Soon after passing Claye we left the high road, and turned north into a labyrinth of byways. The weather was superb; it was one of those blue days of late September, which are apt to collect to themselves all the best beauty of the year in France. From dawn to sunset not a cloud rose in the sky; there reigned a soft continual radiance in which the colour of every object took peculiar intensity. The first hamlet we reached, Charny, brought us to the only disappointment of our day; for we failed, after much inquiry, to find the place of death, or even of burial, of the poet Charles Péguy, who has been the intellectual mascot of this war to France. His gallant death opened the battle of the Marne. Under the shelter of a slope, he and his men fought until they were driven into the open. The officer who led them, and his lieutenant, were soon killed; Péguy then had no sooner taken the command than a ball struck him full in the forehead. His death marked the moment of transition between France in danger and France redeemed. We endeavoured to follow his track, and we drove through Villeroy, where there is little or nothing left to see. The rustic calm of these grey hamlets is unbroken, and at first all that tells us of the tragedy is the appearance from this point onwards of the flags which mark where the French soldiers lie. The dominant feature of these rural battlefields, as we saw them in the full upland sunshine on that long splendid September day, was the scattered profusion of little tricolor flags. A long blue horizon, broken by golden haystacks against the sky, gave a general tone of greyness to the earth, which, green with oats, livid with beetroot, brown with parched lucerne, rolled beneath that vast expanse. In the midst of this harmony of tender hues there stood out sharply the hard red, white, and blue of the little flags, planted now solitary and now in clusters, without arrangement or system—the bright flags flapping and fluttering in the wind as far as the eye could reach, like charming indigenous flowers, like brilliant ixias on some pale South African veldt; and each marking the spot where a hero fell. At first, a stick with a képi on the top of it, or even a cravat or a medal, had to serve for a provisional mark, but now the little splendid flag seems to be a permanent memorial. It leaps from a corner of the beetroot field, from a slope of the harvest, from the turn of an apple-orchard, from the edge of the road, and in its singleness and in its multitude alike, it marks this district of the Brie a holy land for ever.