plied
that Monsieur le Chef-Major was at home and his comrades would be
welcome to treat the garden as if it were theirs, and he made me another
of his bows and marched away, to return in five minutes, accompanied by
half a dozen officers and a priest. As they passed the window, where I
still sat, they all bowed at me solemnly, and Chef-Major Weitzel stopped
to ask if madame would be so good as to join them, and explain the
country, which was new to them all.

Naturally madame did not wish to. I had not been out there since
Saturday night--was it less than forty-eight hours before? But equally
naturally I was ashamed to refuse. It would, I know, seem
super-sentimental to them. So I reluctantly followed them out. They
stood in a group about me--these men who had been in battles, come out
safely, and were again advancing to the firing line as smilingly as one
would go into a ballroom--while I pointed out the towns and answered
their questions, and no one was calmer or more keenly interested than
the Breton priest, in his long soutane with the red cross on his arm.
All the time the cannon was booming in the northeast, but they paid no
more attention to it than if it were a threshing-machine.

There was a young lieutenant in the group who finally noticed a sort of
reluctance on my part-which I evidently had not been able to conceal--to
looking off at the plain, which I own I had been surprised to find as
lovely as ever. He taxed me with it, and I confessed, upon which he
said:--

"That will pass. The day will come--Nature is so made, luckily--when
you will look off there with pride, not pain, and be glad that you saw
what may prove the turning of the tide in the noblest war ever fought
for civilization."

I wonder.

The chef-major turned to me--caught me looking in the other
direction--to the west where deserted Esbly climbed the hill.

"May I be very indiscreet?" he asked.

I told him that he knew best.

"Well," he said, "I want to know how it happens that you--a foreigner,
and a woman--happen to be living in what looks like exile--all alone on
the top of a hill--in war-time?"

I looked at him a moment--and--well, conditions like these make people
friendly with one another at once. I was, you know, never very
reticent, and in days like these even the ordinary reticences of
ordinary times are swept away. So I answered frankly, as if these men
were old friends, and not the acquaintances of an hour, that,