A nice-looking, elderly gentleman whom we met in front of the ruined Hotel du Nord said that the Germans came there and, finding champagne in the cellar after the maitre d’hotel had told them there wasn’t any, set fire to the hotel, and, as I recall it, shot him.  How true such stories are I cannot say, but there was no doubt that Senlis had been punished.  At least half of the old city on the banks of the wistful Nonette—­it is a much larger place than Crepy, with a cathedral of some consequence—­ was smashed as utterly as it might have been by a cyclone or an earthquake.  The systematic manner in which this was done was suggested by the fact that, in the long street running parallel to the one picked for destruction, nearly every door still carried its chalked order to “Schoenen.”  One house spared was that of a town fireman.  “I’ve got five little children,” he told the German soldiers.  “They’re one, two, three, four, five years old, and I’m expecting another.”  And they went on.

These were common sights and sounds of that gracious country north of Paris—­deserted, perhaps demolished, villages; the silent countryside, with dead horses, bits of broken shell, smashed bicycles or artillery wagons along the road; and the tainted autumn wind.  Along the level French roads, under their arches of elms or poplars, covered carts on tall wheels, drawn by two big farm horses harnessed one behind another, and loaded with women, children, and household goods, were beginning to move northward as they had moved south three weeks before.  Trains, similarly packed, were creeping up to within ear-shot of the constant cannonading, and it was on one of these trains that we had come.

In Paris, recovered now from the dismay of three weeks before, keen French imaginations were daily turning the war into terms of heroism and sacrifice and military glory.  Even editors and play-writers fighting at the front were able to send back impressions now and then, and these, stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as impersonal as pages torn from fiction.  Sitting comfortably at some cafe table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French “seventy-fives” and the heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one brief burst of glory.  And these thrills, repeated over and over again, without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of unreality.  Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard dies but never surrenders.

A man could leave the Cafe de la Paix and in two hours be under fire, where killing was as matter of fact as driving tacks.  And in between these two zones—­the zone where war was at once a highly organized business and a splendid, terrible game, and that in which its disjointed, horrible surfaces were being turned into abstractions, into ideas, poetry, rhetoric—­was this middle ground through which we were now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation.