A dozen times during the afternoon I went into the study and tried to read.  Little groups of old men, women, and children were in the road, mounted on the barricade which the English had left.  I could hear the murmur of their voices.  In vain I tried to stay indoors.  The thing was stronger than I, and in spite of myself, I would go out on the lawn and, field-glass in hand, watch the smoke.  To my imagination every shot meant awful slaughter, and between me and the terrible thing stretched a beautiful country, as calm in the sunshine as if horrors were not.  In the field below me the wheat was being cut.  I remembered vividly afterward that a white horse was drawing the reaper, and women and children were stacking and gleaning.  Now and then the horse would stop, and a woman, with her red handkerchief on her head, would stand, shading her eyes a moment, and look off.  Then the white horse would turn and go plodding on.  The grain had to be got in if the Germans were coming, and these fields were to be trampled as they were in 1870.  Talk about the duality of the mind—­it is sextuple.  I would not dare tell you all that went through mine that long afternoon.

It was just about six o’clock when the first bomb that we could really see came over the hill.  The sun was setting.  For two hours we saw them rise, descend, explode.  Then a little smoke would rise from one hamlet, then from another; then a tiny flame—­hardly more than a spark—­would be visible; and by dark the whole plain was on fire, lighting up Mareuil in the foreground, silent and untouched.  There were long lines of grain-stacks and mills stretching along the plain.  One by one they took fire, until, by ten o’clock, they stood like a procession of huge torches across my beloved panorama.

It was midnight when I looked off for the last time.  The wind had changed.  The fires were still burning.  The smoke was drifting toward us—­and oh! the odor of it!  I hope you will never know what it is like.

I was just going to close up when Amelie came to the door to see if I was all right.  My mind was in a sort of riot.  It was the suspense—­the not knowing the result, or what the next day might bring.  You know, I am sure, that physical fear is not one of my characteristics.  Fear of Life, dread of Fate, I often have, but not the other.  Yet somehow, when I saw Amelie standing there, I felt that I needed the sense of something living near me.  So I said, “Amelie, do you want to do me a great service?”

She said she ’d like to try.

“Well, then,” I replied, “don’t you want to sleep here to-night?”

With her pretty smile, she pulled her nightdress from under her arm:  that was what she had come for.  So I made her go to bed in the big bed in the guest-chamber, and leave the door wide open; and do you know, she was fast asleep in five minutes, and she snored, and I smiled to hear her, and thought it the most comforting sound I had ever heard.