If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they said:  “We try to be fair to the natives!” which means that they are just and even-tempered.  An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit, yet holds together for that very reason.  Imperial weight may have interfered with British adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know how to rule.

That church bell across the street from our chateau begins its clangor at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old men to the fields in harvest time.  But its peal carrying across the farmlands is softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in the evening.  In the morning it tells them that the day is long and they have much to do before dark.  After that thought I never complained because it robbed me of my sleep.  I felt ashamed not to be up and doing myself, and worked with a better spirit.

“Will they do it?”

We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw?  Would the peasants be able to get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away?  I had inside information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker that they would.  A financial expert, the baker.  Of course, he said, France would go on fighting till the Germans were beaten, just as the old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell were clanging the matins or the angelus.  But there was the question of finances.  It took money to fight.  The Americans, he knew, had more money than they knew what to do with—­as Europeans universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the distribution—­and if they would lend the Allies some of their spare billions, Germany was surely beaten.

A busy man, the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly and saved the day.  But not all farmers felt that they could afford the charge.

These kept at their small patches with sickles.  Gradually the carpets of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble, and great, conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or three loaves of the pain de menage that the baker sold.  So the peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the loss of Warsaw.

One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual.  But these were French troops in the British zone, en route from somewhere in France to somewhere else in France.  There was not a person left in any house in that village.  Everybody was out, with affection glowing in their eyes.  For these were their own—­their soldiers of France!