Neufmortier was in about the same condition. It was a sad sight, but
not at all ugly. Ruins seem to "go" with the French atmosphere and
background. It all looked quite natural, and I had to make an effort to
shake myself into a becoming frame of mind. If you had been with me
I should have asked you to pinch me, and remind me that "all this is
not yet ancient history," and that a little sentimentality would have
become me. But Amélie would never have understood me.

It was not until we were driving east again to approach Penchard that
a full realization of it came to me. Penchard crowns the hill just in the
centre of the line which I see from the garden. It was one of the towns
bombarded on the evening of September 5, and, so far as I can
guess, the destruction was done by the French guns which drove the
Germans out that night.

They say the Germans slept there the night of September 4, and
were driven out the next day by the French soixante-quinze, which
trotted through Chauconin into Penchard by the road we had just
come over.

I enclose you a carte postale of a battery passing behind the apse of
the village church, just as a guarantee of good faith.

But all signs of the horrors of those days have been obliterated.
Penchard is the town in which the Germans exercised their taste for
wilful nastiness, of which I wrote you weeks ago. It is a pretty little
village, beautifully situated, commanding the slopes to the Marne on
one side, and the wide plains of Barcy and Chambry on the other. It is
prosperous looking, the home of sturdy farmers and the small