We crossed the place and called on a prominent burgess.  He received us hospitably.  In the hall of his house was a Uhlan’s lance with drooping pennon which excited our curiosity.  How had it come here?  He was only too pleased to explain.  He had taken it from a marauding Uhlan with whom he had engaged in single combat, strangling him with his own hands—­so!

     I took by the throat the circumcised dog
     And smote him, thus!

He held out a pair of large fat hands of the consistency of clay; he was of a full habit and there were pouches under his eyes.  In England he would have been a small tradesman, with strong views on total abstinence, accustomed to a diet of high tea, and honoured as the life-long superintendent of a Sunday school.  I was more astonished than sceptical, but perhaps, as the Comte suggested in a whisper, the Uhlan was drunk.  Here, too, we heard tales of loot, especially among ladies’ wardrobes.  It is a curious fact that there is nothing the Hun loves so much as women’s underclothing.  As to what happens when he gets hold of the lingerie many scandalous stories are told, and none more scandalous than the one which appeared in the whimsical pages of La Vie Parisienne.  But that is, most emphatically, quite another story.

From La Ferte we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to Barcy, where the maire, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with municipal gravity.  We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by lightning.  Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside.  We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a threshing machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an oat-rick.  The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional passage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men.  As we raced along, the furrows, running at right angles to the road, seemed to be eddying away from us in pleats and curves, and this illusion of a stationary car in a whirling landscape was fortified by the contours of the countryside, which were those of a great plain, great as any sea, stretching away to a horizon of low chalk hills.  Suddenly the car slowed down at a signal from my companion and stopped.  We got out.  Not a sound was to be heard except the mournful hum of the distant threshing machine, but a peculiar clicking, like the halliard of a flagstaff in a breeze, suddenly caught my ear.  The wind was rising, and as I looked around me I saw innumerable little tricolour flags fluttering against small wooden staves.  It was the battlefield of the Marne, the scene of that immortal order of Joffre’s in which he exhorted the sons of France to conquer or