The picturesque mill bridges across the Marne have been partly saved.  The ends of the bridges on the town side were blown up, and the mills were mined, to be destroyed on the German approach.  Pere was told that an appeal was made to the English commanders to save the old landmarks if possible, and although at that time it seemed to no one at all likely that they could be saved, this precaution did save them.  He tells me that blowing up the bridge-heads smashed all the windows, blew out all the doors, and damaged the walls more or less, but all that is reparable.

Do you remember the last time we were at Meaux, how we leaned on the stone wall on that beautiful Promenade des Trinitaires, and watched the waters of the Marne churned into froth by the huge wheels of the three lines of mills lying from bank to bank?  I know you will be glad they are saved.  It would have been a pity to destroy that beautiful view.  I am afraid that we are in an epoch where we shall have to thank Fate for every fine thing and every well-loved view which survives this war between the Marne and the frontier, where the ground had been fought over in all the great wars of France since the days of Charlemagne.

It seems that more people stayed at Meaux than I supposed.  Monsignor Morbeau stayed there, and they say about a thousand of the poor were hidden carefully in the cellars.  It had fourteen thousand inhabitants.  Only about five buildings were reached by bombs, and the damage is not even worth recording.

I am sure you must have seen the Bishop in the days when you lived in Paris, when he was cure at St. Honore d’Eylau in the Place Victor Hugo.  At that time he was a popular priest—­mondain, clever and eloquent.  At Meaux he is a power.  No figure is so familiar in the picturesque old streets, especially on market day, Saturday, as this tall, powerful-looking man in his soutane and barrette, with his air of authority, familiar yet dignified.  He seems to know everyone by name, is all over the market, his keen eyes seeing everything, as influential in the everyday life of his diocese as he is in its spiritual affairs, a model of what a modern archbishop ought to be.

I hear he was on the battlefield from the beginning, and that the first ambulances to reach Meaux found the seminary full of wounded picked up under his direction and cared for as well as his resources permitted.  He has written his name in the history of the old town under that of Bossuet—­and in the records of such a town that is no small distinction.

The news which is slowly filtering back to us from the plains is another matter.

Some of the families in our commune have relatives residing in the little hamlets between Cregy and Monthyon, and have been out to help them re-install themselves.  Very little in the way of details of the battle seems to be known.  Trees and houses dumbly tell their own tales.  The roads are terribly cut up, but road builders are already at work.  Huge trees have been broken off like twigs, but even there men are at work, uprooting them and cutting the wood into lengths and piling it neatly along the roadside to be carted away.  The dead are buried, and Paris automobiles are rapidly removing all traces of the battles and carrying out of sight such disfigurements as can be removed.