to get into touch with the French Army on the way to the capital. As a
matter of fact, it was the wrong place from all points of view; it was
nothing less than a deathtrap, and it was by a thousand-to-one chance
that I succeeded in escaping quite a nasty kind of fate.

I might have suspected that something was wrong with the place by the
strange look on the face of a friendly French peasant, whom I met. He
had described to me in a very vivid way the disposition of the French
troops on the neighboring hills. Down the road came suddenly parties of
peasants with fear in their eyes. Some of them were in farm carts and
put their horses to a stumbling gallop.

Women with blanched faces, carrying children in their arms, trudged
along the dusty highway, and it was clear that these people were afraid
of something behind them. There were not many of them, and when they had
passed the countryside was strangely and uncannily quiet. There was only
the sound of singing birds above fields which were flooded with the
golden light of the setting sun.

Then I came into the town. An intense silence brooded there among the
narrow little streets below the old Norman church--a white jewel on the
rising ground beyond. Almost every house was shuttered with blind eyes;
but here and there I looked through an open window into deserted rooms.
No human face returned my gaze. It was an abandoned town, emptied of all
its people, who had fled with fear in their eyes, like those peasants
along the roadway.

But presently I saw a human form; it was the figure of a French dragoon
with his carbine slung behind his back. He was stopping by the side of a
number of gunpowder bags. A little further away were little groups of
soldiers at work by two bridges, one over a stream and one over a road.
They were working very calmly, and I could see what they were doing;
they were mining bridges to blow them up at a given signal.

As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with broken bottles
and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and carefully made.

It was a queer experience. It was obvious that there was very grim
business being done, and that the soldiers were waiting for something
to happen. At the railway station I quickly learned the truth; the
Germans were only a few miles away, in great force. At any moment they
might come down, smashing everything in their way and killing every
human being along that road.

The station master