its noble church, all bathed in the liquid gold of September, it seemed lovelier than ever before. The only sign of disturbance is the modern bridge, which the English blew up for strategical purposes, without hurting the old town in any respect. In leaving Meaux to return to the battlefields we took a northward road almost parallel with that by which we had entered, but somewhat to the east of it, thus crossing the battlefields at a point a couple of miles farther on in the German retreat. There is little to see close to Meaux, but presently the graves begin, many of them gay with dahlias and chrysanthemums. We descended to the village of Varreddes, which takes a prominent place in the chronicle of the fighting. The struggle here was very heavy. Varreddes is a rather large village, built a little distance to the south of the canal of the Ourcq, which makes at this place a great bend, surrounding the village on three sides, while the Marne nearly isolates it on the fourth. Hence it was held by the enemy with determination as long as possible. At Varreddes the Germans did dreadful things. They ordered the population of the village to leave it at once, and a group of seventeen very old men, who were too infirm to move quickly, they set up against a wall and shot in cold blood. The priest, a venerable man of seventy-six years, they seized as a hostage, and killed in their retreat. Many bright new roofs and walls testify in the village of Varreddes to the enterprise of the inhabitants, who have ventured to rebuild their ruined houses. The church, which has some good thirteenth-century features, seems to be intact. And yet it is precisely at Varreddes that the scheme of the battle, as it swept from west to east, is most intelligible to a civilian. The intensity of the fighting is proved by the profusion of graves, whose flags glitter and shimmer, with their petals of red, white, and blue, in every direction. Farther on, above Etrépilly, a large turfed reservoir, perched on a hillock, forms a landmark, from which the eye explores in every direction the rolling country, intersected by scarcely visible glens or trenches, through which the rivers wind. On the summit of this commanding height we found a curious monument, which called for an explanation which no one seemed competent to give. It consists of a metal shield of brilliant vermilion and azure, surmounted by seven flags—one of them the American flag—and addressed in large letters, ‘Les Prisonniers de Guerre aux Héros de la Marne.’ What prisoners these were we asked one another in vain. But it made our hearts, with a touch of added mystery, thrill in fresh response to those myriads of memorial flowers that twinkled and sparkled on the circle of brown fields around us. There is one object of horror that attracts attention here. It was a great barn or hangar, in which the bodies of the fallen Germans were heaped up after the battle, and then burned by their comrades.