After we were certain, on the 4th of August, that war was being declared all around Germany and Austria, and that England was to back France and Russia, a sort of stupor settled on us all.  Day after day Amelie would run to the mairie at Quincy to read the telegraphic bulletin—­half a dozen lines of facts—­that was all we knew from day to day.  It is all we know now.

Day after day I sat in my garden watching the aeroplanes flying over my head, and wishing so hard that I knew what they knew.  Often I would see five in the day, and one day ten.  Day after day I watched the men of the commune on their way to join their classe.  There was hardly an hour of the day that I did not nod over the hedge to groups of stern, silent men, accompanied by their women, and leading the children by the hand, taking the short cut to the station which leads over the hill, right by my gate, to Couilly.  It has been so thrilling that I find myself forgetting that it is tragic.  It is so different from anything I ever saw before.  Here is a nation—­which two weeks ago was torn by political dissension—­suddenly united, and with a spirit that I have never seen before.

I am old enough to remember well the days of our Civil War, when regiments of volunteers, with flying flags and bands of music, marched through our streets in Boston, on the way to the front.  Crowds of stay-at-homes, throngs of women and children lined the sidewalks, shouting deliriously, and waving handkerchiefs, inspired by the marching soldiers, with guns on their shoulders, and the strains of martial music, varied with the then popular “The girl I left behind me,” or, “When this cruel war is over.”  But this is quite different.  There are no marching soldiers, no flying flags, no bands of music.  It is the rising up of a Nation as one man—­all classes shoulder to shoulder, with but one idea—­“Lift up your hearts, and long live France.”  I rather pity those who have not seen it.

Since the day when war was declared, and when the Chamber of Deputies—­all party feeling forgotten—­stood on its feet and listened to Paul Deschanel’s terse, remarkable speech, even here in this little commune, whose silence is broken only by the rumbling of the trains passing, in view of my garden, on the way to the frontier, and the footsteps of the groups on the way to the train, I have seen sights that have moved me as nothing I have ever met in life before has done.  Day after day I have watched the men and their families pass silently, and an hour later have seen the women come back leading the children.  One day I went to Couilly to see if it was yet possible for me to get to Paris.  I happened to be in the station when a train was going out.  Nothing goes over the line yet but men joining their regiments.  They were packed in like sardines.  There were no uniforms—­just a crowd of men—­men in blouses, men in patched jackets, well-dressed men—­no distinction of class; and on the platform the women