n--I see on the route nationale, when I
drive down to Couilly. Across the fields it is a short and pretty walk.
Amelie makes it in twenty minutes. I could, if it were not for climbing
that terrible hill to get back.

Besides, the mud is inches deep. I have a queer little four-wheeled
cart, covered, if I want to unroll the curtains. I call it my perambulator,
and really, with Ninette hitched in, I am like an overgrown baby in its
baby carriage, and any nurse I ever knew would push a perambulator
faster than that donkey drags mine. Yet it just suits my mood. I sit
comfortably in it, and travel slowly--time being non-existent--so slowly
that I can watch the wheat sprout, and gaze at the birds and the view
and the clouds. I do hold on to the reins--just for looks--though I have
no need to, and I doubt if Ninette suspects me of doing anything so
foolish. On the road I always meet officers riding along, military cars
flying along, army couriers spluttering along on motor-cycles, heavy
motor transports groaning up hill, or thundering down, and now and
then a long train of motor-ambulances. Almost any morning, at nine, I
can see the long line of camions carrying the revitaillement towards
the front, and the other afternoon, as I was driving up the hill, I met a
train of ambulances coming down. The big grey things slid, one after
another, around the curve of the Demi-Lune, and simply flew by me,
raising such a cloud of dust that after I had counted thirty, I found I
could not see them, and the continual tooting of the horns began to
make Ninette nervous--she had never seen anything like that before--
so, for fear she might do some trick she never had done in her life,
like shying, and also for fear that the drivers, who were rushing by
exactly in the middle of the road, might not see me in the dust, or a
car might skid, I slid out, and led my equipage the rest of the way. I
do assure you these are actually all the war signs we see, though, of
course, we still hear the cannon.

But, though we don't see it, we feel it in many ways. My neighbors
feel it more than I do! For one example--the fruit crop this year has
been an absolute loss. Luckily the cassis got away before the war
was declared, but we hear it was a loss to the buyers, and it was held
in the Channel ports, necessarily, and was spoiled. But apples and
pears had no market. In ordinary years purchasers come to buy the
trees, and send their own pickers and packers, and w