Perhaps the tragedy of what is to be seen and heard at Senlis, on the battle-grounds of the Ourcq, and in the villages of Lorraine, was heightened for me by the beauty of the long drive south from the neighbourhood of G.H.Q.—­some hundred and forty miles.  It was a cold but clear March day.  We had but parted from snow a little while, and we were soon to find it again.  But on this day, austerely bright, the land of France unrolled before us its long succession of valley and upland, upland and valley.  Here, no trace of the invader; generally speaking no signs of the armies; for our route lay, on an average, some forty miles behind the line.  All was peace, solitude even; for the few women, old men, and boys on the land scarcely told in the landscape.  But every mile was rich in the signs and suggestion of an old and most human civilisation—­farms, villages, towns, the carefully tended woods, the fine roads running their straight unimpeded course over hill and dale, bearing witness to a State sense, of which we possess too little in this country.

We stopped several times on the journey—­I remember a puncture, involving a couple of hours’ delay, somewhere north of Beauvais—­and found ourselves talking in small hot rooms with peasant families of all ages and stages, from the blind old grandmother, like a brooding Fate in the background, to the last toddling baby.  How friendly they were, in their own self-respecting way!—­the grave-faced elder women, the young wives, the children.  The strength of the family in France seems to me still overwhelming—­would we had more of it left in England!  The prevailing effect was of women everywhere carrying on—­making no parade of it, being indeed accustomed to work, and familiar with every detail of the land; having merely added the tasks of their husbands and sons to their own, and asking no praise for it.  The dignity, the essential refinement and intelligence—­for all their homely speech—­of these solidly built, strong-faced women, in the central districts of France, is still what it was when George Sand drew her Berri peasants, nearly a hundred years ago.

Then darkness fell, and in the darkness we went through an old, old town where are the French General Headquarters.  Sentries challenged us to right and left, and sent us forward again with friendly looks.  The day had been very long, and presently, as we approached Paris, I fell asleep in my corner, only to be roused with a start by a glare of lights, and more sentries.  The barriere of Paris!—­shining out into the night.

Two days in Paris followed; every hour crowded with talk, and the vivid impressions of a moment when, from beyond Compiegne and Soissons—­some sixty miles from the Boulevards—­the French airmen flying over the German lines were now bringing back news every morning and night of fresh withdrawals, fresh villages burning, as the sullen enemy relaxed his hold.

On the third day, a most courteous and able official of the French Foreign Office took us in charge, and we set out for Senlis on a morning chill and wintry indeed, but giving little sign of the storm it held in leash.