restaurant we had run across a friend attached to the Staff, and now, meeting him again in the depth of our difficulty, we were told of lodgings to be found near by.  He could not take us there, for it was past the hour when he had a right to be out, or we either, for that matter, since curfew sounds at nine at Chalons.  But he told us how to find our way through the maze of little unlit streets about the Cathedral; standing there beside the motor, in the icy darkness of the deserted square, and whispering hastily, as he turned to leave us:  “You ought not to be out so late; but the word tonight is Jena.  When you give it to the chauffeur, be sure no sentinel overhears you.”  With that he was up the wide steps, the glass doors had closed on him, and I stood there in the pitch-black night, suddenly unable to believe that I was I, or Chalons Chalons, or that a young man who in Paris drops in to dine with me and talk over new books and plays, had been whispering a password in my ear to carry me unchallenged to a house a few streets away!  The sense of unreality produced by that one word was so overwhelming that for a blissful moment the whole fabric of what I had been experiencing, the whole huge and oppressive and unescapable fact of the war, slipped away like a torn cobweb, and I seemed to see behind it the reassuring face of things as they used to be.

The next morning dispelled that vision.  We woke to a noise of guns closer and more incessant than even the first night’s cannonade at Verdun; and when we went out into the streets it seemed as if, overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground.  Waylaid at one corner after another by the long tide of troops streaming out through the town to the northern suburbs, we saw in turn all the various divisions of the unfolding frieze:  first the infantry and artillery, the sappers and miners, the endless trains of guns and ammunition, then the long line of grey supply-waggons, and finally the stretcher-bearers following the Red Cross ambulances.  All the story of a day’s warfare was written in the spectacle of that endless silent flow to the front:  and we were to read it again, a few days later, in the terse announcement of “renewed activity” about Suippes, and of the bloody strip of ground gained between Perthes and Beausejour.

IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES

NANCY, May 13th, 1915

Beside me, on my writing-table, stands a bunch of peonies, the jolly round-faced pink peonies of the village garden.  They were picked this afternoon in the garden of a ruined house at Gerbeviller—­a house so calcined and convulsed that, for epithets dire enough to fit it, one would have to borrow from a Hebrew prophet gloating over the fall of a city of idolaters.