ither the French of English.
The hard thing to bear was, that it was all conjecture.

So often, when I first took this place on the hill, I had looked off at
the plain and thought, "What a battlefield!" forgetting how often the
Seine et Marne had been that from the days when the kings lived at
Chelles down to the days when it saw the worst of the invasion of 1870.
But when I thought that, I had visions very different from what I was
seeing. I had imagined long lines of marching soldiers, detachments of
flying cavalry, like the war pictures at Versailles and Fontainebleau.
Now I was actually seeing a battle, and it was nothing like that. There
was only noise, belching smoke, and long drifts of white clouds
concealing the hill.

By the middle of the afternoon Monthyon came slowly out of the smoke.
That seemed to mean that the heaviest firing was over the hill and not
on it,--or did it mean that the battle was receding? If it did, then the
Allies were retreating. There was no way to discover the truth. And
all this time the cannon thundered in the southeast, in the direction of
Coulommiers, on the route into Paris by Ivry.

Naturally I could not but remember that we were only seeing the action
on the extreme west of a battle-line which probably extended hundreds of
miles. I had been told that Joffre had made a frontier of the Marne.
But alas, the Meuse had been made a frontier-but the Germans had crossed
it, and advanced to here in little less than a fortnight. If that--why
not here? It was not encouraging.

A dozen times during the afternoon I went into the study and tried to
read. Little groups of old men, women, and children were in the road,
mounted on the barricade which the English had left. I could hear the
murmur of their voices. In vain I tried to stay indoors. The thing was
stronger than I, and in spite of myself, I would go out on the lawn and,
field-glass in hand, watch the smoke. To my imagination every shot
meant awful slaughter, and between me and the terrible thing stretched a
beautiful country, as calm in the sunshine as if horrors were not. In
the field below me the wheat was being cut. I remembered vividly
afterward that a white horse was drawing the reaper, and women and
children were stacking and gleaning. Now and then the horse would stop,
and a woman, with her red handkerchief on her head, would stand, shading
her eyes a moment, and look off. Then the white horse would turn and go