Dormans. Several kilometers before we got into Dormans little crosses began to show themselves along the roadside. All through here was heavy fighting during the battle of the Marne. The first grave we stopped by bore on its little cross the words, “_Trois Allemands_,” and it was neatly fenced up with black sticks and wire. We started to climb the hill, and among the malachite, the beryl, the emerald, the jasper, and the aquamarine vines were many other graves. Sometimes it would be “_20 Français_,” the red-and-white-and-blue _cocarde_ decorating the cross. Once it was “_30 Allemands_.” On another was the name “_Lastaud, le 3 septembre, 1914, souvenir d’un ami_.” I thought how friendship has been glorified in this war. But mostly it was the continuous gorgeous anonymity of the defenders of the land that clutched the heart and with them the invaders, pressing their bayonets and their wills into a land not theirs. I was once more again before the awful tangle of the world as I looked at these resting-places. Over beyond the crest of the hill and the forest was Montmirail. Just a hundred years before, Napoleon had put these names upon the scrolls of history, and again and then again they had resounded to marching feet, the terrors of invasion, the heroisms of defense. One of a group of soldiers passing called out as we stood by one of the German graves: “I came through here in 1914.” “But you still walk the earth,” I answered. “I got a ball in the hip, all the same, on the top of that hill,” and he pointed across the road. “_Mais j’ai eu de la chance._” And a look of a strange and pitiful wonder that he was above the earth, not under it, flashed for a moment over his young face; then he touched his cap and went singing down the road with his companions, and I caught the refrain, “_Ces mots sacrés, ces mots sacrés, gloire et patrie, gloire et patrie_.” And somehow, after Dormans, we were all quiet. I only remember long, gray villages, mostly eighteenth century, and many blue soldiers walking about their broad, central streets, and signs of billetings, “_30 hommes, 2 officiers_,” “_5 hommes, 2 chevaux_,” black-robed women coming out of little Gothic churches, and children playing, and in between the villages great avenues of poplar and plane trees. Then we lost the Marne and picked up the Seine, and passed La Ferté, and Meaux, seen from the inside, preserved its flavor of “_autres temps, autres mœurs_,” in spite of the 1917 soldiers billeted there, walking hand in hand with girls who don’t have a ghost of a chance, in military towns, to get through the war as they began it.