he entered, brought his hand to
salute, and sat down, without a word. They did not even look at one
another. It is one of the most marked changes in attitude that I have
seen since the war. It is right. We were all getting too talkative, but it
takes away the one charm there was in going to Paris. I've had no
adventures since I wrote to you Christmas Day, although we did
have, a few days after that, five minutes of excitement.
One day I was walking in the garden. It was a fairly bright day, and
the sun was shining through the winter haze. I had been counting my
tulips, which were coming up bravely, admiring my yellow crocuses,
already in flower, and hoping the sap would not begin to rise in the
rose bushes, and watching the Marne, once more lying like a sea
rather than a river over the fields, and wondering how that awful
winter freshet was going to affect the battle-front, when, suddenly,
there was a terrible explosion. It nearly shook me off my feet.
The letter-carrier from Quincy was just mounting the hill on his wheel,
and he promptly tumbled off it. I happened to be standing where I
could see over the hedge, but before I could get out the stupid
question, "What was that?" there came a second explosion, then a
third and a fourth.
They sounded in the direction of Paris.
"Zeppelins," was my first thought, but that was hardly the hour for
them.
I stood rooted to the spot. I could hear voices at Voisins, as if all the
world had rushed into the street. Then I saw Amelie running down the
hill. She said nothing as she passed. The postman picked himself up,
passed me a letter, shrugged his shoulders, and pushed his wheel up
the hill.
I patiently waited until the voices ceased in Voisins. I could see no
smoke anywhere. Amelie came back at once, but she brought no
explanation. She only brought a funny story.
There is an old woman in Voisins, well on to ninety, called Mere R---.
The war is too tremendous for her localized mind to grasp. Out of
the confusion she picks and clings to certain isolated facts. At the first
explosion, she rushed, terrorized, into the street, gazing up to the
heavens, and shaking her withered old fists above her head, she
cried in her shrill, quavering voice: "Now look at that! They told us the
Kaiser was dying. It's a lie. It's a lie, you see, for here he comes
throwing his cursed bombs down on us."
You know all this month the papers have had Guillaume dying of that
ever-recurring
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