I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he spoke of his house.

It was very old.  Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of his house.  It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys high.  No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even that has known palaces, will smile at this old man’s efforts to tell of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys high, as we stood together by that sad white mound.  He told me that his son was killed.  And that disaster strangely did not move me so much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of France.

He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone had stuck a small cross of wood.  “The church,” he said.  And that I knew already.

In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him.  I told him that surely France would build his house again.  Perhaps even the allies; for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still wandering homeless.  I told him that surely in the future Croisilles would stand again.

He took no interest in anything that I said.  His house of two storeys was down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had gone away; he had only one hope from the future.  When I had finished speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, up to the level of his throat, surely his son’s old trench stick, and there he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which he held against his neck.  He watched me shrewdly and attentively meanwhile, for I was a stranger and was to be taught something I might not know—­a thing that it was necessary for all men to learn.  “Le Kaiser,” he said.  “Yes;” I said, “the Kaiser.”  But I pronounced the word Kaiser differently from him, and he repeated again “Le Kaiser,” and watched me closely to be sure that I understood.  And then he said “Pendu,” and made the stick quiver a little as it dangled from its string.  “Oui,” I said, “Pendu.”

Did I understand?  He was not yet quite sure.  It was important that this thing should be quite decided between us as we stood on this road through what had been Croisilles, where he had lived through many sunny years and I had dwelt for a season amongst rats.  “Pendu” he said.  Yes, I agreed.

It was all right.  The old man almost smiled.

I offered him a cigarette and we lit two from an apparatus of flint and steel and petrol that the old man had in his pocket.

He showed me a photograph of himself and a passport to prove, I suppose, that he was not a spy.  One could not recognize the likeness, for it must have been taken on some happier day, before he had seen his house of two storeys lying there by the road.  But he was no spy, for there were tears in his eyes; and Prussians I think have no tears for what we saw across the village of Croisilles.