VIII



August 10,1914.


I have your cable asking me to come "home" as you call it. Alas, my
home is where my books are--they are here. Thanks all the same.

It is a week since I wrote you--and what a week. We have had a sort of
intermittent communication with the outside world since the 6th, when,
after a week of deprivation, we began to get letters and an occasional
newspaper, brought over from Meaux by a boy on a bicycle.

After we were certain, on the 4th of August, that war was being declared
all around Germany and Austria, and that England was to back France and
Russia, a sort of stupor settled on us all. Day after day Amelie would
run to the mairie at Quincy to read the telegraphic bulletin--half a
dozen lines of facts--that was all we knew from day to day. It is all
we know now.

Day after day I sat in my garden watching the aeroplanes flying over my
head, and wishing so hard that I knew what they knew. Often I would see
five in the day, and one day ten. Day after day I watched the men of
the commune on their way to join their classe. There was hardly an hour
of the day that I did not nod over the hedge to groups of stern, silent