“Well, this is the situation as near as I can work it out.  We infer from the work we were given to do—­destroying bridges, railroads, telegraphic communications—­that an effort is to be made here to stop the march on Paris; in fact, that the Germans are not to be allowed to cross the Marne at Meaux, and march on the city by the main road from Rheims to the capital.  The communications are all cut.  That does not mean that it will be impossible for them to pass; they’ve got clever engineers.  It means that we have impeded them and may stop them.  I don’t know.  Just now your risk is nothing.  It will be nothing unless we are ordered to hold this hill, which is the line of march from Meaux to Paris.  We have had no such order yet.  But if the Germans succeed in taking Meaux and attempt to put their bridges across the Marne, our artillery, behind you there on the top of the hill, must open fire on them over your head.  In that case the Germans will surely reply by bombarding this hill.”  And he drank his tea without looking to see how I took it.

I remember that I was standing opposite him, and I involuntarily leaned against the wall behind me, but suddenly thought, “Be careful.  You’ll break the glass in the picture of Whistler’s Mother, and you’ll be sorry.”  It brought me up standing, and he didn’t notice.  Isn’t the mind a queer thing?

He finished his tea, and rose to go.  As he picked up his cap he showed me a hole right through his sleeve—­in one side, out the other-and a similar one in his puttee, where the ball had been turned aside by the leather lacing of his boot.  He laughed as he said, “Odd how near a chap comes to going out, and yet lives to drink tea with you.  Well, good-bye and good luck if I don’t see you again.”

And off he marched, and I went into the library and sat down and sat very still.

It was not more than half an hour after Captain Edwards left that the corporal came in to ask me if I had a window in the roof.  I told him that there was, and he asked if he might go up.  I led the way, picking up my glasses as I went.  He explained, as we climbed the two flights of stairs, that the aeroplane had reported a part of the Germans they were hunting “not a thousand feet from this house.”  I opened the skylight.  He scanned in every direction.  I knew he would not see anything, and he did not.  But he seemed to like the view, could command the roads that his posse was guarding, so he sat on the window ledge and talked.  The common soldier is far fonder of talking than his officer and apparently he knows more.  If he doesn’t, he thinks he does.  So he explained to me the situation as the “men saw it.”  I remembered what Captain Edwards had told me, but I listened all the same.  He told me that the Germans were advancing in two columns about ten miles apart, flanked in the west by a French division pushing them east, and led by the English drawing them toward the Marne.