On the Edge of the War Zone

On the Edge of the War Zone

Project Gutenberg's On the Edge of the War Zone, by Mildred Aldrich
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Title: On the Edge of the War Zone From the Battle of the Marne to the
Entrance of the Stars and Stripes
Author: Mildred Aldrich
Release Date: April 7, 2004 [EBook #11947]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE
EDGE OF THE WAR ZONE ***

Produced by A. Langley

On the Edge of the War Zone
From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes
by Mildred Aldrich
Author of "A Hilltop on the Marne" "Told in a French Garden"

To The Public The Friends, Old and New, Whose Persistent And
Sympathetic Demands For News Of Us On The Hilltop "After The
Battle," Inspired The Collecting And Editing Of These Letters, This
Little Book Is Gratefully Dedicated

On the Edge of the War Zone

I

La Creste, Huiry, Couilly. S et M.
September 16, 1914 Dear Old Girl:--
More and more I find that we humans are queer animals.
All through those early, busy, exciting days of September,--can it be
only a fortnight ago?--I was possessed, like the "busy bee," to "employ
each shining hour" by writing out my adventures. Yet, no sooner was
the menace of those days gone, than, for days at a time, I had no desire
to see a pen.
Perhaps it was because we were so absolutely alone, and because, for
days, I had no chance to send you the letters I had written, nor to get
any cable to you to tell you that all was well.
There was a strange sort of soulagement in the conviction that we had,
as my neighbors say, "échappé bien." I suppose it is human. It was like
the first days of a real convalescence--life is so good, the world is so
beautiful. The war was still going on. We still heard the cannon--they
are booming this minute--but we had not seen the spiked helmets
dashing up my hill, nor watched the walls of our little hamlet fall. I
imagine that if human nature were not just like that, Life could never be
beautiful to any thinking person. We all know that, though it be not
today, it is to be, but we seem to be fitted for that, and the idea does not
spoil life one bit.
It is very silent here most of the time. We are so few. Everybody works.
No one talks much. With the cannon booming out there no one feels in
the humor, though now and then we do get shaken up a bit. Everything
seems a long time ago. Yet it is really only nine days since the French
troops advanced--nine days since Paris was saved.
The most amazing thing of all is that our communications, which were
cut on September 2, were reopened, in a sort of a way, on the 10th.
That was only one week of absolute isolation. On that day we were told
that postal communication with Paris was to be reopened with an
automobile service from Couilly to Lagny, from which place, on the
other side of the Marne, trains were running to Paris.
So Amélie gathered up my letters, and carried them down the hill, and

dropped them hopefully in the box under the shuttered window of the
post-office in the deserted town.
That was six days ago, and it is only this morning that I began to feel
like writing to you again. I wanted to cable, but there is no way yet, so I
can only hope that you know your geography well enough not to have
worried since the 7th.
Although we are so shut in, we got news from the other side of the
Marne on Wednesday, the 9th, the day after I wrote to you--the fifth
day of the battle. Of course we had no newspapers; our mairie and
post-office being closed, there was no telegraphic news. Besides, our
telegraph wires are dangling from the poles just as the English
engineers left them on September 2. It seems a century ago.
We knew the Germans were still retreating because each morning the
booming of the cannon and the columns of smoke were further off, and
because the slopes and the hills before us, which had been burning the
first three days of the battle, were lying silent in the wonderful sunshine,
as if there were no living people in the