“What village is that over there?”

He glanced around and replied:  “Quincy.”

It was my town.  I ought not to have been surprised.  Of course I knew that if I could see Chauconin so clearly from my garden, why, Chauconin could see me.  Only, I had not thought of it.

Amelie and I looked back with great interest.  It did look so pretty, and it is not pretty at all—­the least pretty village on this side of the hill.  “Distance” does, indeed, “lend enchantment.”  When you come to see me I shall show you Quincy from the other side of the Marne, and never take you into its streets.  Then you’ll always remember it as a fairy town.

It was not until we were entering into Chauconin that we saw the first signs of war.  The approach through the fields, already ploughed, and planted with winter grain, looked the very last thing to be associated with war.  Once inside the little village—­we always speak of it as “le petit Chauconin “—­we found destruction enough.  One whole street of houses was literally gutted.  The walls stand, but the roofs are off and doors and windows gone, while the shells seem burned out.  The destruction of the big farms seems to have been pretty complete.  There they stood, long walls of rubble and plaster, breeched; ends of farm buildings gone; and many only a heap of rubbish.  The surprising thing to me was to see here a house destroyed, and, almost beside it, one not even touched.  That seemed to prove that the struggle here was not a long one, and that a comparatively small number of shells had reached it.

Neufmortier was in about the same condition.  It was a sad sight, but not at all ugly.  Ruins seem to “go” with the French atmosphere and background.  It all looked quite natural, and I had to make an effort to shake myself into a becoming frame of mind.  If you had been with me I should have asked you to pinch me, and remind me that “all this is not yet ancient history,” and that a little sentimentality would have become me.  But Amelie would never have understood me.

It was not until we were driving east again to approach Penchard that a full realization of it came to me.  Penchard crowns the hill just in the centre of the line which I see from the garden.  It was one of the towns bombarded on the evening of September 5, and, so far as I can guess, the destruction was done by the French guns which drove the Germans out that night.

They say the Germans slept there the night of September 4, and were driven out the next day by the French soixante-quinze, which trotted through Chauconin into Penchard by the road we had just come over.

I enclose you a carte postale of a battery passing behind the apse of the village church, just as a guarantee of good faith.

But all signs of the horrors of those days have been obliterated.  Penchard is the town in which the Germans exercised their taste for wilful nastiness, of which I wrote you weeks ago.  It is a pretty little village, beautifully situated, commanding the slopes to the Marne on one side, and the wide plains of Barcy and Chambry on the other.  It is prosperous looking, the home of sturdy farmers and the small rentiers.  It has an air of humble thrift, with now and then a pretty garden, and here and there suggestions of a certain degree of greater prosperity, an air which, in France, often conceals unexpected wealth.