But never mind all these things, which the guides will recite for you, I imagine, when you come over to make the grand tour of Fighting France, for on these plains about Meaux you will have to start your pilgrimage.

I confess that my heart beat a little too rapidly when, as we ran out of Meaux, and took the route departmentale of Senlis, a soldier stepped to the middle of the road and held up his gun—­baionette au canon.

We stopped.

Were we after all going to be turned back?  I had the guilty knowledge that there was no reason why we should not be.  I tried to look magnificently unconcerned as I leaned forward to smile at the soldier.  I might have spared myself the effort.  He never even glanced inside the car.  The examination of the papers was the most cursory thing imaginable—­a mere formality.  The chauffeur simply held his stamped paper towards the guard.  The guard merely glanced at it, lifted his gun, motioned us to proceed—­and we proceeded.

It may amuse you to know that we never even showed the paper again.  We did meet two gendarmes on bicycles, but they nodded and passed us without stopping.

The air was soft, like an early autumn day, rather than December as you know it.  There was a haze in the air, but behind it the sun shone.  You know what that French haze is, and what it does to the world, and how, through it, one gets the sort of landscape painters love.  With how many of our pilgrimages together it is associated!  We have looked through it at the walls of Provins, when the lindens were rosy with the first rising of the sap; we have looked through it at the circular panorama from the top of the ruined tower of Montlhery; we have looked through it across Jean Jacques Rousseau’s country, from the lofty terrace of Montmorency, and from the platform in front of the prison of Philippe Auguste’s unhappy Danish wife, at Etampes, across the valley of the Juine; and from how many other beautiful spots, not to forget the view up the Seine from the terrace of the Tuileries.

Sometime, I hope, we shall see these plains of the Marne together.  When we do, I trust it will be on just such another atmospheric day as yesterday.

As our road wound up the hill over the big paving-stones characteristic of the environs of all the old towns of France, everything looked so peaceful, so pretty, so normal, that it was hard to realize that we were moving towards the front, and were only about three miles from the point where the German invasion was turned back almost three months ago to a day, and it was the more difficult to realize as we have not heard the cannon for days.

A little way out of Meaux, we took a road to the west for Chauconin, the nearest place to us which was bombarded, and from a point in the road I looked back across the valley of the Marne, and I saw a very pretty white town, with red roofs, lying on the hillside.  I asked the chauffeur: