one was suggested
by the fact that, in the long street running parallel to the one picked
for destruction, nearly every door still carried its chalked order to
"Schoenen." One house spared was that of a town fireman. "I've got five
little children," he told the German soldiers. "They're one, two,
three, four, five years old, and I'm expecting another." And they went
on.

These were common sights and sounds of that gracious country north of
Paris--deserted, perhaps demolished, villages; the silent countryside,
with dead horses, bits of broken shell, smashed bicycles or artillery
wagons along the road; and the tainted autumn wind. Along the level
French roads, under their arches of elms or poplars, covered carts on
tall wheels, drawn by two big farm horses harnessed one behind another,
and loaded with women, children, and household goods, were beginning to
move northward as they had moved south three weeks before. Trains,
similarly packed, were creeping up to within ear-shot of the constant
cannonading, and it was on one of these trains that we had come.

In Paris, recovered now from the dismay of three weeks before, keen
French imaginations were daily turning the war into terms of heroism and
sacrifice and military glory. Even editors and play-writers fighting at
the front were able to send back impressions now and then, and these,
stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as
impersonal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting comfortably at some cafe
table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming
up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the
heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth
time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one
brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over again,
without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still
city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of
unreality. Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words
that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard
dies but never surrenders.

A man could leave the Cafe de la Paix and in two hours be under fire,
where killing was as matter of fact as driving tacks. And in between
these two zones--the zone where war was at once a highly organized
business and a splendid, terrible game, and that in which its
disjointed, horrible surfaces we