ost 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 extending 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 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 prepared 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 eternally hanging round dans les coulisses, I
am never in the play. I instinctively thought of Captain Simpson, who
had left his brother 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 curiosity to see one scene or the
other. I knew 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 reinforcements 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. Before 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 encounter the
expressions of astonishment to which I am now q