Soon they would know what the Germans had done to the homes.  What the Germans had done to one piano was evident.  It stood in the yard of a house where grass and flowers had been trodden by horses and men.  In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of the little drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the intoxication of a Paris gained, a France in submission.  They did not know what Joffre had in pickle for them.  It had all gone according to programme up to that moment.  Nothing can stop us Germans!  Champagne instead of beer!  Set the glass on top of the piano and sing!  Haven’t we waited forty years for this day?

Captured diaries of German officers, which reflect the seventh heaven of elation suddenly turned into grim depression, taken in connection with what one saw on the battlefield, reconstruct the scene around that piano.  The cup to the lips; then dashed away.  How those orders to retreat must have hurt!

The state of the refugees’ homes all depended upon the chances of war.  War’s lightning might have hit your roof-tree and it might not.  It plays no favourites between the honest and the dishonest; the thrifty and the shiftless.  We passed villages which exhibited no signs of destruction or of looting.  German troops had marched through in the advance and in the retreat without being billeted.  A hurrying army with another on its heels has no time for looting.  Other villages had been points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight.  General Mauvaise Chance had it in for them.  Shells had wrecked some houses; others were burned.  Where a German non-commissioned officer came to the door of a French family and said that room must be made for German soldiers in that house and if anyone dared to interfere with them he would be shot, there the exhausted human nature of a people trained to think that “Krieg ist Krieg” and that the spoils of war are to the victor had its way.

It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is the effect of war, when men live a year in a day, that he is demonized in a month.  Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken, crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled.  The soldiery which could not have its Paris “took it out” of the property of their hosts.  Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is organized destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are aroused to the kind of insane passion which war kindles in human beings.  But some indecencies one could not understand in civilized men.  All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded that will embarrass the enemy.  A certain foully disgusting practice was too common not to have had the approval of at least some officers, whose conduct in several chateaux includes them as accomplices.  Not all officers, not all soldiers.  That there should be a few is enough to sicken you of belonging to the human species.  Nothing worse in Central America; nothing worse where civilized degeneracy disgraces savagery.