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Updated: June 24, 2025
We obtained a respectable carriage, with a melancholy, resigned old driver, who said: "For fifteen francs, plus always the pourboire, I will take you to Barcy, which was bombarded and burnt. I will show you all the battlefield." With those few words he thrilled me.
Thousands have gone out to it from Paris, from Meaux, and the whole country-side. The innumerable graves, single or grouped, among the harvest fields and the pastures, have been covered with flowers, and bright, mile after mile, with the twinkling tricolour, as far as the eye could see. At Barcy and Etrépilly, the centres of the fight, priests have blessed the graves, and prayed for the dead.
Oh, lighthearted sons of France, it can be truly said that death held no terrors for you, since from Barcy to Soissons the ground you loved and so valiantly defended was strewn white with hundreds of thousands of tender ditties and chansons de route.
This living in suspense was beginning to tell on my nerves and anything, even the assurance of dreaded misfortune, would have seemed a relief. After the state in which we had found Barcy there was little doubt that our part of the country had been treated the same way. Perhaps it was still in the Germans' hands; we had no way of knowing to the contrary.
When the descent was effected, the lights and the speaking-trumpets soon attracted a number of peasants, who brought carts and helped the party to the village of Barcy, where most of them passed the night; but Monsieur Nadar and the Prince de Wittgenstein, with two or three others, came to Paris by the first train from Meaux.
We were well on our road before she came to her senses, and there were moments when I almost wished she might remain dormant until we had passed beyond the gruesome plain that stretches between Barcy and Vareddes now a historic battlefield. What a weird and wonderful sight it presented that gloomy September morning.
At Barcy, we stopped a few minutes, to go and look at the ruined church, with its fallen bell, and its graveyard packed with wreaths and crosses, bound with the tricolour.
I could see the moment not far distant when our whole party, seized with fear, would become panic-stricken, and that idea, together with the one of camping in the sodden fields surrounded by grim death, was anything but reassuring. "Come on," I urged. "Surely Barcy is not entirely deserted." What mud!
Soupplêts Marcilly Barcy Etrépilly Acy-en-Multien; villages from which one by one, by keen, hard fighting, the French attack, coming eastwards from Dammartin to Paris, dislodged the troops of Von Kluck; while to our right lay Trocy, and Vareddes, a village on the Ourcq, between which points ran the strongest artillery positions of the enemy.
It is worth while to try and realise the scene the terror-stricken old men dragged away by their murderers the wives left behind, no doubt under a guard the sound of the distant shots the broken hearts of the widow and the orphan. But that was a mere prelude. On Friday, September 4th, a large detachment of Von Kluck's army invaded Vareddes, coming from Barcy, which lies to the west.
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