On the open down above Barcy, and quite close to the road, a peasant was loading a hay-cart with the help of two sullen-looking men in rough white clothes. These were German prisoners, and we were moved by curiosity to stop and talk to the peasant. He, from his half-built rick, replied with stolidity to our questions. ‘He had no complaints to make of the prisoners,’ he said; ‘that one’, indicating a burly captive, ‘really works quite well.’ ‘Had they learned to speak French?’ we asked. ‘Oh no!’ ‘How, then, did the work get on?’ ‘Ah,’ said the master, ‘we show them what they have to do, and they point at what they want.’ During this, and more, conversation the prisoners pursued their slow labour, not glancing at us or taking more notice than cattle would. Strange it seemed, and almost inhuman, that these Germans should have lived two years in this sequestered French village and that neither on the one side nor on the other should there have been the smallest approximation of language. The peasant ‘had no complaints to make,’ and that was the sum of their relations. It was beyond Barcy that the bright flags began to be abundant. The eye had no longer any need to seek for them; the garden of death was now lavish of its bouquets of flowers. They were difficult to distinguish among the beetroot, easy among the oats, insistent on the grey expanse of stubble. Soon after leaving Barcy, at the corner where the road turns abruptly south, there is a great cluster of them, and, always at a little distance off, the plain black crosses which mark the spots where Germans are buried. Presently we paused to examine the great monument raised to the memory of officers and men who fell in the battle of the Ourcq. It is garish in colour, and too much adorned with symbols in silvered cardboard and wreaths of arsenical green. No doubt it is provisional; a memorial in severer taste will ultimately testify to the riper genius of France. We descend to Chambry, another tiny village of Brie, and here we meet with a feature of poignant importance. In the great ‘push,’ the retiring Germans occupied the cemetery of Chambry, a walled enclosure at the summit of the village; this was a position of great strength, commanding the countryside in every direction.