I think I forgot to tell you in my letter of last week that the people-- drummed out of the towns on the other side of the Marne, that is to say, the near-by towns, like those in the plain, and on the hilltops from which the Germans were driven before the 10th--began to return on that night; less than a fortnight after they fled. It was unbelievable to me when I saw them coming back. When they were drummed out, they took a roundabout route, to leave the main roads free for the army. They came back over the route nationale. They fled en masse. They are coming back slowly, in family groups. Day after day, and night after night the flocks of sheep, droves of cattle, carts with pigs in them, people in carts leading now and then a cow, families on foot, carrying cats in baskets, and leading dogs and goats and children, climb the long hill from Couilly, or thread the footpaths on the canal. They fled in silence. I remember as remarkable that no one talked. I cannot say that they are coming back exactly gaily, but, at any rate, they have found their tongues. The slow procession has been passing for a fortnight now, and at almost any hour of the day, as I sit at my bedroom window, I can hear the distant murmur of their voices as they mount the hill. I can't help thinking what some of them are going to find out there in the track of the battle. But it is a part of the strange result of war, borne in on me by my own frame of mind, that the very fact that they are going back to their own hearths seems to reconcile them to anything. Of course these first people to return are mostly the poorer class, who did not go far. Their speedy return is a proof of the morale of the country, because they would surely not have been allowed to come back by the military authorities if the general conviction was not that the German advance had been definitely checked. Isn't it wonderful? I can't get over it. Even before they began to return, the engineers were at work repairing the bridges as far as Chalons, and the day I wrote to you last week, when Amélie went down the hill to mail your letter, she brought back the news that the English engineers were sitting astride the telegraph poles, pipes in mouth, putting up the wires they cut down a fortnight ago. The next day our post-office opened, and then I got newspapers. I can tell you I devoured them. I read Joffre's order of the day. What puzzled me was that it was dated on the morning of September 6, yet we, with our own eyes, saw the battle begin at noon on the 5th,--a battle which only stopped at nine that night, to begin again at four the next morning. But I suppose history will sometime explain that. Brief as the news was in the papers, it was exciting to know that the battle we had seen and heard was really a decisive fight, and that it was considered won by the English and French--in a rainstorm--as long ago as the 10th, and that the fighting to the east of us had been far more terrible than here.