So the old places awoke. _The Times_ and the _Daily Mail_ appeared where formerly the _Figaro_ and _La Croix_ (pillars of the old French nobility) were seen; the _Winning Post_ found itself side by side with _The Lives of the Saints_ (in thirty-eight volumes in calf); and pictures of charming young ladies cut out of the _Sketch_ or _La Vie Parisienne_, particularly Rudolphe Kirchner’s delightful sketches from the latter, were pinned up on the walls next to family portraits of dead-and-gone châtelains and châtelaines. The green tree-frogs, sprawling lazily in the sunshine among the sedge on the surface of the moat, leapt away in high indignation at the invasion of their realm by noisy young men with bath-towels. The rooks in the plantation cawed in raucous protest against the thin blue curls of smoke arising from the camp-fires of the troops bivouacked among the oaks and beeches, singing, hammering, rattling tins, and jesting from dawn to dark. The birds watched in amazement men-folk doing work they had been wont to believe was the prerogative of rabbits and moles, scraping deep holes in the ground, roofing them with timber, and thatching them with leaves, and vanishing therein when blasts on a whistle heralded the approach of the curious new birds recently noticed in the sky, birds that glittered whitely far up among the clouds and droned angrily like a giant bumble-bee. I have seen many striking contrasts in these châteaux of France. One day I turned into the courtyard of as dainty a little château as ever the fifteenth Louis of gallant memory built for a lady. It was one of the country places of a French officer then at the front, and very rarely visited by him. Its grounds were neglected, the iron gates were rusted and broken, and the stonework running round the flat and shallow fish-pond was hoary and cracked with age. Against a superb background of green foliage, a mighty screen of poplars bordering a drive that ran out to the blue horizon, a horseman sat on his horse, turbaned, a lance at his stirrup, immobile, a sublime equestrian statue. It was an Indian sowar, a Pathan trooper of the native cavalry. He sat perfectly still in the sunshine, in the silence that was Pompadour France....