On the Edge of the War Zone | Page 3

anything can happen. I'll wager you know more about it on your side of the great pond than we do here within hearing of the battle.
I don't even know whether it is true or not that Gallieni is out there. If it is, that must mean that the army covering Paris has advanced, and that Joffre has called out his reserves which have been entrenched all about the seventy-two miles of steel that guards the capital. I wondered then, and today--seven days later--I am wondering still.
It was useless to give these conjectures to Am��lie. She was too deep in her disappointment. She walked sadly beside me back to the garden, an altogether different person from the one who had come racing across the field in the sunshine. Once there, however, she braced up enough to say:
"And only think, madame, a woman out there told me that the Germans who were here last week were all chauffeurs at the Galeries Lafayette and other big shops in Paris, and that they not only knew all the country better than we do, they knew us all by name. One of them, who stopped at her door to demand a drink, told her so himself, and called her by name. He told her he had lived in Paris for years."
That was probably true. The delivery automobiles from all the big shops in Paris came out here twice, and some of them three times a week. It is no secret that Paris was full of Germans, and has been ever since that beastly treaty of Frankfort, which would have expired next year.
After Am��lie had gone back to her work, I came into the library and sat down at my desk to possess my soul with what patience I could, until official news came. But writing was impossible.
Of course to a person who has known comparatively few restraints of this sort, there is something queer in this kind of isolation. I am afraid I cannot exactly explain it to you. As I could not work, I walked out on to the chemin Madame. On one side I looked across the valley of the Marne to the heights crowned by the bombarded towns. On the other I looked across the valley of the Grande Morin, where, on the heights behind the trees, I knew little towns like Coutevoult and Montbarbin were evacuated. In the valley at the foot of the hill, Couilly and St. Germain, Montry and Esbly were equally deserted. No smoke rose above the red roofs. Not a soul was on the roads. Even the railway station was closed, and the empty cars stood, locked, on the side- tracks. It was strangely silent.
I don't know how many people there are at Voisins. I hear that there is no one at Quincy. As for Huiry? Well, our population--everyone accounted for before the mobilization--was twenty-nine. The hamlet consists of only nine houses. Today we are six grown people and seven children.
There is no doctor if one should be so silly as to fall ill. There are no civil authorities to make out a death certificate if one had the bad taste to die--and one can't die informally in France. If anyone should, so far as I can see, he would have to walk to his grave, dig it, and lie down in it himself, and that would be a scandal, and I am positive it would lead to a proc��s. The French love lawsuits, you know. No respectable family is ever without one.
However, there has not been a case of illness in our little community since we were cut off from the rest of the world.
Somehow, at times, in the silence, I get a strange sensation of unreality--the sort of intense feeling of its all being a dream. I wish I didn't. I wonder if that is not Nature's narcotic for all experiences outside those we are to expect from Life, which, in its normal course, has tragedies enough.
Then again, sometimes, in the night, I have a sensation as if I were getting a special view of a really magnificent spectacle to which the rest of "my set" had not been invited--as if I were seeing it at a risk, but determined to see it through.
I can imagine you, wrinkling your brows at me and telling me that that frame of mind comes of my theatre-going habit. Well, it is not worth while arguing it out. I can't. There is a kind of veil over it.
Nor were the day's mental adventures over.
I was just back from my promenade when my little French friend from the foot of the hill came to the door. I call her "my little friend," though she is taller than I am, because she is only half my age. She came with the