Brief as the news was in the papers, it was exciting to know that the battle we had seen and heard was really a decisive fight, and that it was considered won by the English and French--in a rainstorm--as long ago as the 10th, and that the fighting to the east of us had been far more terrible than here.
I suppose long before this our myriads of "special telegraph" men have sent you over details and anecdotes such as we shall never see. We get a meagre "communiqué official" and have to be content with that. It is now and then hard for me, who have been accustomed to something different.
None of our shops is open yet. Indeed almost no one has returned to Couilly; and Meaux, they say, is still deserted. Yet I cannot honestly say that I have suffered for anything. I have an abundance of fruit. We have plenty of vegetables in Père's garden. We have milk and eggs. Rabbits and chickens run about in the roads simply asking to be potted. There is no petrol, but I, luckily, had a stock of candles, and I love candlelight--it suits my house better than lamps. It is over a fortnight since we had sugar or butter or coffee. I have tea. I never would have supposed that I could have got along so well and not felt deprived. I suppose we always have too much--I've had the proof. Perhaps had there been anyone with me I should have felt it more. Being alone I did not give it a thought.
Sunday afternoon, the weather being still fine and the distant booming of the cannon making reading or writing impossible--I am not yet habituated to it--I went for a walk. I took the road down the hill in the direction of the Marne. It is a pretty walk--not a house all the way.
It leads along what is called the Pavé du Roi, dropping down into the plain of the valley, through the woods, until the wheat fields are reached, and then rising from the plain, gently, to the high suspension bridge which crosses the canal, two minutes beyond which lies the river, here very broad and sluggish.
This part of the canal, which is perfectly straight from Condé to Meaux, is unusually pretty. The banks are steep, and "tall poplar trees" cast long shadows across grass-edged footpaths, above which the high bridge is swung. There is no bridge here across the Marne; the nearest in one direction is at the Iles-lès-Villenoy, and in the other at Meaux. So, as the Germans could not have crossed the Marne here, the canal bridge was not destroyed, though it was mined. The barricades of loose stones which the English built three weeks ago, both at the bridgehead and at a bend in the road just before it is reached, where the road to Mareuil sur Marne turns off, were still there.