“We do not destroy for the pleasure it gives us.  We destroy only when it is necessary.  The French rural populace are more rational, more tractable and much less turbulent than the Belgians.  To a much greater degree than the Belgians they have refrained from acts against our men that would call for severe retaliatory measures on our part.  Consequently we have spared the houses and respected the property of the French noncombatants.”

Personally I had a theory of my own.  So far as our observations went, the people living immediately on both sides of the line were an interrelated people, using the same speech and being much alike in temperament, manners and mode of conduct.  I reached the private conclusion that, because of the chorus of protest that arose from all the neutral countries, and particularly from the United States, against the severities visited on Belgium in August and September, the word went forth to the German forces in the field that the scheme of punishment for offenders who violated the field code should be somewhat softened and relaxed.  However, that is merely a personal theory.  I may be absolutely wrong about it.  The German general who interpreted the meaning of the situation may have been absolutely right about it.  Certainly the physical testimony was on his side.

Also, it seemed to me, the psychology of the people—­particularly of the womenfolk—­in northern France was not that of their neighboors over the frontier.  In a trade way the small shopkeepers here faced ruin; the Belgians already had been ruined.  The Frenchwomen, whose sons and brothers and husbands and fathers were at the front, walked in the shadow of a great fear, as you might tell by a look into the face of any one of them.  They were as peppercorns between the upper millstone and the nether, and the sound of the crunching was always in their ears, even though their turn to be ground up had not yet come.

For the Belgian women, however, the worst that might befall had already happened to them; their souls could be wrung no more; they had no terror of the future, since the past had been so terrible and the present was a living desolation of all they counted worth while.  You might say the Frenchwomen dreaded what the Belgians endured.  The refilled cup was at the lips of France; Belgium had drained it dry.

Yet in both countries the women generally manifested the same steadfast and silent patience.  They said little; but their eyes asked questions.  In the French towns we saw how bravely they strove to carry on their common affairs of life, which were so sadly shaken and distorted out of all normality by the earthquake of war.

For currency they had small French coins and strange German coins, and in some places futile-looking, little green-and-white slips, issued by the municipality in denominations of one franc and two francs and five francs, and redeemable in hard specie “three months after the declaration of peace.”  For wares to sell they had what remained of their depleted stocks; and for customers, their friends and neighbors, who looked forward to commercial ruin, which each day brought nearer to them all.  Outwardly they were placid enough, but it was not the placidity of content.  It bespoke rather a dumb, disciplined acceptance by those who have had fatalism literally thrust on them as a doctrine to be practiced.