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 from the battles of the 5th, 6th, and 7th had lain for days un-buried under the hot September sun, but that the fire department was already out there from Paris, and that it would only be a few days when the worst marks of the terrible fight would be removed.  But they brought back no news.  The few people who had remained hidden in cellars or on isolated farms knew no more than we did, and it was impossible, naturally, to get near to the field ambulance at Neufmortier, which we can see from my lawn.

However, on the 9th—­the very day after the French advanced from here—­we got news in a very amusing way.  We had to take it for what it was worth, or seemed to be.  It was just after noon.  I was working in the garden on the south side of the house.  I had instinctively put the house between me and the smoke of battle when Amelie came running down the hill in a high state of excitement, crying out that the French were “coming back,” that there had been a “great victory,” and that I was to “come and see.”

She was in too much of a hurry to explain or wait for any questions.  She simply started across the fields in the direction of the Demi-Lune, where the route nationale from Meaux makes a curve to run down the long hill to Couilly.

I grabbed a sunbonnet, picked up my glasses, and followed her to a point in the field from which I could see the road.

Sure enough—­there they were—­cuirassiers—­the sun glinting on their helmets, riding slowly towards Paris, as gaily as if returning from a fete, with all sorts of trophies hanging to their saddles.