ost of the time. We are so few. Everybody
works. No one talks much. With the cannon booming out there no
one feels in the humor, though now and then we do get shaken up a
bit. Everything seems a long time ago. Yet it is really only nine days
since the French troops advanced--nine days since Paris was saved.

The most amazing thing of all is that our communications, which were
cut on September 2, were reopened, in a sort of a way, on the 10th.
That was only one week of absolute isolation. On that day we were
told that postal communication with Paris was to be reopened with an
automobile service from Couilly to Lagny, from which place, on the
other side of the Marne, trains were running to Paris.

So Amelie gathered up my letters, and carried them down the hill, and
dropped them hopefully in the box under the shuttered window of the
post-office in the deserted town.

That was six days ago, and it is only this morning that I began to feel
like writing to you again. I wanted to cable, but there is no way yet, so
I can only hope that you know your geography well enough not to
have worried since the 7th.

Although we are so shut in, we got news from the other side of the
Marne on Wednesday, the 9th, the day after I wrote to you--the fifth
day of the battle. Of course we had no newspapers; our mairie and
post-office being closed, there was no telegraphic news. Besides, our
telegraph wires are dangling from the poles just as the English
engineers left them on September 2. It seems a century ago.

We knew the Germans were still retreating because each morning
the booming of the cannon and the columns of smoke were further
off, and because the slopes and the hills before us, which had been
burning the first three days of the battle, were lying silent in the
wonderful sunshine, as if there were no living people in the world
except us few on this side of the river.

At no time can we see much movement across the river except with a
glass. The plains are undulating. The roads are tree-lined. We trace
them by the trees. But the silence over there seems different today.
Here and there still thin ribbons of smoke--now rising straight in the
air, and now curling in the breeze--say that something is burning, not
only in the bombarded towns, but in the woods and plains. But what?
No one knows.

One or two of our older men crossed the Marne on a raft on the 10th,
the sixth day of the battle. They brought back word that thousands
f