To reach Senlis one must cross the military enceinte of Paris.  Many visitors from Paris and other parts of France, from England, or from America, have seen by now the wreck of its principal street, and have talked with the Abbe Dourlent, the “Archipretre” of the cathedral, whose story often told has lost but little of its first vigour and simplicity, to judge at least by its effect on two of his latest visitors.

We took the great northern road out of Paris, which passes scenes memorable in the war of 1870.  On both sides of us, at frequent intervals, across the flat country, were long lines of trenches, and belts of barbed wire, most of them additions to the defences of Paris since the Battle of the Marne.  It is well to make assurance doubly sure!  But although, as we entered the Forest of Chantilly, the German line was no more than some thirty-odd miles away, and since the Battle of the Aisne, two and a half years ago, it has run, practically, as it still ran in the early days of this last March, the notion of any fresh attack on Paris seemed the merest dream.  It was indeed a striking testimony to the power of the modern defensive—­this absolute security in which Paris and its neighbourhood has lived and moved all that time, with—­up to a few weeks ago—­the German batteries no farther off than the suburbs of Soissons.  How good to remember, as one writes, all that has happened since I was in Senlis!—­and the increased distance that now divides the German hosts from the great prize on which they had set their hearts.

How fiercely they had set their hearts on it, the old Cure of Senlis, who is the chief depository of the story of the town, was to make us feel anew.

One enters Senlis from Paris by the main street, the Rue de la Republique, which the Germans deliberately and ruthlessly burnt on September 2nd and 3rd, 1914.  We moved slowly along it through the blackened ruins of houses large and small, systematically fired by the German petroleurs, in revenge for a supposed attack by civilians upon the entering German troops. Les civils ont tire—­it is the universal excuse for these deeds of wanton barbarism, and for the hideous cruelties to men, women, and children that have attended them—­beginning with that incident which first revealed to a startled world the true character of the men directing the German Army—­the burning and sack of Louvain.  It is to be hoped that renewed and careful investigation will be made—­(much preliminary inquiry has already of course taken place)—­after the war into all these cases.  My own impression from what I have heard, seen, and read—­for what it may be worth—­is that the plea is almost invariably false; but that the state of panic and excitement into which the German temperament falls, with extraordinary readiness, under the strain of battle, together with the drunkenness of troops traversing a rich wine-growing country, have often accounted for an honest, but quite mistaken belief in the minds of German soldiers, without excusing at all the deeds to which it led.  Of this abnormal excitability, the old Cure of Senlis gave one or two instances which struck me.