After travelling some distance through the sort of country just spoken of, we again emerged upon a high and open tract of corn, and in a hollow some way in front saw the neat village of Gournay, forming a broad street of clean-looking buff cottages, all, I think, slated. Here we stumbled upon the first traces of our allies the Prussians, who bivouacked (at least some of their corps) last night upon these heights. Of all disgusting objects in the world, there is perhaps none more so than the deserted bivouac--the ground everywhere covered with half-extinguished fires, broken jugs, &c., bits of rags, shreds of uniforms, straw trampled in the miry soil, remnants of food of all sorts, &c. In histories of war and warlike operations, the pomp and glitter and excitement are all that present themselves to our mind’s eye, whilst the bivouac, the battle-field encumbered with carnage and misery, the hospital with its heartrending scenes, the plundered cottage, the brutal outrage, and a thousand other disgusting and harrowing episodes, are carefully slurred over if touched upon, but more generally never produced. Up to this moment I have actually not known with what part of the army we have been marching. As far as I could see, we have had an apparently interminable column ahead and astern of us; now, however, I find we are with the advance. A few paces from the highroad, and in the midst of the bivouac (at the point from whence we obtain sight of Gournay) stood a monument of Republican and Prussian revenge--pitiful revenge!--such as, having enacted, a schoolboy would blush at--the mausoleum of some illustrious lady, whom a long inscription, in the true French style of mawkish sentiment, told us “had been lovely in person and elegant in mind--that, soaring above superstition, she eschewed the folly of laying her bones in _consecrated_ ground, choosing rather to lie overshadowed in death by those trees of which she had been so enamoured (_passionné_) whilst living,” &c. The monument was a stone pyramid, standing in a small square space enclosed by an embankment, and planted round with acacias. The Prussians had cut down the trees, nearly levelled the embankment, and made a fruitless attempt at destroying the pyramid itself. Descending from this eminence by a long but gradual slope, we entered Gournay after crossing a little stream tumbling from the heights. This certainly is the neatest and cleanest place we have seen in France; pity it is, however, that it stands so bare--scarcely a bush to be seen. I don’t know how it happened, but when we reached Gournay we were ahead of almost everybody. About the middle of the long village several well-dressed persons were standing at the door of an auberge, attentively watching our advance. As we approached they hurried forward to meet us, eagerly demanding when the Duke of Wellington would come up. Now I suspected the report which we heard yesterday--of Paris having