he
right or left the "seventy-fives," as though aroused by the moon, began
like terriers to bark viciously. The officer in the steel casque paused
to listen, fixed their position, and named them. How he knew where they
were, how he knew where he was himself, was all part of the mystery.
Rats, jet black in the moonlight, scurried across the open places,
scrambled over our feet, ran boldly between them. We had scared them,
perhaps, but not half so badly as they scared me.

We pushed on past sentinels, motionless, silent, fatefully awake. The
moonlight had turned their blue uniforms white and flashed on their
steel helmets. They were like men in armor, and so still that only when
you brushed against them, cautiously as men change places in a canoe,
did you feel they were alive. At times, one of them thinking something
in the gardens of barb-wire had moved, would loosen his rifle, and
there would be a flame and flare of red, and then again silence, the
silence of the hunter stalking a wild beast, of the officer of the law,
gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of the burglar to betray his
presence.

The next morning I called to make my compliments to General Franchet
d'Esperay. He was a splendid person--as alert as a steel lance. He
demanded what I had seen.

"Nothing!" he protested. "You have seen nothing. When you return from
Serbia, come to Champagne again and I myself will show you something of
interest."

I am curious to see what he calls "something of interest."

"I wonder what's happening in Buffalo?"

There promised to be a story for some one to write a year after the war.
It would tell how quickly Champagne recovered from the invasion of the
Germans. But one need not wait until after the war. The story can be
written now.

We know that the enemy was thrown back across the Aisne.

We know that the enemy drove the French and English before him until at
the Forest of Montmorency, the Hun was within ten and at Claye within
fifteen miles of Paris.

But to-day, by any outward evidence, he would have a hard time to prove
it. And that is not because when he advanced he was careful not to tramp
on the grass or to pick the flowers. He did not obey even the warnings
to automobilists: "Attention _les enfants_!"

On the contrary, as he came, he threw before him thousands of tons of
steel and iron. Like a cyclone he uprooted trees, unroofed houses; like
a tidal wave he excavated roads that had been built by the Rom