ur grocer's shop, we could not buy any because the Food Controller
had omitted to put up the price. I had no time to reason this out,
because at that moment we heard a loud buzzing in the sky. We gazed up
into the velvet black night, that was like a skull-cap over the world.
The buzzing continued. "Perhaps," said my companion, "what we can hear is
our great big Bee."

That buzzing overhead did not develop. It merely waned and increased. It
was remarkable but inconsequential. It alarmed while giving no good cause
for alarm. In the invisible heavens there might have been One who was
playing Bogie to frighten poor mortals for fun. I went in to continue my
reading of Charles le Goffic's book, _General Foch at the Marne_. This
was all in accord with the Book of Daniel, and the jam that was uneatable
because it was not dear enough. My reading continued, as it were, the
mysterious buzzing.

I can give, as a rule, but a slack attention to military history, and my
interest in war itself is, fundamentally, the same as for cretinism and
bad drains. I merely wonder why it is, and wish it were not. But the
Marne, I regret to say, holds me in wonder still; for this there is
nothing to say excepting that, from near Meaux, I heard the guns of the
Marne. I saw some of its pomp and circumstance. I had been hearing the
guns of the War for some weeks then, but the guns of the Marne were
different. They who listened knew that those foreboding sounds were of
the crisis, with all its import. If that thundering drew nearer....

The Marne holds me still, as would a ghost story which, by chance, had me
within its weird. I want to know all that can be told of it. And if there
is one subject of the War more than another which needs a careful sorting
of the mixed straws in our beards, it is the Battle of the Marne. In the
case of my own beard, one of the straws is the Russian myth. In France,
as in England, everybody knew someone who had seen those Russians. One
huge camp, I was told, was near Chartres, and in Paris I was shown
Cossack caps which had come from there. That was on the day Manoury's
soldiers went east in their historic sortie of taxicabs against von
Kluck. I could not then go to Chartres to confirm that camp of Cossacks;
nor--and this is my straw--could the German Intelligence Staff. I did not
believe that the Russians were in France, but I could not prove they were
not, nor could the German generals, who, naturally, had heard about