Meanwhile, the stores have arrived. Whilst the pots are boiling we improvise a lunch for twenty-five in the large dining-room. The manager lends us napkins and a tablecloth, plates and glasses, and even a _jardinière_ for putting flowers on the table. Our ordinary fare includes a fillet of beef and we have bought three fowls. Each man brings his own wine and bread. This sybaritic life, however, cannot last indefinitely. At two o'clock we make our way through a district which has witnessed terrible battles. Arms and equipments, _képis_ and helmets and cloaks strew the ground. The smell of decomposing bodies passes in whiffs; it proceeds mainly from dead horses, still unburied, rotting away, their bodies all swollen and their legs rigid. By the side of a stack of hay three German corpses await the services of a grave-digger. Their greyish-green uniform seems to harmonize with the colour of the hay. At the halt, in a carriage left behind by the enemy, we find Berlin journals telling of victories in Belgium, along with a confused mass of note-books, night-lights--very convenient articles, these,--a broken phonograph, and German postcards all containing wishes that the recipients may have a good time in Paris, etc. Peasants come along with tales that uhlans are lurking in the neighbourhood. We waste a couple of hours in sending patrols to scour the woods. Not a single uhlan to be seen. We are caught in a shower of rain and reach Lévignen at nightfall, wet through. The silence and solitude are intense. Enormous gaps in the houses have been made by shells. The gamekeeper--perhaps the only inhabitant--proposes to the lieutenant that the detachment be lodged in the church. By the light of candles which are speedily lit, the men make the best of the situation, only too pleased to be out of the rain. The church, however, is too small. Half the detachment wanders about the abandoned village as the downpour continues. At all hazards we enter a house. No one is there, but we find beds, a stove and wood. There is no water, however, for making coffee, so I fill a large bowl with the rain streaming from a spout. A few tins of preserved meat and some wine have been left behind, so the lieutenant, Belin, Reymond, Maxence and myself easily manage to make a good meal and to sleep under a sheltering roof. _Sunday, 13th September._ It appears that there is a dead German at the _mairie_. We go to look at him. There the fellow lies, stretched on the floor. His head is concealed beneath his arms; his sides, back and legs have been stripped bare by a shell explosion and he has evidently dragged himself here to die. A smell of decomposing flesh puts us to flight. The detachment again starts off early across a devastated land. We are gaily received by the inhabitants of Villers-Cotterets, who, delivered from the enemy a couple of nights previously, fête the French troops incessantly marching into the town.