.
Perhaps had there been anyone with me I should have felt it more.
Being alone I did not give it a thought.

Sunday afternoon, the weather being still fine and the distant
booming of the cannon making reading or writing impossible--I am
not yet habituated to it--I went for a walk. I took the road down the hill
in the direction of the Marne. It is a pretty walk--not a house all the
way.

It leads along what is called the Pave du Roi, dropping down into the
plain of the valley, through the woods, until the wheat fields are
reached, and then rising from the plain, gently, to the high suspension
bridge which crosses the canal, two minutes beyond which lies the
river, here very broad and sluggish.

This part of the canal, which is perfectly straight from Conde to
Meaux, is unusually pretty. The banks are steep, and "tall poplar
trees" cast long shadows across grass-edged footpaths, above which
the high bridge is swung. There is no bridge here across the Marne;
the nearest in one direction is at the Iles-les-Villenoy, and in the other
at Meaux. So, as the Germans could not have crossed the Marne
here, the canal bridge was not destroyed, though it was mined. The
barricades of loose stones which the English built three weeks ago,
both at the bridgehead and at a bend in the road just before it is
reached, where the road to Mareuil sur Marne turns off, were still
there.

The road along the canal and through Mareuil is the one over which
the German cavalry would have advanced had von Kluck's army
succeeded in crossing the Marne at Meaux, and it was patrolled and
guarded by the Yorkshire boys on September 2, and the Bedfords
from the night of the 3d to the morning of the 5th.

The road from the canal to the river, separated here by only a few
yards, leads through a wide avenue, across a private estate
belonging to the proprietor of the plaster quarries at Mareuil, to a
ferry, beside which was the lavoir. There is a sunken and terraced
fruit garden below the road, and an extensive enclosure for fancy
fowl.

The bank of the river showed me a sad sight. The wash-houses were
sunk. They lay under water, with their chimneys sticking out. The little
river piers and all the row-boats had been smashed and most of them
sunk. A few of them, drawn up on the bank, were splintered into
kindling wood. This work of destruction had been done, most
effectively, by the English. They had not left a stick anywhere that
could have served the