You can imagine that gray horde rolling through the streets—­narrow, cobblestoned streets, with steep-roofed stone houses and queer little courts, and the air over all of having been lived in for generations on generations.  There is the remnant in Crepy of one of the houses that used to belong to the Dukes of Valois, and at the end of one winding street you find yourself unexpectedly looking through a grilled iron gateway into the ordered stateliness of an old-time chateau.  On the outward side the walls of the chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or forty feet to the edge of the ravine.  What a place to wait for an approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; and the Germans evidently thought so too, for from this part of town they carefully kept away.  They burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate as to live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, they pillaged the houses whose owners had run away, and they ordered the town to pay them one hundred thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the fortitude to stay behind were not molested.  The enemy were even polite, one woman told us—­“Pas peur!” said the officer who visited her house, taking off his hat.  On the gate of another house was scrawled in German script, “Sick Woman—­keep away!” and as we passed the open windows, sure enough there was the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just as she had been when the Germans came.

On another door we read, also in German script, “Good people—­they give everything!” and on several were orders to leave those within alone.  And there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase:  “Gute Leute—­ Schoenen!” chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their lives to the north of us and likely never to see their fatherland again.

Crepy-en-Valois, more fortunate than some of the towns, whose mayors were dismissed for revealing “a lamentable absence of sang-froid,” had a mayor who stuck to his post.  He was there when three-fourths of the village had fled and, getting up from a sick-bed to receive the German commander, he saw that the latter’s orders were carried out, and signed the order for the town’s ransom while his daughter held smelling-salts under his nose.

Whether the mayor of the old town of Senlis, a few miles west of Crepy, was in any way tactless is scarcely of importance now, in so far as it concerns him for he and the other hostages were shot, and, however little good it may have done anybody, he at least gave France his life.  It is said that his order to the townspeople to turn in their arms was not completely obeyed.  It was also said—­and this several people of Senlis told us—­that a few Senegalese, lagging behind as the French left, fired on the Germans as they approached, and that it was possible that one or two excited civilians had joined in.

Granting that civilians did fire after hostages had been given, there remains the question of reprisal.  It was the German commander’s idea that Senlis should be taught a lesson, and this consisted of shooting the mayor and the hostages, and sacking and burning the main street—­a half mile, perhaps—­from end to end.  The idea was carried out with thoroughness, and men ran along from house to house feeding the flames with petroleum and even burning a handsome new country house which stood apart at one end.