XIV

THE CONCIERGE AT SENLIS


We rose early the next day, and, having paid our reckoning, were away
betimes, for we were to visit the French lines and wished also to pay a
flying visit to Senlis. As we left Crépy-en-Valois we entered the Forest
of Compiègne, a forest of noble beeches which rose tall and straight and
grey like the piers of Beauvais Cathedral, their arms meeting overhead
in an intricate vaulting through which we saw the winter sun in a
sapphire sky. We met two Chasseurs d'Afrique, mounted on superb Arabs
and wearing red fez-like caps and yellow collar-bands. They were like
figures out of a canvas of Meissonier, recalling the spacious days when
men went into action with all the pomp and circumstance of war, drums
beating, colours flying, plumes nodding, and the air vibrant with the
silvery notes of the bugle. All that is past; to-day no bugle sounds the
charge, and even the company commander's whistle has given way to
certain soft words for which the German mocking-bird will seek in vain
in our Infantry Manual. As for cuirass and helmet, the range of modern
guns and rifles has made them a little too ingenuous. And, sure enough,
as we drove into Compiègne we found a squadron of dragoons as sombre as
our own, in their mouse-coloured _couvre-casques_ and cavalry cloaks,
though their lances glinted in the sun. Here all was animation. Informal
conventicles of Staff officers, with whom we exchanged greetings, stood
about the square in front of the exquisite Hôtel de Ville, with its
high-pitched roof pierced with dormer-windows and crowned with many