Leaving the town with a feeling akin to awe, I came upon a new surprise. Walking calmly along the public road in broad day were men in Prussian uniform, and--more amazing still--women in the dark _gellab_ or cloak of the Moors. This was certainly startling, but the explanation was waiting on the road to the east, and it was written in gruesome signs--dead men lying in the ditches--Zouaves in their Oriental dress, Moors in their cloaks, French soldiers in their long blue coats, and Germans in their grey. Every hundred yards or so lay a disembowelled horse with a bloody saddle. This was the ragged edge of the battlefield of the Marne, and the men and women in Prussian and Moorish dress were harmless civilians who had gone to bury the dead and to succour the wounded. It was raining torrents; the wind was bitterly cold, and they had covered themselves with the garments of the dead. Passing along this road I came to a wood, where one of these civilian burial parties had dug a pit in which they laid the friend and foe side by side. Fresh mounds of earth that told their own story guided me to a path, where the battle had blazed, a trail of splintered shells, broken rifles, bullet-riddled helmets, blood-stained rags, with which the dying had stopped their wounds, tiny bags in which the German soldier had hoarded his crumbs of biscuit, letters with the crimson imprint of fingers, showing how in the hour of agony and death men's thoughts turn to the beloved ones they are leaving for ever. Four miles east of Meaux the hills rise sharply to the north, and are covered with trees. Beyond this wood a broad undulating plain stretches northward over cultivated fields dotted with farmsteads. A hundred paces in front, on a gentle slope, the earth has been levelled in several places that are sown with brass cylinders, whose charge sent the shells on their deadly flight. In these emplacements lie some gunners; their heads have been shattered by shells. Under an apple-tree, laden with green fruit, two livid faces turn to the pitiless sky; one man grasps a letter in his hand--it is a woman's writing. Dark huddled patches among the cabbages and the trampled wheat, brown stains on the path, fragments of blood-stained lint, broken rifles and bayonets, bullet-pierced helmets and rent cloaks--all the _débris_ of battle show where the fight was fiercest. On the crest of the rise are the trenches; they extend for nearly a mile parallel with the edge of the wood, and are thrown back on the west. They are deep trenches, protected with mounds of earth, and were not made hurriedly. About them lie the dead.