man’s estate that are left untilled and have lost almost all feature save the records of past wars. For here has been a great battle-field for ages. Across its flat one may still trace the lines of the Roman military roads. Here the French have made their chief modern ranges for the training of their gunners. Here Attila was broken in his great defeat, and you may see his enormous oval camp still standing, so large that it looks like the ruin of a town in the midst of the plain. Here also in the very next year that followed the flight of the king were to meet for the first time the armies of the Revolution and of Europe, and from these poor fields were to retreat the forces of the invasion, which did not return until, after twenty-two years, the republic and Napoleon had transformed the world. Here, yesterday, the fate of the world was decided once again in the Battle of the Marne. Right across the sweep drives the great road from Châlons, twenty-five miles, till it strikes Sainte-Menehould, a country town at the foot of the Argonne. Only two relays break this long day’s stretch, Somme-Vesle and Orbeval, each an isolated farm and standing in one of those slightly depressed muddy-watered dips to which the road falls, and from which it as slightly rises again in its eastward progress across the plain. And there, at Somme-Vesle, at the Châlons end of the stretch, barely ten miles away, should be the first cavalry awaiting them, Choiseul’s troop. It was in the hours between half-past four and six that the Berline was passing through this stage. That hour and a half of debt to fate which the loyalty of Lagny at Chaintrix had increased perhaps to two, the avoidable accidents under Vallet’s posting had stretched to nearly three. Young Choiseul, the duke, had come in to Somme-Vesle. He had his orders to expect somewhat after noon at the earliest, at the latest by three, the carriage which held his master and the queen. His exact time-table said one, and at one that carriage had not yet reached Chaintrix! The officer was mounted, and his troop of forty also--forty German mercenaries esteemed more trustworthy in such a task than any troops of the nation. From one till two they still sat their horses, waiting in the road before the posting-house, with the width of the Champagne all about: a strange sight to see, so considerable an escort thus gathered, waiting for they would not say what! But here again, so oddly fast did the news travel, one man knew. As the afternoon wore on, and men sent riding up to the crest of the rise could see nothing coming down the road, the postmaster, as though to make conversation, strolled up to one man in subordinate command and said, “It seems that the king is to pass this way?” He was answered neither yes nor no.