About the twelfth we had a couple of days of the worst cannonading since October.  It was very trying.  I stood hours on the lawn listening, but it was not for several days that we knew there had been a terrible battle at Soissons, just forty miles north of us.

There is a great difference of opinion as to how far we can hear the big guns, but an officer on the train the other day assured me that they could be heard, the wind being right, about one hundred kilometres—­that is to say, eighty miles—­so you can judge what it was like here, on the top of the hill, half that distance away by road, and considerably less in a direct line.

Our official communique, as usual, gave us no details, but one of the boys in our town was wounded, and is in a near-by ambulance, where he has been seen by his mother; she brings back word that it was, as he called it, “a bloody slaughter in a hand-to-hand fight.”  But of course, nothing so far has been comparable to the British stand at Ypres.  The little that leaks slowly out regarding that simply makes one’s heart ache with the pain of it, only to rebound with the glory.

Human nature is a wonderful thing, and the locking of the gate to Calais, by the English, will, I imagine, be, to the end of time, one of the epics, not of this war alone, but of all war.  Talk about the “thin red line.”  The English stood, we are told, like a ribbon to stop the German hordes,—­and stopped them.

It almost seems a pity that, up to date, so much secrecy has been maintained.  I was told last week in Paris that London has as yet no dream of the marvellous feat her volunteer army achieved—­a feat that throws into the shade all the heroic defenses sung in the verse of ancient times.  Luckily these achievements do not dull with years.

On top of the Soissons affair came its result:  the French retreat across the Aisne caused by the rising of the floods which carried away the bridges as fast as the engineers could build them, and cut off part of the French, even an ambulance, and, report says, the men left across the river without ammunition fought at the end with the butts of their broken guns, and finally with their fists.

Of course this brings again that awful cry over the lack of preparation, and lack of ammunition.

It is a foolish cry today, since the only nation in the world ready for this war was the nation that planned and began it.

Even this disaster—­and there is no denying that it is one—­does not daunt these wonderful people.  They still see two things, the Germans did not get to Paris, nor have they got to Calais, so, in spite of their real feats of arms—­one cannot deny those—­an endeavor must be judged by its purpose, and, so judged, the Germans have, thus far, failed.  Luckily the French race is big enough to see this and take heart of grace.  God knows it needs to, and thank Him it can.

Don’t you imagine that I am a bit down.  I am not.  I am cold.  But, when I think of the discomfort in the hurriedly constructed trenches, where the men are in the water to their ankles, what does my being cold in a house mean?  Just a record of discomfort as my part of the war, and it seems, day after day, less important.  But oh, the monotony and boredom of it!  Do you wonder that I want to hibernate?