They ordered him to come out into the road.  He managed to obey.  By the time he got there terror had made him quite speechless.

They began to question him.  To all their questions he merely shook his head.  He understood well enough, but his tongue refused its office, and by the time he could speak the idea had come to him to pretend that he was not French—­that he was a refugee—­that he did not know the country,—­was lost,—­in fact, that he did not know anything.  He managed to carry it off, and finally they gave him up as a bad job, and rode away up the hill towards my house.

Then he had a new panic.  He did not dare go home.  He was afraid he would find them in the village, and that they would find out he had lied and harm his old wife, or perhaps destroy the town.  So he had hidden down by the canal until hunger drove him home.  It is a simple tale, but it was a rude experience for the old man, who has not got over it yet.

I am afraid all this seems trivial to you, coming out of the midst of this terrible war.  But it is actually our life here.  We listen to the cannon in ignorance of what is happening.  Where would be the sense of my writing you that the battle-front has settled down to uncomfortable trench work on the Aisne; that Manoury is holding the line in front of us from Compiegne to Soissons, with Castelnau to the north of him, with his left wing resting on the Somme; that Maud’huy was behind Albert; and that Rheims cathedral had been persistently and brutally shelled since September 18?  We only get news of that sort intermittently.  Our railroad is in the hands of the Minister of War, and every day or two our communications are cut off, from military necessity.  You know, I am sure, more about all this than we do, with your cable men filling the newspapers.

But if I am seeing none of that, I am seeing the spirit of these people, so sure of success in the end, and so convinced that, even if it takes the whole world to do it, they will yet see the Hohenzollern dynasty go up in the smoke of the conflagration it has lighted.

Of course, the vicious destruction of the great cathedral sends shivers down my back.  Every time I hear the big guns in that direction I think of the last time we were there.  Do you remember how we sat, in the twilight of a rainy day, in our top-floor room, at the Lion d’Or, in the wide window-seat, which brought us just at a level with that dear tympanum, with its primitive stone carving of David and Goliath, and all those wonderful animals sitting up so bravely on the lacework of the parapet?  Such a wave of pity goes over me when I think that not only is it destroyed, but that future generations are deprived of seeing it; that one of the greatest achievements of the hands of man, a work which has withstood so many wars in what we called “savage times,” before any claims were made for “Kultur,” should have been destroyed in our days.  Men have come and men have gone (apologies to Tennyson)—­it is the law of living.  But the wilful, unnecessary destruction of the great works of man, the testimony which one age has left as a heritage to all time—­for that loss neither Man nor Time has any consolation.  It is a theft from future ages, and for it Germany will merit the hatred of the world through the coming generations.