How should I guess what a
dare-devil fool Gallieni would turn out? But if Trochu, in '70, had been
the same kind of a fool, we should never have got Paris!"
Half the ghosts in history seemed to haunt this Route de Strasbourg, and
to meet us as we passed. You know how you see the characters in a
moving-picture play, and behind them the "fade ins" that show their life
history, visions that change on the screen like patterns in a
kaleidoscope? So on this meadow-bordered road, peaceful in the autumn
sunlight, we saw with our minds' eyes the soldiers of 1914: behind them
the soldiers of 1870: farther in the background Napoleon the Great with
his men: and fading into the distance, processions of kings who had
marched along the Marne, since the day Sainte-Genevieve ordered the
gates of Paris to be shut in the face of Attila.
Such a gay, gold-sequined blue-green ribbon of a river it looked! Almost
impudent in gaiety, as if it wished to forget and be happy. But souls
and rivers never really forget. When they know what the Marne knows,
they are gay only on the surface!
It was at Meaux where we had our first close meeting with the Marne:
Meaux, the city nearest Paris "on the Marne front," where the Germans
came: and even after three years you can still see on the left bank of
the river traces of trench--shallow, pathetic holes dug in wild haste.
We might have missed them, we creatures with mere eyes, if Brian hadn't
asked, "Can't you see the trenches?" Then we saw them, of course, half
lost under rank grass, like dents in a green velvet cushion made by a
sleeper who has long ago waked and walked away.
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