(AUGUST, 1914--FEBUARY, 1915)

I

AUGUST





On the 30th of July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had
lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of a
field. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border
of woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and
the sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is apt
to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomed
eyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merely
flat and tame; at other moments the sensitive imagination sees in
every thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless vigilant attachment
of generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscape
before us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemed
full of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeated
tasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war rumours which
had hung on us since morning.

All day the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the time
we reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away under
the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to
pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a
church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in a