Foolishly, we didn't
connect it with the sting, for Julian O'Farrell was bitten, too, and
didn't complain at all.
Well, we set out for Soissons yesterday morning (I write again at night)
leaving all our luggage at the hotel in Compiegne. It was quite a safe
and uneventful run, for the Germans stopped shelling Soissons
temporarily some time ago, when they were obliged to devote their whole
attention to other places. The road was good, and the day a dream of
Indian summer, when war seemed more than ever out of place in such a
world. If Mother Beckett looked ill, we didn't notice, because she wore
her dust-veil. The same officer was with us who'd been our guide last
time, and we felt like friends, as he explained, with those vivid
gestures Frenchmen have, just how the Germans in September, 1914,
marched from Laon upon Soissons--marched fast, singing, yelling, wild to
take a city so important that the world would be impressed. Why, it
would be--they thought--as if the whole Ile-de-France were in their
grasp! The next step would be to Paris, goal of all Germanic invasions
since Attila.
It's an engaging habit of Mother Beckett's to punctuate exciting stories
like this with little soft sighs of sympathy: but the graphic war
descriptions given by our lieutenant left her cold. Even when we came
into the town, and began to go round it in the car, she was heavily
silent, not an exclamation! And we ought to have realized that this was
strange, because Soissons nowadays is a sight to strike the heart a
hammer-blow.
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