Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their eyes.  Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to our car in holiday spirit.  The laugh of a sturdy young woman who threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of victorious France—­France after forty years’ waiting throwing back a foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers.  All the land, rich fields and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling landscape, basked in victory.  Dead the spirit of anyone who could not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a Frenchman.  Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages which had saved Paris and France.

The car sped on over the hard road.  Staff officers in other cars whom we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead.  Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete?

Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, with firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of ship-masts.  From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of park-like country toward wooded hills.  As far as we could see against the background of the foliage which threw it into relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shells, renewed with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.

This, then, was a battle.  No soldiers, no guns, in sight; only against masses of autumn green a diaphanous, man-made nimbus which was raining steel hail.  Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall grass.  Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.

There was hard fighting; a lot of French and German were being killed in the direction of Compiegne and Noyon to-day.  Another dip into another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the muffled firing of a line of infantry were audible.  Yes, we were getting up with the army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road on which we were.  Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.