There are old men here who thought that their days of hard work were over, who are in the fields working like boys.  There is our blacksmith—­old Pere Marie—­lame with rheumatism, with his white-haired wife working in the fields from sunrise to sunset.  He cheerfully limps up the hill in his big felt slippers, his wife carrying the lunch basket, and a tiny black-and-tan English dog called “Missy,” who is the family baby, and knows lots of tricks, trotting behind, “because,” as he says, “she is so much company.”  The old blacksmith is a veteran of 1870, and was for a long time a prisoner at Konigsburg.  He likes nothing better than to rest a bit on a big stone at my gate and talk of 1870.  Like all Frenchmen of his type he is wonderfully intelligent, full of humor, and an omnivorous reader.  Almost every day he has a bit of old newspaper in his pocket out of which he reads to la dame Americaine as he calls me, not being able to pronounce my name.  It is usually something illuminating about the Germans, when it is not something prophetic.  It is wonderful how these old chaps take it all to heart.

All the time my heart is out there in the northeast.  It is not my country nor my war—­yet I feel as if it were both.  All my French friends are there, all my neighbors, and any number of English friends will soon be, among them the brother of the sculptor you met at my house last winter and liked so much.  He is with the Royal Field Artillery.  His case is rather odd.  He came back to England in the spring, after six years in the civil service, to join the army.  His leave expired just in time for him to reenter the army and see his first active service in this war.  Fortunately men seem to take it all as a matter of course.  That consoles some, I find.

I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians can go up to Paris if there are places left after the army is accommodated.  There is no guaranty that I can get back the same day.  Still, I am going to risk it.  I am afraid to be any longer without money, though goodness knows what I can do with it.  Besides, I find that all my friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say “good-bye”—­I don’t know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse.  Anyway, I am going to try it.  I am going armed with every sort of paper—­provisional passport from our consul, permis de sejour from my mayor here, and a local permit to enter and leave Paris, which does not allow me to stay inside the fortifications after six o’clock at night, unless I get myself identified at the prefecture of the arrondissement in which I propose to stay and have my passport vised.

X

August 24, 1914.

I seem to be able to get my letters off to you much more regularly than I dared to hope.