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Updated: June 21, 2025
Meaux is full of Germans. The biggest department shop there is a German enterprise. Even Couilly has a German or two, and we had one in our little hamlet. But they've got to get out. Our case is rather pathetic. He was a nice chap, employed in a big fur house in Paris. He came to France when he was fifteen, has never been back, consequently has never done his military service there.
Day after day I have watched the men and their families pass silently, and an hour later have seen the women come back leading the children. One day I went to Couilly to see if it was yet possible for me to get to Paris. I happened to be in the station when a train was going out. Nothing goes over the line yet but men joining their regiments. They were packed in like sardines.
At the station at Esbly the same situation a few lights, very low, on the main platform, and absolutely none on the platform where I took the narrow-gauge for Couilly. I went stumbling, in absolute blackness, across the main track, and literally felt my way along the little train to find a door to my coach.
He has a field on the route de Couilly, and another on the side of the hill on the route de Meaux, and he has a small patch of fruit trees and a potato field on the chemin Madame, and another big piece of grassland running down the hill from Huiry to Condé. Almost nothing is fenced in.
So if you could have seen the road, just outside of Couilly, Thursday morning, just after nine, you would have seen a Southern girl sitting in a high cart facing east, and an elderly lady in a donkey cart facing west, and the two of them watching the road ahead for the coming of a bicycle pedalled by a gendarme with a gun on his back, as they talked like magpies.
Indeed almost no one has returned to Couilly; and Meaux, they say, is still deserted. Yet I cannot honestly say that I have suffered for anything. I have an abundance of fruit. We have plenty of vegetables in Père's garden. We have milk and eggs. Rabbits and chickens run about in the roads simply asking to be potted.
Our resting place at Couilly, where, sheltered by acacia trees, we hardly feel the tropical heat of July, is an admirable starting point for excursions, each interesting in a different way. The striking contrast with the homely ease and well to do terre-a-terre about us is the princely chateau of the Rothschilds at Ferrieres, which none should miss seeing on any account whatever.
Even though he is an intimate friend of our mayor, the commune preferred to be rid of him. He begged not to be sent back to Germany, so he went sadly enough to a concentration camp, pretty well convinced that his career here was over. Still, the French do forget easily. Couilly had two Germans. One of them the barber got out quick. The other did not.
My mail comes there, and the railway station is there, and everyone knows me. The idea that I can't go there gives me, for the first time since the battle, a shut-in feeling. I talked to the garde champêtre, whom I met on the road, as I returned from the mairie, and I asked him what he thought about the risk of my going to Couilly.
La Creste, Huiry, Couilly. S et M. September 16, 1914 Dear Old Girl: More and more I find that we humans are queer animals. All through those early, busy, exciting days of September, can it be only a fortnight ago? I was possessed, like the "busy bee," to "employ each shining hour" by writing out my adventures.
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