de was strangely and uncannily quiet. There was only
the sound of singing birds above the fields which were flooded with
the golden light of the setting sun.

Then I came into the town. An intense silence brooded there, among
the narrow little streets below the old Norman church--a white jewel
on the rising ground beyond. Almost every house was shuttered, with
blind eyes, but here and there I looked through an open window into
deserted rooms. No human face returned my gaze. It was an
abandoned town, emptied of all its people, who had fled with fear in
their eyes like those peasants along the roadway.

But presently I saw a human form. It was the figure of a French
dragoon, with his carbine slung behind his back. He was standing by
the side of a number of gunpowder bags. A little further away were
groups of soldiers at work by two bridges--one over a stream and one
over a road. They were working very calmly, and I could see what
they were doing. They were mining the bridges to blow them up at a
given signal. As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with
broken bottles and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and
carefully made.

It was a queer experience. It was obvious that there was a very grim
business being done in Beauvais, and that the soldiers were waiting
for something to happen. At the railway station I quickly learnt the
truth. The Germans were only a few miles away in great force. At any
moment they might come down, smashing everything in their way,
and killing every human being along that road. The station master, a
brave old type, and one or two porters, had determined to stay on to
the last. "Nous sommes ici," he said, as though the Germans would
have to reckon with him. But he was emphatic in his request for me to
leave Beauvais if another train could be got away, which was very
uncertain. As a matter of fact, after a mauvais quart d'heure, I was
put into a train which had been shunted into a siding and left
Beauvais with the sound of the German guns in my ears.

Sitting in darkness and shaken like peas in a pod because of
defective brakes, we skirted the German army, and by a twist in the
line almost ran into the enemy's country; but we rushed through the
night, and the engine-driver laughed and put his oily hand up to the
salute when I stepped out to the platform of an unknown station.

"The Germans won't have us for dinner after all," he said. "It was a
little risky all the