“The Germans!” she said.  She spat upon the ground, scornfully, and with a gesture of infinite loathing.  And every time she uttered that hated word she spat again.  It was a ceremony she used; she felt, I know, that her mouth was defiled by that word, and she wished to cleanse it.  It was no affectation, as, with some folk, you might have thought it.  It was not a studied act.  She did it, I do believe, unconsciously.  And it was a gesture marvelously expressive.  It spoke more eloquently of her feelings than many words could have done.

She had seen the Germans!  Aye!  She had seen them come, in 1914, in the first days of the war, rolling past in great, gray waves, for days and days, as if the flood would never cease to roll.  She had seen them passing, with their guns, in those first proud days of the war, when they had reckoned themselves invincible, and been so sure of victory.  She knew what cruelties, what indignities, they had put upon the helpless people the war had swept into their clutch.  She knew the defilements of which they had been guilty.

Nor was that the first time she had seen Germans.  They had come before she was so old, though even then she had not been a young girl—­in the war of 1870, when Europe left brave France to her fate, because the German spirit and the German plan were not appreciated or understood.  Thank God the world had learned its lesson by 1914, when the Hun challenged it again, so that the challenge was met and taken up, and France was not left alone to bear the brunt of German greed and German hate.

She hated the Germans, that old French nun.  She was religious; she knew the teachings of her church.  She knew that God says we must love our enemies.  But He could not expect us to love His enemies.

Albert, when we came to it, we found a ruin indeed.  The German guns had beaten upon it until it was like a rubbish heap in the backyard of hell.  Their malice had wrought a ruin here almost worse than that at Arras.  Only one building had survived although it was crumbling to ruin.  That was a church, and, as we approached it, we could see, from the great way off, a great gilded figure of the Holy Virgin, holding in her arms the infant Christ.

The figure leaned at such an angle, high up against the tottering wall of the church, that it seemed that it must fall at the next moment, even as we stared at it.  But—­it does not fall.  Every breath of wind that comes sets it to swaying, gently.  When the wind rises to a storm it must rock perilously indeed.  But still it stays there, hanging like an inspiration straight from Heaven to all who see it.  The peasants who gaze upon it each day in reverent awe whisper to you, if you ask them, that when it falls at last the war will be over, and France will be victorious.