It did not take me half an hour to get my effects in order, but poor Amelie’s disgust seems to increase with time.  You can’t deny that if I had been drummed out and came back to find my house a ruin, my books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china and plated ware to “start housekeeping again,” it would have been humorous.  Real humor is only exaggeration.  That would surely have been a colossal exaggeration.

It is not the first time I have had to ask myself, seriously, “Why this mania for possession?” The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it across as our railroad is to “handle” it today.  Yet nothing seems able to break a person born with that mania for collecting.

I stood looking round at it all when everything was in place, and I realized that if the disaster had come, I should have found it easy to reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with me.  It is the law of Nature.  Material things, like the friends we have lost, may be eternally regretted.  They cannot be eternally grieved for.  We must “—­be up and doing, With a heart for any fate.”

All the same, it was a queer twist in the order of my life, that, hunting in all directions for a quiet retreat in which to rest my weary spirit, I should have ended by deliberately sitting myself down on the edge of a battlefield,—­even though it was on the safe edge,—­and stranger still, that there I forgot that my spirit was weary.

We are beginning to pick up all sorts of odd little tales of the adventures of some of the people who had remained at Voisin.  One old man there, a mason, who had worked on my house, had a very queer experience.  Like all the rest of them, he went on working in the fields all through the menacing days.  I can’t make out whether he had no realization of actual danger, or whether that was his way of meeting it.  Anyway, he disappeared on the morning the battle began, September 5, and did not return for several days.  His old wife had made up her mind that the Germans had got him, when one morning he turned up, tired, pale, and hungry, and not in any state to explain his absence.

It was some days before his wife could get the story out of him.  He owns a field about halfway between Voisins and Mareuil, close to the route de Pave du Roi, and on the morning that the battle began he was digging potatoes there.  Suddenly he saw a small group of horsemen riding down from the canal, and by their spiked helmets he knew them for Germans.

His first idea, naturally, was to escape.  He dropped his hoe, but he was too paralyzed with fear to run, and there was nothing to hide behind.  So he began walking across the field as well as his trembling old legs would let him, with his hands in his pockets.

Of course the Uhlans overtook him in a few minutes, and called out to him, in French, to stop.  He stopped at once, expecting to be shot instantly.