
ploded 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, "youVe 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 mo-
ment 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

[ 185 1

A Hilltop on the Marne

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 regi-
ment began to move. Nobands 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 Sun-
day 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 oppor-
tunity 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 Septem-
ber 4, 1914, which has but just become available
for publication, has special interest and signi-
ficance: —

1. It is fitting to take advantage of the rash situa-
tion of the First German Army to concentrate upon
it the efforts of the Allied Armies on the extreme left.
All dispositions will be m^ade in the course of Septem-
ber 5 to start for the attack on September 6.

2. The disposition to be carried out by the eve-
ning 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 avail-
able 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-Ester-
nay-Sezanne, ready to attack in the general direc-
tion from south to north, the Second Cavalry Corps
securing the connection between the British Army
and the Fifth Army.

[ 187 1

Appendix

(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.

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