Paris, Thursday. Those have been grim fights round Meaux the last few days. It is no single battlefield; rather a continuous line of battles. But Chaucotin, Poincy, Penchard, Chambery, may be remembered in history as the triangle where the flood was first turned back. The line is marked on the fields like the waving edge of a past tide on the beach--those pleasant fields, stubble, meadow, trees, that fall from either side to the wooded, sheltered river; and among them, caught as in a hollow, Meaux itself, its cathedral, by some miracle, still unharmed. The loss has been great, especially on the side of the Germans. The peasants to-day were shovelling into the long trenches the terrible harvest of death. All round us was the litter of battle, smashed muskets, smashed helmets, and broken life. I could follow the fighting foot by foot from well south of Meaux. Haystacks torn down and scattered over the field for trusses of shelter. Haystacks still standing, their north side torn and holed with shrapnel, with trusses like wings on either side whence the men had fired. Burnt woods, trees cut down and broken, and the long brown lines of trenches. Some of our own men took me round them. Trenches finely made but, in the hurry, not so finished as those which the Italian workmen, turned on to this surprising task instead of digging the Metropolitan tunnels, have made near Paris. The German trenches were distinguishable by their shape, more hurried, as of the attacking side. It was possible to follow the story--the trenches where the shell had burst well behind; the tell-tale breaks where the Germans had found the range; the trample and dead horses of cavalry charges. At Penchard our ---- division had suffered fearfully. Before they fired a shot the Germans had the range; and the men stood by helplessly or ran back--those who survived. But the Germans are far on the retreat now from Penchard! At Poincy they played yet another trick, and paid for it. Beaten by our close fire from the trenches--how close I could measure--one in every three Germans got up and ran back, leaving two or three hidden. Our men came quickly up, taking no cover. From close range they were swept away by the unexpected fire. But they came back--with the bayonet! "And, sir, the Prussians don't like cold steel. But we left them no time to say so!" At Chaucotin the peasants were burying many hundred Germans, by the trenches, in a wastage of swords, muskets, and broken saddles and arms. And in the distance, beyond the Marne and Ourcq, the battle we could hear still going on. In Meaux, as I looked over the bridge, the steam-barges deep in the green shadow of the river below were moving slowly towards Paris with yet more wounded. The decks were bright with the blue-red guards.