of a whistle.  It is certain that immediately after the old man had left his room fifteen or twenty German soldiers burst into the house and dragged him out into the street, where they shot him dead.  At that moment the child Juliette opened her bedroom window, looking out into the darkness at this shadow scene.  It was not Romeo but Death who called this little Juliette.  A bullet hit her in the stomach, and twenty-four hours later she died in agony.

I need not add to these stories, nor plunge deeper into the vile obscenity of all those crimes which in the months of August and September set hell loose in the beautiful old villages of France along a front of five hundred miles.  The facts are monotonous in the repetition of their horror, and one’s imagination is not helped but stupefied by long records of outrages upon defenceless women, with indiscriminate shooting down village streets, with unarmed peasants killed as they trudged across their fields or burned in their own homesteads, with false accusations against innocent villagers, so that hostages were collected and shot in groups as a punishment for alleged attacks upon German soldiers, with old French chateaux looted of all their treasures by German officers in search of souvenirs and trophies of victory for their womenfolk, and with drunken orgies in which men of decent breeding became mere animals inflamed with lust.

10

The memory of those things has burnt deep into the brains of the French people, so deep that in some cases there is the fire of madness there.

In a small chateau in France an English friend of mine serving with a volunteer ambulance column with the French troops on the Meuse was sitting at ease one night with some of his comrades and fellow-countrymen.  The conversation turned to England, because April was there, and after ten months of war the thoughts of these men yearned back to their homes.  They spoke of their mothers and wives and children.  One man had a pretty daughter, and read a piece of her latest letter, and laughed at her gay little jests and her descriptions of the old pony and the dogs and the antics of a black kitten.  Other men gave themselves away and revealed the sentiment which as a rule Englishmen hide.  In the room was a French officer, who sat very still, listening to these stories.  The candles were burning dim on the table when he spoke at last in a strange, hard voice: 

“It is good for you Englishmen when you go back home.  Those who are not killed out here will be very happy to see their women again.  You do not want to die, because of that. ...  If I were to go home now, gentlemen, I should not be happy.  I should find my wife and my daughter both expecting babies whose fathers are German soldiers...  England has not suffered invasion.”

11