As near as I can remember, it was a little after one o’clock when the cannonading suddenly became much heavier, and I stepped out into the orchard, from which there is a wide view of the plain.  I gave one look; then I heard myself say, “Amelie,”—­as if she could help,—­and I retreated.  Amelie rushed by me.  I heard her say, “Mon Dieu.”  I waited, but she did not come back.  After a bit I pulled myself together, went out again, and followed down to the hedge where she was standing, looking off to the plain.

The battle had advanced right over the crest of the hill.  The sun was shining brilliantly on silent Mareuil and Chauconin, but Monthyon and Penchard were enveloped in smoke.  From the eastern and western extremities of the plain we could see the artillery fire, but owing to the smoke hanging over the crest of the hill on the horizon, it was impossible to get an idea of the positions of the armies.  In the west it seemed to be somewhere near Claye, and in the east it was in the direction of Barcy.  I tried to remember what the English soldiers had said,—­that the Germans were, if possible, to be pushed east, in which case the artillery at the west must be either the French of English.  The hard thing to bear was, that it was all conjecture.

So often, when I first took this place on the hill, I had looked off at the plain and thought, “What a battlefield!” forgetting how often the Seine et Marne had been that from the days when the kings lived at Chelles down to the days when it saw the worst of the invasion of 1870.  But when I thought that, I had visions very different from what I was seeing.  I had imagined long lines of marching soldiers, detachments of flying cavalry, like the war pictures at Versailles and Fontainebleau.  Now I was actually seeing a battle, and it was nothing like that.  There was only noise, belching smoke, and long drifts of white clouds concealing the hill.

By the middle of the afternoon Monthyon came slowly out of the smoke.  That seemed to mean that the heaviest firing was over the hill and not on it,—­or did it mean that the battle was receding?  If it did, then the Allies were retreating.  There was no way to discover the truth.  And all this time the cannon thundered in the southeast, in the direction of Coulommiers, on the route into Paris by Ivry.

Naturally I could not but remember that we were only seeing the action on the extreme west of a battle-line which probably extended hundreds of miles.  I had been told that Joffre had made a frontier of the Marne.  But alas, the Meuse had been made a frontier-but the Germans had crossed it, and advanced to here in little less than a fortnight.  If that—­why not here?  It was not encouraging.