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One scene is clear cut in my memory, as it was revealed in a narrow street of Paris where a corner lantern flung its rays down upon the white faces of two men and two women.  It was midnight, and I was waiting outside the door of a newspaper office, where my assistant was inquiring for the latest bulletins of war.  For some minutes I watched this little group with an intuition that tragedy was likely to leap out upon them.  They belonged to the apache class, as it was easy to see by the cut of the men’s trousers tucked into their boots, with a sash round the waist, and by the velvet bonnets pulled down sideways over their thin-featured faces and sharp jaws.  The women had shawls over their heads and high-heeled shoes under their skirts.  At the Alhambra in London the audience would have known what dance to expect when such a group had slouched into the glamour of the footlights.  They were doing a kind of slow dance now, though without any music except that of women’s sobs and a man’s sibilant curses.  The younger of the two men was horribly drunk, and it was clear that the others were trying to drag him home before trouble came.  They swayed with him up and down, picked him up when he fell, swiped him in the face when he tried to embrace one of the women, and lurched with him deeper into the throat of the alley.  Then suddenly the trouble came.  Four of those shadows on bicycles rode out of the darkness and closed in.

As sharp and distinct as pistol shots two words came to my ears out of the sudden silence and stillness which had arrested the four people: 

“Vos papiers!”

There was no “s’il vous plait” this time.

It was clear that one at least of the men—­I guessed it was the drunkard—­had no papers explaining his presence in Paris, and that he was one of the embusques for whom the Military Governor was searching in the poorer quarters of the city (in the richer quarters there was not such a sharp search for certain young gentlemen of good family who had failed to answer the call to the colours), and for whom there was a very rapid method of punishment on the sunny side of a white wall.  Out of the silence of that night came shriek after shriek.  The two women abandoned themselves to a wild and terror-stricken grief.  One of them flung herself on to her knees, clutching at an agent de police, clasping him with piteous and pleading hands, until he jerked her away from him.  Then she picked herself up and leant against a wall, moaning and wailing like a wounded animal.  The drunkard was sobered enough to stand upright in the grasp of two policemen while the third searched him.  By the light of the street lamp I saw his blanched face and sunken eyes.  Two minutes later the police led both men away, leaving the women behind, very quiet now, sobbing in their shawls.