Amid the abounding, dazzling confusion of objects which it was a duty to admire, people talked cautiously of the war.  With tranquillity and exactness and finality the high official, clad in pale alpaca and yellow boots, explained the secret significance of Yellow Books, White Books, Orange Books, Blue Books.  The ultimate issues were never touched.  New, yet unprinted, music was played; Schumann, though German enough, was played.  Then literature came to the top.  A novelist wanted to know what I thought of a book called “The Way of All Flesh,” which he had just read.  It is singular how that ruthless book makes its way across all frontiers.  He also wanted to know about Gissing, a name new to him.  And then a voice from the obscurity of the balcony came startlingly to me in the music-room: 

“Tell me!  Sincerely—­do they hate the Germans in England?  Do they hate them, veritably?  Tell me.  I doubt it.  I doubt strongly.”

I laughed, rather awkwardly, as any Englishman would.

The transient episode was very detrimental to literary talk.

Negotiations for a private visit to the front languished.  The thing was arranged right enough, but it seemed impossible to fix a day actually starting.  So I went to Meaux.  Meaux had stuck in my ears.  Meaux was in history and in romances; it is in Dumas.  It was burnt by the Normans in the tenth century, and terrific massacres occurred outside its walls in the fourteenth century, massacres in which the English aristocracy took their full share of the killing.  Also, in the seventeenth century, Bossuet was Bishop of Meaux.  Finally, in the twentieth century, the Germans just got to Meaux, and they got no further.  It was, so far as I can make out, the nearest point to Paris which they soiled.

I could not go even to Meaux without formalities, but the formalities were simple.  The dilatory train took seventy minutes, dawdling along the banks of the notorious Marne.  In an automobile one could have done the journey in half the time.  An automobile, however, would have seriously complicated the formalities.  Meaux contains about fourteen thousand inhabitants.  Yet it seems, when you are in it, to’ consist chiefly of cathedral.  When you are at a little distance away from it, it seems to consist of nothing but cathedral.  In this it resembles Chartres, and many another city in France.

We obtained a respectable carriage, with a melancholy, resigned old driver, who said: 

“For fifteen francs, plus always the pourboire, I will take you to Barcy, which was bombarded and burnt.  I will show you all the battlefield.”

With those few words he thrilled me.

The road rose slowly from the canal of the Ourcq; it was lined with the most beautiful acacia trees, and through the screen of the acacias one had glimpses of the town, diminishing, and of the cathedral, growing larger and larger.  The driver talked to us in faint murmurs over his shoulder, indicating the positions of various villages such as Penchard, Poincy, Crecy, Monthyon, Chambry, Varreddes, all of which will be found, in the future detailed histories of the great locust-advance.