The schoolmistress and her little maid sat up for us, and shepherded us kindly to bed.  Never was there a more strangely built little house!  The ceilings came down on our heads, the stairs were perpendicular.  But there was a stove in each room, and the beds though hard, and the floor though bare, were scrupulously clean.  In the early morning I woke up and looked out.  There had been a white frost, and the sun was just rising in a clear sky.  Its yellow light was shining on the whitewashed wall of the next cottage, on which a large pear-tree was trained.  All round were frost-whitened plots of garden or meadow—­preaux—­with tall poplars in the hedges cutting the morning sky.  Suddenly, I heard a continuous murmur in the room beneath me.  It was the schoolmistress and her maid at prayer.  And presently the house door opened and shut.  It was Mademoiselle who had gone to early Mass.  For the school was an ecole libre, and the little lady who taught it was a devout Catholic.  The rich yet cold light, the frosty quiet of the village, the thin French trees against the sky, the ritual murmur in the room below—­it was like a scene from a novel by Rene Bazin, and breathed the old, the traditional France.

We were to start early and motor far, but there was time before we started for a little talk with Mademoiselle.  She was full of praise for our English soldiers, some of whom were billeted in the village.  “They are very kind to our people, they often help the women, and they never complain.” (Has the British Tommy in these parts really forgotten how to grouse?) “I had some of your men billeted here.  I could only give them a room without beds, just the bare boards.  ‘You will find it hard,’ I said.  ‘We will get a little straw,’ said the sergeant.  ’That will be all right.’  Our men would have grumbled.” (But I think this was Mademoiselle’s politesse!) “And the children are devoted to your soldiers.  I have a dear little girl in the school, nine years old.  Sometimes from the window she sees a man in the street, a soldier who lodges with her mother.  Then I cannot hold her.  She is like a wild thing to be gone.  ‘Voila mon camarade!—­voila mon camarade!’ Out she goes, and is soon walking gravely beside him, hand in hand, looking up at him.”  “How do they understand each other?” “I don’t know.  But they have a language.  Your sergeants often know more French than your officers, because they have to do the billeting and the talking to our people.”

The morning was still bright when the motor arrived, but the frost had been keen, and the air on the uplands was biting.  We speed first across a famous battlefield, where French and English bones lie mingled below the quiet grass, and then turn south-east.  Nobody on the roads.  The lines of poplar-trees fly past, the magpies flutter from the woods, and one might almost forget the war.  Suddenly, a railway line, a steep descent and we are full in its midst again.