Down through the heart of France—­Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme—­past trim little French rivers, narrow, winding, still, and deep, with rows of poplars close to the water’s edge, and still a certain air of coquetry, in spite of bare branches and fallen leaves—­past brown fields across which teams of oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing the furrow for next spring’s wheat.  It’s the old men who are ploughing —­except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man in sight.  And everywhere soldiers—­wounded ones bound for southern France, reserves not yet sent up.

Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; then, just after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, where the civil government obligingly fled when the enemy was rolling down on Paris in the first week of September.

Bordeaux, Monday.

Bordeaux is a day’s railroad ride from Paris—­twelve hours away from the German cannon, which even now are only fifty miles north of the boulevards, twelve hours nearer Spain and Africa.  And you feel both these things.

All about you is the wine country—­the names of towns and villages round about read like a wine-card—­and, as you are lunching in some little side-street restaurant, a table is moved away, a trap-door opens, and monsieur the proprietor looks on while the big casks of claret are rolled in from the street and lowered to the cellar and the old casks hauled up again.  You are close to the wine country and close to the sea—­to oysters and crabs and ships—­and to the hot sun and more exuberant spirits of the Midi.  The pretty, black-eyed Bordelaise—­there are pretty girls in Bordeaux—­often seems closer to Madrid than to Paris; even the Bordelais accent has a touch of the Mediterranean, and the crisp words of Paris are broken up and even an extra vowel added now and then, until they ripple like Spanish or Italian.  “Pe-tite-a ma-dame-a !” rattles some little newsboy, ingratiating himself with an indifferent lady of uncertain age; and the porter will bring your boots in no time-in “une-a pe-tite-a mi-nute-a.”

The war is in everybody’s mind, of course—­no one in France thinks of anything else—­but there is none of that silence and tenseness, that emotional tremor, one feels in Paris.  The Germans will never come here, one feels, no matter what happens, and as you read the communiques in La Petite Gironde and La Liberte du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I feel pretty sure, than it does in front of the newspaper bill-boards in New York.

In fact, one of the first and abiding impressions of Bordeaux is that it is a great place for things to eat—­oysters from Marennes, lobsters and langoustes, pears big as cantaloupes, pomegranates, mushrooms—­the little ones and the big cepes of Bordeaux—­yellow dates just up from Tunis.  The fruiterers’ shops not only make you hungry, but into some of them you may enter and find a quiet little room up-stairs, where the proprietor and his wife and daughter, in the genial French fashion, will serve you with a cosey little dinner with wine for three francs, in front of the family grate fire, and the privilege of ordering up anything you want from the shop-window below.