from my town," said our statesman.
Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All
inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.

Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and
shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their
eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to
our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who
threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to
the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of
victorious France--France after forty years' waiting throwing back a
foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields
and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling
landscape, basked in victory. Dead the spirit of anyone who could
not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a
Frenchman. Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one
seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages
which had saved Paris and France.

The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom
we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead.
Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our
speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete?

Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that
brought to our ears the thunder of guns, with firing so rapid that it was
like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size
of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an
open sweep of park-like country toward wooded hills. As far as we
could see against the background of the foliage which threw it into
relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shells, renewed
with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.

This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns, in sight; only against
masses of autumn green a diaphanous, man-made nimbus which
was raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it
lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms
hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall
grass. Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been
able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.

There was hard fighting; a lot of French and German were being
killed in the direction of Compiegne and Noyon to-da