e of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. As we raced
along, the furrows, running at right angles to the road, seemed to be
eddying away from us in pleats and curves, and this illusion of a
stationary car in a whirling landscape was fortified by the contours of
the countryside, which were those of a great plain, great as any sea,
stretching away to a horizon of low chalk hills. Suddenly the car slowed
down at a signal from my companion and stopped. We got out. Not a sound
was to be heard except the mournful hum of the distant threshing
machine, but a peculiar clicking, like the halliard of a flagstaff in a
breeze, suddenly caught my ear. The wind was rising, and as I looked
around me I saw innumerable little tricolour flags fluttering against
small wooden staves. It was the battlefield of the Marne, the scene of
that immortal order of Joffre's in which he exhorted the sons of France
to conquer or die where they stood. As he had commanded, so had they
done. With an emotion too deep for words we each contemplated these
plaintive memorials of the heroes who lay where they fell. Our orderly
wept and made no effort to hide his tears. I thought of Jeanne's wistful
petition, but my heart sank, for these graves were to be numbered not by
hundreds but by thousands. "C'est absolument impossible!" said the
Comte, to whom I had communicated my quest. A sudden cry from the
orderly, who was moving from grave to grave in a close scrutiny of the
inscriptions, arrested us. He was standing by a wooden cross, half
draped by a tattered blue coat and covered with wreaths of withered
myrtle. A kepi pierced with holes lay upon the grave. And sure enough,
by some miracle of coincidence, he had found it. On a wooden slab we
read these words:

PAUL DUVAL,
151e Reg. d'Inf.
6 sept. 1914
MORT POUR LA PATRIE.

The sun was fast declining over the chalk hills and it grew bitter cold.
I unfolded my camera, stepped back eight paces, and pressed the trigger.
We clambered back into the car and resumed the road to Meaux. As I
looked over my shoulder the last things I saw in the enfolding twilight
were those little flags still fluttering wistfully in the wind.

XIII

MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS

We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments
of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal
reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at
Oxford,