These are only haphazard extracts from the records of that terrible month of September, 1914, when unfortunate Meaux was the very center of affairs. Elsewhere we read of the aspects of the streets after each successive bombardment, the telegraph hanging in festoons on the footways, the trunks of huge trees felled by cannon barring the way; the carcasses of animals lying about amid strange débris, such as heavy leather shoes, broken guns, sticks and barrels, empty tin cans, torn and ragged clothing clotted with blood, strange piles of still smoking ashes containing small bones, and over all the odor of burning petroleum. The houses with wide open doors and sashless window frames; gardens uprooted and despoiled; walls thrown down, and strewn about an immense quantity of broken glass bottles. These were the streets of Meaux, which I had explored on that peaceful morning in August, 1910, and made the sketches of the old bridge with its clustered mills, the fire blackened beams now hanging in grotesque ruins over the water of the little green river. The bombardment began on Monday, the 7th of September, 1914. The first of the German shells fell upon the town at eleven in the morning, in the direction of the fauburg St.-Nicholas, then in the fauburg St.-Faron. The bombardment followed the line of the railway. In the cemetery the ancient tombs were scattered in all directions; ten shells destroyed the hospital. The Grand Seminary fell next. Of the one hundred and twenty shells which on this Monday fell in the town, the first five did the greatest damage. Whole lines of houses were thrown down and set on fire. This lasted until six in the afternoon. The next day shells began to fall again in the early morning. The cathedral was encircled by shells, which did great damage, but by a special Providence with the exception of an enormous hole in the roof, and the destruction of the venerable cloisters, the ancient cathedral escaped the fate of its neighbors. This is the chronology: Wednesday, September 2, the exodus; Thursday, the town lay deserted and helpless; Friday, the organization of all the available defensive forces; Saturday and Sunday, the battle; Monday, the bombardment; Tuesday, the enemy driven off, and the town saved. SENLIS |FROM the railway station one could see the towers of the cathedral and the old church of St. Pierre, above the heavy trees of a short avenue which led to that part of the town, where formerly stood the old ramparts--and to the Porte Royale. The best and most picturesque part of the town, of interest to the antiquary, was the western end, and here were tortuous and delightful crooked narrow streets, quaint little gabled houses, old mossy walls surrounding luxuriant gardens, and some remains of the remarkable chateaux of a bygone period.