Then I passed long lines of beautiful little villas on the Seine side, utterly abandoned among their trees and flowers.  A solitary fisherman held his line above the water as though all the world were at peace, and in a field close to the fortifications which I expected to see bursting with shells, an old peasant bent above the furrows and planted cabbages.  Then, at last, I walked through the streets of Paris and found them strangely quiet and tranquil.

The people I met looked perfectly calm.  There were a few children playing in the gardens of Champs Elysees and under the Arc de Triomph symbolical of the glory of France.

I looked back upon the beauty of Paris all golden in the light of the setting sun, with its glinting spires and white gleaming palaces and rays of light flashing in front of the golden trophies of its monuments.  Paris was still unbroken.  No shell had come shattering into this city of splendor, and I thanked Heaven that for a little while the peril had passed.

A Zouave’s Story

By Philip Gibbs of The London Daily Chronicle.

[Special Dispatch to THE NEW YORK TIMES.]

CREIL, Sept. 10.—­I could write this narrative as a historian, with details gathered from many different witnesses at various parts of the lines, in a cold and aloof way, but I prefer to tell it in the words of a young officer of the Zouaves who was in the thickest of fighting until when I met him and gave him wine and biscuits.  He was put out of action by a piece of shell which smashed his left arm.  He told me the story of the battle as he sat back, hiding his pain by a little careless smile of contempt, and splashed with blood which made a mess of his uniform.

“For four days previous to Monday, Sept. 7,” he said, “we were engaged in clearing out the German bosches from all the villages on the left bank of the Ourcq, which they had occupied in order to protect the flank of their right wing.  Unfortunately for us the English heavy artillery, which would have smashed the beggars to bits, had not yet come up to help us, although we expected them with some anxiety, as big business events began as soon as we drove the outposts back to their main lines.

“However, we were equal to the preliminary task, and, heartened by the news of an ammunition convoy which had been turned into a pretty fireworks display by ‘Soixante-dix’ Pau, my Zouaves, (as you see, I belong to the First Division, which has a reputation to keep up, n’est ce pas?) were in splendid form.  Of course, they all laughed at me.  They wanted to get near those German guns and nearer still to the gunners.  That was before they knew the exact meaning of shellfire well.

“They did good things, those Zouaves of mine, but it wasn’t pleasant work.  We fought from village to village, very close fighting, so that sometimes we could look into our enemy’s eyes.  The Moroccans were with us.  The native troops are unlike my boys, who are Frenchmen, and they were like demons with their bayonet work.