an open sewer into which housewives emptied their slop-pails every
morning, while mongrel dogs nosed among the garbage. Yet the precincts
were not without a certain beauty, and every side of the town was
approached through an avenue of limes or poplars. But in winter the
sodden landscape was desolate beyond belief, these roads presenting just
that aspect of a current of slime in a muddy sea which they suggested to
the lonely horseman on the eve of Waterloo in that little classic of De
Vigny's known to literature as _Laurette_.

Such was the country and such the town in which we were billeted. Now
upon a morning in February it happened that I was smoking a cigarette in
the little garden, bordered by hedges of box, while waiting for my car,
and as I waited I watched Jeanne, with her sleeves rolled up to her
elbows and a clothes-peg in her mouth, busy over the wash-tub. "Vous
êtes une blanchisseuse, aujourd'hui?" I remarked. She corrected me.
"Non, m'sieu', une lessiveuse." "Une lessiveuse?" For answer Jeanne
pointed to a linen-bag which was steeping in the tub. The linen-bag
contained the ashes of the beech-tree; it is a way of washing that they
have in some parts of France, and very cleansing. To specialise thus is
_lessiver_. As we talked in this desultory fashion I let fall a word
concerning a journey I was about to undertake to the French lines, a
journey that would take me over the battlefield of the Marne. "La Marne!
Hélas, quelle douleur!" said Jeanne, and wiped her eyes with the corner
of her apron. "But it was a glorious victory," I expostulated. Yes, but
Jeanne, it seemed, had lost a brother in the battle of the Marne. She
pulled out of her bosom a frayed letter, bleached, stained, and
perforated with holes about the size of a shilling, and handed it to me.
I could make nothing of it. She handed me another letter. "Son
camarade," she explained, and no longer attempted to hide her tears.
And this was what I read: