It was no casual looting that the Huns did.  They did their work methodically, systematically.  It was a sight to make the angels weep.

As I left the ruined cathedral I met a couple of French poilus, and tried to talk with them.  But they spoke “very leetle” English, and I fired all my French words at them in one sentence.

“Oui, oui, madame,” I said.  “Encore pomme du terre.  Fini!”

They laughed, but we did no get far with our talk!  Not in French.

“You can’t love the Hun much, after this,” I said.

“Ze Hun?  Ze bloody Boche?” cried one of them.  “I keel heem all my life!”

I was glad to quit Peronne.  The rape of that lovely church saddened me more than almost any sight I saw in France.  I did not care to look at it.  So I was glad when we motored on to the headquarters of the Fourth Army, where I had the honor of meeting one of Britain’s greatest soldiers, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who greeted us most cordially, and invited us to dinner.

After dinner we drove on toward Amiens.  We were swinging back now, toward Boulogne, and were scheduled to sleep that night at Amiens—­ which the Germans held for a few days, during their first rush toward Paris, before the Marne, but did not have time to destroy.

Adam knew Amiens, and was made welcome, with the rest of us, at an excellent hotel.  Von Kluck had made its headquarters when he swung that way from Brussels, and it was there he planned the dinner he meant to eat in Paris with the Kaiser.  Von Kluck demanded an indemnity of a million dollars from Amiens to spare its famous old cathedral.

It was late when we arrived, but before I slept I called for the boots and ordered a bottle of ginger ale.  I tried to get him to tell me about old von Kluck and his stay but he couldn’t talk English, and was busy, anyway, trying to open the bottle without cutting the wire.  Adam and Hogge are fond, to this day, of telling how I shouted at him, finally: 

“Well, how do you expect to open that bottle when you can’t even talk the English language?”

Next day was Sunday, and we went to church in the cathedral, which von Kluck didn’t destroy, after all.  There were signs of war; the windows and the fine carved doors were banked with sand bags as a measure of protection from bombing airplanes.

I gave my last roadside concert on the road from Amiens to Boulogne.  It was at a little place called Ouef, and we had some trouble in finding it and more in pronouncing its name.  Some of us called it Off, some Owf!  I knew I had heard the name somewhere, and I was racking my brains to think as Johnson set up our wee piano and I began to sing.  Just as I finished my first song a rooster set up a violent crowing, in competition with me, and I remembered!

“I know where I am!” I cried.  “I’m at Egg!”

And that is what Oeuf means, in English!

The soldiers were vastly amused.  They were Gordon Highlanders, and I found a lot of chaps among them frae far awa’ Aberdeen.  Not many of them are alive to-day!  But that day they were a gay lot and a bonnie lot.  There was a big Highlander who said to me, very gravely: