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"Here, as briefly as possible, is the account which you asked me to send. Yesterday evening at nine o'clock, the `Giant' was compelled to descend near the Barcy Marsh, two leagues from Meaux, after three violent shocks, the last of which completely turned everything in the car topsy-turvy, and it descended on its side.
At Etrépilly, with the snow beating in our faces, and the wind howling round us, we read the inscription on the national monument raised to those fallen in the battle, and looking eastwards to the spot where Trocy lay under thick curtains of storm, we tried to imagine the magnificent charge of the Zouaves, of the 62nd Reserve Division, under Commandant Henri D'Urbal, who, with many a comrade, lies buried in the cemetery of Barcy.
We were stopped at all the cross-roads, and at that between Barcy and Chambry, where the pedestal of the monument to mark the limit of the battle in the direction of Paris is already in place, we found a group of a dozen officers not noncommissioned officers, if you please, but captains and majors.
Chambry escaped glory; but between it and Barcy, on the intervening slope through which a good road runs, a battle was fought. You know what kind of a battle it was by the tombs. These tombs were very like the others an oblong of barbed wire, a white flag, a white cross, sometimes a name, more often only a number, rarely a wreath.
From La Ferté we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to Barcy, where the maire, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with municipal gravity.
I simply asked from where these people had come, and was told that they were evacuating Daumartin and all the towns on the plain between there and Meaux, which meant that Monthyon, Neufmortier, Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry, in fact, all the villages visible from my garden were being evacuated by order of the military powers.
And if there are half a million similarly tragic houses in Europe to-day, as probably there are, such frequency does not in the slightest degree diminish the forlorn tragedy of that particular house which I have beheld. At last Barcy came into view the pierced remains of its church tower over the brow of a rise in the plain. Barcy is our driver's show- place. Barcy was in the middle of things.
Even then, as she was rather deaf, she probably did not realize what was happening, and went into the street in such fear that she left everything behind her. From Barcy we drove out into the plain, and took the direction of Chambry, following the line of the great and decisive fight of September 6 and 7. We rolled slowly across the beautiful undulating country of grain and beet fields.
Their progress was snail-like, for there was little oil left in our lantern and they hesitated before casting the refuse into the ditch for fear of profaning some unknown hero's grave. And so, stumbling and halting, we came into Barcy. As we passed in front of the battered church we could see the huge bronze bell lying amid a pile of beams, at the foot of the belfry.
The fighting round Barcy lasted a night and a day, and Barcy was taken and retaken twice. "You see the new red roofs," said the driver as we approached. "By those new red roofs you are in a state to judge a little what the damage was." Some of the newly made roofs, however, were of tarred paper. The street by which we entered had a small-pox of shrapnel and bullet-marks.
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