I didn’t quite fall through the gate backwards.  I am accustomed to saying that I am old.  I am not yet accustomed to have people notice it when I do not call their attention to it.  Amelie is only ten years younger than I am, but she has got the figure and bearing of a girl.  The lad recovered himself at once, and said, “Why, of course not,—­she doesn’t speak any English.”  I was glad that he didn’t even apologize, for I expect that I look fully a hundred and something.  So with a reiterated “Don’t worry—­you are all safe here now,” he mounted his wheel and rode up the hills.

I watched him making good time across to the route to Meaux.  Then I came into the house and lay down.  I suddenly felt horribly weak.  My house had taken on a queer look to me.  I suppose I had been, in a sort of subconscious way, sure that it was doomed.  As I lay on the couch in the salon and looked round the room, it suddenly appeared to me like a thing I had loved and lost and recovered—­resurrected, in fact; a living thing to which a miracle had happened.  I even found myself asking, in my innermost soul, what I had done to deserve this fortune.  How had it happened, and why, that I had come to perch on this hillside, just to see a battle, and have it come almost to my door, to turn back and leave me and my belongings standing here untouched, as safe as if there were no war,—­and so few miles away destruction extending to the frontier.

The sensation was uncanny.  Out there in the northeast still boomed the cannon.  The smoke of the battle still rose straight in the still air.  I had seen the war.  I had watched its destructive bombs.  For three days its cannon had pounded on every nerve in my body; but none of the horror it had sowed from the eastern frontier of Belgium to within four miles of me, had reached me except in the form of a threat.  Yet out there on the plain, almost within my sight, lay the men who had paid with their lives—­each dear to some one—­to hold back the battle from Paris—­and incidentally from me.  The relief had its bitterness, I can tell you.  I had been prepared to play the whole game.  I had not even had the chance to discover whether or not I could.  You, who know me fairly well, will see the irony of it.  I am eternally hanging round dans les coulisses, I am never in the play.  I instinctively thought of Captain Simpson, who had left his brother in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, and still had in him the kindly sympathy that had helped me so much.

When Amelie returned, she said that every one was out at the Demi-Lune to watch the troups going to Meaux, and that the boys in the neighborhood were already swimming the Marne to climb the hill to the battlefield of Saturday.  I had no curiosity to see one scene or the other.  I knew what the French boys were like, with their stern faces, as well as I knew the English manner of going forward to the day’s work, and the hilarious, macabre spirit of the French untried lads crossing the river to look on horrors as if it were a lark.