stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as
impersonal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting comfortably at some cafe
table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming
up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the
heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth
time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one
brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over again,
without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still
city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of
unreality. Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words
that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard
dies but never surrenders.

A man could leave the Café de la Paix and in two hours be under fire,
where killing was as matter of fact as driving tacks. And in between
these two zones--the zone where war was at once a highly organized
business and a splendid, terrible game, and that in which its
disjointed, horrible surfaces were being turned into abstractions, into
ideas, poetry, rhetoric--was this middle ground through which we were
now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation.

We returned to Crepy. All that night the trains went clanking through
the station, pouring more men--Frenchmen, Englishmen--into the sodden
trenches along the Aisne. For a week it had rained, cold shower
following cold shower. In Paris shivering concierges closed their doors
in the middle of the day in mournful attempts to keep warm--autumn's
quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the armies had fought
across this same country a fortnight before. It was into trenches half
filled with water that the new men were going--Frenchmen trundling over
to the bar in big overcoats, with their air of good little boy, to go