and children they were leaving.  There was no laughter, none of the gayety with which one has so often reproached this race—­but neither were there any tears.  As the crowded train began to move, bare heads were thrust out of windows, hats were waved, and a great shout of “Vive la France” was answered by piping children’s voices, and the choked voices of women—­“Vive l’Armee”; and when the train was out of sight the women took the children by the hand, and quietly climbed the hill.

Ever since the 4th of August all our crossroads have been guarded, all our railway gates closed, and also guarded—­guarded by men whose only sign of being soldiers is a cap and a gun, men in blouses with a mobilization badge on their left arms, often in patched trousers and sabots, with stern faces and determined eyes, and one thought—­“The country is in danger.”

There is a crossroad just above my house, which commands the valley on either side, and leads to a little hamlet on the route nationale from Couilly to Meaux, arid is called “La Demi-Lune”—­why “Half-Moon” I don’t know.  It was there, on the 6th, that I saw, for the first time, an armed barricade.  The gate at the railway crossing had been opened to let a cart pass, when an automobile dashed through Saint-Germain, which is on the other side of the track.  The guard raised his bayonet in the air, to command the car to stop and show its papers, but it flew by him and dashed up the hill.  The poor guard—­it was his first experience of that sort—­stood staring after the car; but the idea that he ought to fire at it did not occur to him until it was too late.  By the time it occurred to him, and he could telephone to the Demi-Lune, it had passed that guard in the same way—­and disappeared.  It did not pass Meaux.  It simply disappeared.  It is still known as the “Phantom Car.”  Within half an hour there was a barricade at the Demi-Lune mounted by armed men—­too late, of course.  However, it was not really fruitless,—­that barricade,—­as the very next day they caught three Germans there, disguised as Sisters of Charity—­papers all in order—­and who would have got by, after they were detected by a little boy’s calling attention to their ungloved hands, if it had not been for the number of armed old men on the barricade.

What makes things especially serious here, so near the frontier, and where the military movements must be made, is the presence of so many Germans, and the bitter feeling there is against them.  On the night of August 2, just when the troops were beginning to move east, an attempt was made to blow up the railroad bridge at lie de Villenoy, between here and Meaux.  The three Germans were caught with the dynamite on them—­so the story goes—­and are now in the barracks at Meaux.  But the most absolute secrecy is preserved about all such things.  Not only is all France under martial law:  the censorship of the press is absolute.  Every one has to carry his papers, and be provided with a passport for which he is liable to be asked in simply crossing a road.