of the street, and dogs and children rollicked mildly beneath the branches.  Several officers were with us, including two Staff officers.  These officers, not belonging to the same unit, had a great deal to tell each other and us:  so much, that the luncheon lasted nearly two hours.  Some of them had been in the retreat, in the battles of the Marne and of the Aisne, and in the subsequent trench fighting; none had got a scratch.  Of an unsurpassed urbanity and austerity themselves, forming part of the finest civilisation which this world has yet seen, thoroughly appreciative of the subtle and powerful qualities of the race to which they belong, they exhibited a chill and restrained surprise at the manners of the invaders.  One had seen two thousand champagne bottles strewn around a chateau from which the invaders had decamped, and the old butler of the house going carefully through the grounds and picking up the bottles which by chance had not been opened.  The method of opening champagne, by the way, was a stroke of the sabre on the neck of the bottle.  The German manner was also to lay the lighted cigar on the finest table-linen, so that by the burnt holes the proprietors might count their guests.  Another officer had seen a whole countryside of villages littered with orchestrions and absinthe-bottles, groundwork of an interrupted musical and bacchic fete whose details must be imagined, like many other revolting and scabrous details, which no compositor would consent to set up in type, but which, nevertheless, are known and form a striking part of the unwritten history of the attack on civilisation.  You may have read hints of these things again and again, but no amount of previous preparation will soften for you the shock of getting them first-hand from eyewitnesses whose absolute reliability it would be fatuous to question.

What these men with their vivid gestures, bright eyes, and perfect phrasing most delight in is personal heroism.  And be it remembered that, though they do tell a funny story about German scouts who, in order to do their work, painted themselves the green of trees—­and then, to complete the illusion, when they saw a Frenchman began to tremble like leaves—­they give full value to the courage of the invaders.  But, of course, it is the courage of Frenchmen that inspires their narrations.  I was ever so faintly surprised by their candid and enthusiastic appreciation of the heroism of the auxiliary services.  They were lyrical about engine-drivers, telephone-repairers, stretcher-bearers, and so on.  The story which had the most success concerned a soldier (a schoolmaster) who in an engagement got left between the opposing lines, a quite defenceless mark for German rifles.  When a bullet hit him, he cried, “Vive la France!” When he was missed he kept silent.  He was hit again and again, and at each wound he cried, “Vive la France!” He could not be killed.  At last they turned a machine-gun on him and raked him from head to foot.  “Vive la------”