I begin to believe that we shall have no normal settled weather until
all this cannon play is over. We've had most unseasonable hailstorms
which have knocked all the buds off the fruit-trees, so, in addition to
other annoyances, we shall have no fruit this year.
There is nothing new here except that General Foch is in the
ambulance at Meaux. No one knows it; not a word has appeared in
the newspapers. It was the result of a stupid, but unavoidable,
automobile accident. To avoid running over a woman and child on a
road near here, the automobile, in which he was travelling rapidly in
company with his son-in-law, ran against a tree and smashed. Luckily
he was not seriously hurt, though his head got damaged.
On Thursday Poincaré passed over our hill, with Briand, en route to
meet Joffre at the General's bedside. I did not see them, but some of
the people at Quincy did. It was a lucky escape for Foch. He would
have hated to die during this war of a simple, unmilitary automobile
accident, and the army could ill afford just now to lose one of the
heroes of the Marne. Carefully as the fact has been concealed, we
knew it here through our ambulance, which is a branch of that at
Meaux, where he is being nursed.
Three months since the battle at Verdun began, and it is still going
on, with the Germans hardly more than four miles from the city, and
yet it begins to look as if they knew themselves that the battle--the
most terrible the world has ever seen--was a failure. Still, I have
changed my mind. I begin to believe that had Germany centred all
her forces on that frontier in August, 1914, when her first-line troops
were available, and their hopes high, she would probably have
passed. No one can know that, but it is likely, and many military men
think so. Isn't it a sort of poetic justice to think that it is even
possible that had Germany fought an honorable war she might have
got to Paris? "Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad."
I do nothing but work in the garden on rare days when it does not
rain, and listen to the cannon. That can't be very interesting stuff to
make a letter of. The silence here, which was so dear to me in the
days when I was preparing the place, still hangs over it. But, oh, the
difference! Now and then, in spite of one's self, the very thought of all
that is going on so very near us refuses to take its place and keep in
the perspective, it simply jumps out of the frame of patriotism and the
welfare of the future. Then the only thing to do is to hunt for the visible
consolations--and one always finds them.
For example--wouldn't it seem logical that such a warfare would
brutalize the men who are actually in it? It doesn't. It seems to have
just the contrary effect. I can't tell you how good the men are to one
another, or how gentle they are to the children. It is strange that it
should be so, but it is. I don't try to understand it, I merely set it down
for you.