While this paper was being read, I shook in my boots, to think that I had been—­innocently or at least ignorantly—­associated with what was probably the first crime of our battalion.

[Illustration:  On our way]

We went back to billets a very subdued lot of soldiers.

Later in the day I noticed a lot of boys talking to a young Belgian girl.  I had no opportunity to speak to her then, but after a time I found her alone, and with the little English Mademoiselle Marie B——­ had picked up from British soldiers lately billeted there, and with the small amount of French I had stored away, we held quite a long conversation.

[Illustration:  (C)_Famous Players—­Lasky Corporation.  Scene from the Photo-Play_

THE VOICE OF THE TEMPTER.]

I should judge that she was about fifteen.  She told me she was sixteen.  She was piquant and pretty in appearance, but her features were drawn and her expression was sad.  She had a questioning wistfulness in her eyes, but she showed no fear of the many British soldiers round.

This young girl, little over a child, was all alone.  She awaited in terror the coming of her baby, and the fiends who had outraged her had brutally cut off her right arm just a little above the elbow.

“How did this happen to you, Mademoiselle?” I asked in French.

“Ah, Monsieur,” she replied, “les Allemands, they did—­chop it off.”

“Why, Mademoiselle, surely no German would do such a hideous thing as that without some reason.”

At that time I believed, as apparently do the majority of people in this country to-day believe, that the Germans did not commit the atrocities that were attributed to them.  But it is all true.

“But, oui, Monsieur,... les Allemands, they have no reason.  They kill my two brothers ... my father I have not seen, my mother I have not seen ... no, not for five months. Les Allemands, they have taken them also ... they are dead also, peutetre.”

“And you?” I continued.  “Where was your home?”

“Ah, but it is the long story.  We live close by Liege.  It is a small village.  The Uhlans come and we are sorely frightened.  We hide in the cellar, and do not go out at all.  While there les Allemands post a notice in the village.  It is that every person who has a gun, a pistol, a shell, an explosive, must hand such over to the burgomaster.  We do not know of this, and do nothing.  At last, Monsieur, the Uhlans come to our house to search, and there they see a shotgun and some shot.  It is such a gun as you must know in the house of British, in the house of American.  It is the common gun.  We did not know.  But there is no pardon for ignorance in war.  My brothers were roughly pulled to the market place and shot dead.”  Little Marie choked down a sob.  “My mother and my father,” she continued, “were carried away.  I refuse.  I fight, I bite, I scratch, I scream with frenzy, I tear.  One of les Allemands ... perhaps he was mad, Monsieur, he slash ... so, and so ... he cut off my arm.