On the Edge of the War Zone | Page 8

over the market, his keen eyes seeing everything, as influential in
the everyday life of his diocese as he is in its spiritual affairs, a model
of what a modern archbishop ought to be.
I hear he was on the battlefield from the beginning, and that the first
ambulances to reach Meaux found the seminary full of wounded picked
up under his direction and cared for as well as his resources permitted.
He has written his name in the history of the old town under that of
Bossuet--and in the records of such a town that is no small distinction.
The news which is slowly filtering back to us from the plains is another
matter.
Some of the families in our commune have relatives residing in the
little hamlets between Cregy and Monthyon, and have been out to help
them re-install themselves. Very little in the way of details of the battle
seems to be known. Trees and houses dumbly tell their own tales. The
roads are terribly cut up, but road builders are already at work. Huge
trees have been broken off like twigs, but even there men are at work,
uprooting them and cutting the wood into lengths and piling it neatly
along the roadside to be carted away. The dead are buried, and Paris
automobiles are rapidly removing all traces of the battles and carrying
out of sight such disfigurements as can be removed.
But the details we get regarding the brief German occupation are too
disgusting for words. It is not the actual destruction of the battle--for

Barcy alone of the towns in sight from here seems to be practically
destroyed--which is the most painful, it is the devastation of the
German occupation, with its deliberate and filthy defilement of the
houses, which defies words, and will leave a blot for all time on the
records of the race so vile-minded as to have achieved it. The deliberate
ingenuity of the nastiness is its most debasing feature. At Penchard,
where the Germans only stayed twenty-four hours, many people were
obliged to make bonfires of the bedding and all sorts of other things as
the only and quickest way to purge the town of danger in such hot
weather.
I am told that Penchard is a fair example of what the Germans did in all
these small towns which lay in the line of their hurried retreat.
It is not worth while for me to go into detail regarding such disgusting
acts.
Your imagination, at its most active, cannot do any wrong to the race
which in this war seems determined to offend where it cannot terrorize.
It is wonderfully characteristic of the French that they have accepted
this feature of their disaster as they have accepted the rest--with
courage, and that they have at once gone to work to remove all the
German "hall-marks" as quickly as possible--and now have gone back
to their fields in the same spirit.
It was not until yesterday that I unpacked my little hat-trunk and
carefully put its contents back into place.
It has stood all these days under the stairs in the salon--hat, cape, and
gloves on it, and shoes beside it, just as I packed it.
I had an odd sensation while I was emptying it. I don't know why I put
it off so long. Perhaps I dreaded to find, locked in it, a too vivid
recollection of the day I closed it. It may be that I was afraid that, with
the perversity of inanimate things, it had the laugh on me.
I don't believe I put it off from fear of having to repack it, for, so far as
I can know myself, I cannot find in my mind any signs, even, of a dread
that what had happened once could happen again. But I don't know.
I wish I had more newsy things to write you. But nothing is happening
here, you see.

IlI

October 2, 1914
Well, Amélie came back yesterday, and I can tell you it was a busy day.
I assure you that I was glad to see her about the house again. I liked
doing the work well enough,--for a little while. But I had quite all I
wanted of it before the fortnight was over. I felt like "giving praise"
when I saw her coming into the garden, looking just as good as new,
and, my word for it, she made things hum yesterday.
The first thing she did, after the house was in order, and lunch out of
the way, was to open up the cave in which she had stored her household
treasures a month ago, and I passed a rare afternoon. I spent a good part
of it getting behind something to conceal my silent laughter. If