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Updated: June 14, 2025
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.
The chef-major turned to me caught me looking in the other direction to the west where deserted Esbly climbed the hill. "May I be very indiscreet?" he asked. I told him that he knew best. "Well," he said, "I want to know how it happens that you a foreigner, and a woman happen to be living in what looks like exile all alone on the top of a hill in war-time?"
The schoolmistress and her husband did not go far, however. We discovered before we had got out of Esbly that Couilly had been evacuated during the day, and that a great many people had left Voisins; that the civil government had gone to Coutevroult; that the Croix Rouge had gone.
But the army needed the road, and the engineers were at work five days after the battle. There are but few trains none yet on our branch road so we had to go to Esbly. It took two hours to get to Paris hardly more than twelve miles. We simply crawled most of the way.
One of the most disquieting things about this was to see the effect of the procession as it passed along the road. All the way from Esbly to Montry people began to pack at once, and the speed with which they fell into the procession was disconcerting.
This regulation has resulted in the queerest of embarrassments. A great number of these old peasants and young ones too never had a photograph taken. There is no photographer. The photographer at Esbly and the two at Meaux could not possibly get the people all photographed, and, in this uncertain weather, the prints made, in the delay allowed by the military authorities.
Esbly evacuated, Couilly evacuated, Quincy evacuated. All the shops closed. No government, no post-office, and absolutely no knowledge of what had happened since Wednesday. I had a horrible sense of isolation. Luckily for me, part of the morning was killed by what might be called an incident or a disaster or a farce just as you look at it.
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