In the midst of the delicious Ile de France there lies an open piece of country roughly bounded by three rivers—the Marne, the Ourcq, and the Nonette. It is a high plateau, with rolling hills and winding valleys, fertile and smiling. It forms the northern extremity of the famous district of Brie, richly productive, the kitchen-garden of Paris, which lies to the west of it—surprisingly, alarmingly near. This is the battlefield of the Marne, or more exactly of the Ourcq, and was the scene, in September 1914, of what will probably be looked upon in history as one of the most portentous, and most obscurely enthralling, of the combats of the world. At the courteous invitation of the French Government, and under the charge of a distinguished staff-officer, Captain Gabriel Puaux, I paid a visit to these battlefields towards the end of last September. It was a pilgrimage wholly objective and sentimental, for I have no pretensions of any kind to a knowledge of the arts of war. I can but give a visual impression of what the scenes looked like two years after the stupendous event. We proceeded in a War Office car almost directly east from the gates of Paris, along the great high road towards Strasburg. We reached in some seventeen miles the point, at Claye-Souilly, which marks the extreme advance of the German armies. Their outposts came within sight of the village of Claye, where they found the French awaiting them, but they did not cross the bridge over the Ourcq canal. It overwhelms the imagination to realise, on the spot, how close the Germans were to the zone of Paris on this 5th of September 1914. Civilisation, as observed by the angels in Mr. Hardy’s drama, might well then seem to hang by a single thread over the abyss. At this moment, as Mr. Belloc says, ‘at the maximum of its developed energy, at the highest degree of its momentum,’ the horrible German machine was first checked and then put out of gear by the splendid genius of the French Higher Command. We were eager to see the places where France earned for herself this endless meed of glory.