From the Preface.
It was nearly two years before the beginning of the war that a disquieting symbol of change first appeared to me in the French sky. I was sitting in a friendly garden, basking in the warm autumnal sunshine, savoring, as a New Englander can, the charm of being again in France. Above me, a red-roofed cottage; below, a steep, terraced hillside; beyond, closing the ripe green valley, a darkly wooded horizon. No sign of life but a solitary pony-cart climbing the one white road that cut the opposite hill. No sound in the golden air but the scratch of a pen at an upper window, the click of garden shears among the rose-bushes. Then suddenly, brusquely, an ominous whirr, a mysterious pulsing throb directly overhead. Staring up, I saw the long brown shadow of an army biplane sharp against the opalescent sky. Almost grazing the cottage roof, it wheeled, swooped across the valley, and disappeared. But the spell was broken. Those mechanical wings had left a sinister echo in the quiet garden; and when my radical friend came down from his study to talk of aviation fields beyond the hill, of a journey he had just taken to the battlefields of 1870,1 became aware of a new tension, a half-concealed anxiety, a subtle change in the French temper.
This change, as I saw it further reflected in a certain distinguished French household the following winter, I have tried to suggest in one of the last sketches in the present volume, "Signs of the Times." The Epilogue, "The Merciers at Topsbridge," will indicate that of the war itself I have had only a transatlantic impression. Most of the papers were written in days that now seem unbelievably felicitous, the occasional record of a series of peaceful French visits which date back to 1904.