With her children and the nurse, she made her way through the streets, above which the shells were still crashing, and glanced with horror at all the destruction about her.  The Hotel de Ville was practically destroyed, though at that time the famous belfry still stood erect above the ruined town, chiming out the hours of this tragedy.

Mme. Duterque told me her story with great simplicity and without any self-consciousness of her fine courage.  She was only one of those thousands of women in France who, with a spiritual courage beyond one’s understanding, endured the horrors of this war.  It was good to talk with them, and I was left wondering at such a spirit.

It was with many of these fugitives that I made my way back.  Away in the neighbourhood of Hazebrouck the guns were still booming, and across the fields the outposts of French cavalry were waiting for the enemy.

4

It was better for women and children to be in Arras under continual shell-fire than in some of those villages along the valleys of the Marne and the Meuse and in the Department of the Seine, through which the Germans passed on their first march across the French frontier.  It was a nicer thing to be killed by a clean piece of shell than to suffer the foulness of men whose passions had been unleashed by drink and the devil and the madness of the first experience of war, and by fear which made them cruel as beasts.

I think fear was at the heart of a good deal of those atrocious Bets by which the German troops stained the honour of their race in the first phases of the war.  Advancing into a hostile country, among a people whom they knew to be reckless in courage and of a proud spirit, the generals and high officers were obsessed with the thought of peasant warfare, rifle-shots from windows, murders of soldiers billeted in farms, spies everywhere, and the peril of franc-tireurs, goading their troops on the march.  Their text-books had told them that all this was to be expected from the French people and could only be stamped out by ruthlessness.  The proclamations posted on the walls of invaded towns reveal fear as well as cruelty.  The mayor and prominent citizens were to surrender themselves as hostages.  If any German soldier were killed, terrible reprisals would be exacted.  If there were any attempt on the part of the citizens to convey information to the French troops, or to disobey the regulations of the German commander, their houses would be burned and their property seized, and their lives would pay the forfeit.  These bald-headed officers in pointed helmets, so scowling behind their spectacles, had fear in their hearts and concealed it by cruelty.

When such official proclamations were posted up on the walls of French villages, it is no wonder that the subordinate officers and their men were nervous of the dangers suggested in those documents, and found perhaps without any conscious dishonesty clear proof of civilian plots against them.  A shot rang out down a village street.  “The peasants are firing on us!” shouted a German soldier of neurotic temperament.  “Shoot them at sight!” said an officer who had learnt his lesson of ruthlessness.  “Burn these wasps out!  Lieber Gott, we will teach them a pretty lesson!”