A small girl of about eight brought me her kitten and wanted to give it me.  I explained to her that it would not be very comfortable tied with pink ribbons to my carrier.  She gravely assented, sat on my knee, told me I was very dirty, and commanded me to kill heaps and heaps of Germans.  She didn’t like them; they had beards!

You know those fierce middle-aged Frenchwomen of the bourgeois class, hard as Scotsmen, close as Jews, and with feelings about as fine as those of a motor-bus.  She was one of them, and she was the foremost of a largish crowd that collected round me.  With her was a pretty girl of about twenty-two.

The mother began with a rhetorical outburst against all Germans, anathematising in particular those who had spent the last fortnight in Coulommiers, in which town her uncle had set up his business, which, though it had proved successful, as they all knew, &c., &c.  The crowd murmured that they did all know.  Then the old harridan chanted the wrongs which the Germans had wrought until, when she had worked the crowd and herself up to a heat of furious excitement, she lowered her voice, suddenly lowered her tone.  In a grating whisper she narrated, in more detail than I cared to hear, the full story of how her daughter—­to whom she pointed—­had been shamefully treated by the Germans.  The crowd growled.  The daughter was, I think, more pleased at being the object of my sympathy and the centre of the crowd’s interest than agonised at the remembrance of her misfortune.

Some of the company coming up saved me from the recital of further outrages.  The hag told them of a house where the Germans had left a rifle or two and some of our messages which they had intercepted.  The girl hesitated a moment, and then followed.  I started hastily to go on, but the girl, hearing the noise of my engine, ran back to bid me an unembarrassed farewell.

I rode through Coulommiers, a jolly rambling old town, to our billet in a suburban villa on the Rebais road.  The Division was marching past in the very best of spirits.  We, who were very tired, endeavoured to make ourselves comfortable—­we were then blanketless—­on the abhorrent surface of a narrow garden path.

That night a 2nd Corps despatch rider called in half an hour before his death.  We have heard many explanations of how he died.  He crashed into a German barricade, and we discovered him the next morning with his eyes closed, neatly covered with a sheet, in a quaint little house at the entrance to the village of Doue.

At dawn (Sept. 8th) the others went on with the column.  I was sent back with a despatch for Faremoutiers, and then was detailed to remain for an hour with Cecil.  Ten minutes after my return the Fat Boy rode in, greatly excited.  He had gone out along the Aulnoy road with a message, and round a corner had run into a patrol of Uhlans.  He kept his head, turned quickly, and rode off in a shower of bullets.  He was tremendously indignant, and besought some cavalry who were passing to go in pursuit.