Nevertheless the inevitable happened, owing to the vast reserves of the enemy, who brought up four divisions, and Gen. Pau was compelled to give ground.

On Tuesday German skirmishers with light artillery were coming southward, and the sound of their field guns greeted my ears in that town which I shall always remember with unpleasant recollections in spite of its Old World beauty and the loveliness of the scene in which it is set.  It seemed to me that this was the right place to be in order to get into touch with the French Army on the way to the capital.  As a matter of fact, it was the wrong place from all points of view; it was nothing less than a deathtrap, and it was by a thousand-to-one chance that I succeeded in escaping quite a nasty kind of fate.

I might have suspected that something was wrong with the place by the strange look on the face of a friendly French peasant, whom I met.  He had described to me in a very vivid way the disposition of the French troops on the neighboring hills.  Down the road came suddenly parties of peasants with fear in their eyes.  Some of them were in farm carts and put their horses to a stumbling gallop.

Women with blanched faces, carrying children in their arms, trudged along the dusty highway, and it was clear that these people were afraid of something behind them.  There were not many of them, and when they had passed the countryside was strangely and uncannily quiet.  There was only the sound of singing birds above fields which were flooded with the golden light of the setting sun.

Then I came into the town.  An intense silence brooded there among the narrow little streets below the old Norman church—­a white jewel on the rising ground beyond.  Almost every house was shuttered with blind eyes; but here and there I looked through an open window into deserted rooms.  No human face returned my gaze.  It was an abandoned town, emptied of all its people, who had fled with fear in their eyes, like those peasants along the roadway.

But presently I saw a human form; it was the figure of a French dragoon with his carbine slung behind his back.  He was stopping by the side of a number of gunpowder bags.  A little further away were little groups of soldiers at work by two bridges, one over a stream and one over a road.  They were working very calmly, and I could see what they were doing; they were mining bridges to blow them up at a given signal.

As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with broken bottles and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and carefully made.

It was a queer experience.  It was obvious that there was very grim business being done, and that the soldiers were waiting for something to happen.  At the railway station I quickly learned the truth; the Germans were only a few miles away, in great force.  At any moment they might come down, smashing everything in their way and killing every human being along that road.