The hard thing to bear was, that it was all conjecture.
So often, when I first took this place on the hill, I had looked off at
the plain and thought, "What a battlefield!" forgetting how often the
Seine et Marne had been that from the days when the kings lived at
Chelles down to the days when it saw the worst of the invasion of 1870.
But when I thought that, I had visions very different from what I was
seeing. I had imagined long lines of marching soldiers, detachments of
flying cavalry, like the war pictures at Versailles and Fontainebleau.
Now I was actually seeing a battle, and it was nothing like that. There
was only noise, belching smoke, and long drifts of white clouds
concealing the hill.
By the middle of the afternoon Monthyon came slowly out of the smoke.
That seemed to mean that the heaviest firing was over the hill and not
on it,--or did it mean that the battle was receding? If it did, then the
Allies were retreating. There was no way to discover the truth. And
all this time the cannon thundered in the southeast, in the direction of
Coulommiers, on the route into Paris by Ivry.
Naturally I could not but remember that we were only seeing the action
on the extreme west of a battle-line which probably extended hundreds of
miles.
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