being a lovely accident right in
front of the gate half an hour ago.

The threshing-machine is at work in front of the old grange on the
other side of the road, just above my house. The men had come
back from breakfast, and were starting the machine up just as two
mounted soldiers, each leading two horses, rode out of the grange at
Amelie's, and started down the hill at a trot. The very moment the
horses were turning out to pass the machine,--and the space was
barely sufficient between the machine and the bank--a heedless man
blew three awful blasts on his steam whistle to call his aids. The
cavalry horses were used to guns, and the shrill mouth whistles of the
officers, but that did not make them immune to a steam siren, and in
a moment there was the most dangerous mix-up I ever saw. I
expected to see both riders killed, and I don't know now why they
were not, but neither man was thrown, even in spite of having three
frightened horses to master.

It was a stupid thing for the man on the machine to do. He would
have only had to wait one minute and the horses would have been by
with a clear road before them if they shied. But he "didn't think." The
odd thing was that the soldiers did not say an ugly word. I suppose
they are used to worse.

You have been reproaching me for over a year that I did not write
enough about the war. I do hope that all this movement about me
interests you. It is not war by any means, but the nearest relation to it
that I have seen in that time. It is its movements, its noise, its clothes.
It is gay and brave, and these men are no "chocolate soldiers."

XXXII

January 30, 1917

My, but it is cold here! Wednesday the 24th it was 13 below zero, and
this morning at ten o'clock it was 6 below. Of course this is in
Centigrade and not Fahrenheit, but it is a cold from which I suffer
more--it is so damp--than I ever did from the dry, sunny, below zero
as you know it in the States. Not since 1899 have I seen such cold as
this in France. I have seen many a winter here when the ground has
hardly frozen at all. This year it began to freeze a fortnight ago. It
began to snow on the 17th, a fine dry snow, and as the ground was
frozen it promises to stay on. It has so far, in spite of the fact that
once or twice since it fell the sun has shone. It looks very pretty, quite
unnatural, very reminiscent of New England.

It makes life hard for us as well as the soldiers, but they laugh and
say