South, towards Lizy, a few peasants in carts were already dribbling back to their looted villages. The Prussians were here for a week or so and fought in the streets, using the furniture as obstacles. The destruction is pitiable. The châteaux were in many cases pillaged. Their gardens are strewn with bottles. The lawns are heaped with bolsters and palliasses. In one château, near Lizy, the orchard wall and trees were pierced and wrecked with shells in some prolonged assault, while over the opposite wall, commanding the deep little green lane alongside, a splendid mass of scarlet and orange lilies still glows triumphantly from the deserted garden. In one such devastated village, between Meaux and May, a strange incident checked us. A dignified old peasant, wandering in the wreckage, was pouring out to me a passionate recital of wrongs. A son shot, a farm wasted, ruin before him. There passed a uniformed Government employee, with a dangerous, nervous face, who called out: "Be silent! The French have done us more harm than the Germans!" At such a time, in such a place, it was an insane outcry. Never have I heard such a torrent of execration as when the old peasant turned and sprang at him. Nothing but the vicious look and gestures of the younger man kept murder from being done. The incident was illustrative of the unbalanced mental condition to which war reduces the non-combatant. The younger man was himself ruined, and like a desperate, snarling fox he turned to hurt the nearest sentient thing, his more injured neighbour. In torrents of evening rain I left the battle still continuing beyond the hill, and the two German armies being edged north-west through the forests of Villers and Compiègne, already in part behind the line of Soissons. So, back through the country north of the Canal of Ourcq. A few days ago it was in German occupation; now comfortably patrolled by Cuirassiers, in their rain cloaks; with watch-dog camps of infantrymen, cooking under straw shelters, cheerful and singing for all the torrents of rain and chilly wind. I am writing on an earth mound, on the wrong side of the Ourcq Canal. Some fifty sappers are hurriedly trying to repair the temporary bridge which we crossed this morning. It was frail then. Since then a huge lorry has gone through it. Eighty more of the great Paris omnibuses, now loaded with provisions, are waiting on the far side. It will never carry their weight, and we must get over first. We have done our share of work on the bridge, to earn an early passage. In the next field some soldiers are digging out the airman from under a fallen biplane. The country has turned from a sunlight green to a dull grey with the passing of the summer; and there is an autumn mist of twilight heavy over the forests where the Great Machine is threatening to dissolve into its human elements, and confess its human limitations. The feet in the proud Prussian parade to Paris are slipping, slipping, on the road. Sunday.