perpetually; the motor moves at a foot’s pace, and we catch the young faces of the soldiers through the white thickened air.  And our most animated and animating companion, Monsieur P——­, with his wonderful knowledge of the battle, hails every landmark, identifies every farm and wood, even in what has become, in less than an hour, a white wilderness.  But it is of one village only, of these many whose names are henceforth known to history, that I wish to speak—­the village of Vareddes.  In my next letter I propose to tell the ghastly story of the hostages of Vareddes.

No. 8

May 17th, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—­Shall I ever forget that broad wintry plateau of the Ourcq, as it lay, at the opening of March, under its bed of snow, with its ruined villages, its graves scattered over the fields, its utter loneliness, save for the columns of marching soldiers in the roads, and the howling wind that rushed over the fields, the graves, the cemeteries, and whistled through the gaping walls of the poor churches and farms?  This high spreading plain, which before the war was one scene of rural plenty and industrious peace, with its farm lands and orchards dropping gently from the forest country of Chantilly, Compiegne, and Ermenonville, down to the Ourcq and the Marne, will be a place of pilgrimage for generations to come.  Most of the Battle of the Marne was fought on so vast a scale, over so wide a stretch of country—­about 200 miles long, by 50 broad—­that for the civilian spectator of the future it will never be possible to realise it as a whole, and very difficult even to realise any section of it, topographically, owing to the complication of the actions involved.  But in the Battle of the Ourcq, the distances are comparatively small, the actions comparatively simple and intelligible, while all the circumstances of the particular struggle are so dramatic, and the stakes at issue so vast, that every incident is, as it were, writ large, and the memory absorbs them more easily.

An Englishwoman, too, may be glad it was in this conspicuous section of the battle-field, which will perhaps affect the imagination of posterity more easily than any other, that it fell to the British Army to play its part.  To General Joffre the glory of the main strategic conception of the great retreat; to General Gallieni the undying honour of the rapid perception, the quick decision, which flung General Maunoury, with the 6th Army, on Von Kluck’s flank and rear, at the first hint of the German general’s swerve to the southeast; to General Maunoury himself, and his splendid troops, the credit of the battle proper, across the broad harvest fields of the Ourcq plateau.  But the advance of the British troops from the south of the Marne, on the heels of Von Kluck, was in truth all-important to the success of Maunoury on the Ourcq.  It was the British Expeditionary Force which made the hinge of the battle-line, and if that hinge had