Two days later a French staff-officer greeted me in the vestibule of the Hotel de Crillon at Paris.  It was the Comte de G——­; he had been deputed by the Ministry of War to act as my escort on my tour of the French lines.  He proved to be a charming companion.  He was a magnificent figure of a man six feet three inches in height at least, an officer of dragoons, and he wore the red and white brassard, embroidered in gold with a design of forked lightning, which is the prerogative of the staff.  A military car with a driver and an orderly in shaggy furs awaited us outside on the Place de la Concorde.  It was a sumptuous car, upholstered in green corded silk, with nickel fittings, and displaying on its panels the motto Quand meme, and the monogram of a famous actress.  It had been requisitioned.  The air was cold—­there had been frost overnight—­but the sun was brilliant.  As we threaded our way through Paris and its suburbs, a Paris chastened and resolute, I caught a glimpse of the barges upon the Seine with the women standing on the convex hatches hanging out clothes to dry—­and I thought of Daudet and La Belle Nivernaise.  As more and yet more men are called up to the colours women take their place, until the houses of business are like nunneries—­with a few aged Fathers Superior.  Having had business the day before at the Societe Generale, I had had occasion to reflect on these things as I stood in the counting-house watching some fifty girl typists at work, the room resounding with the tap-tap of their machines, as though fifty thrushes were breaking snails upon a stone.  A wizened little clerk, verging upon superannuation, had beguiled my time of waiting with talk of the war:  how his wife from Picardy had lost fifteen of her parents, while of four painters and paper-hangers who had started doing up his flat on the 2nd of July only one—­disabled—­had returned to finish the job; the rest were dead.  Musing on these things as we drove through the Bois de Vincennes I understood the resolution of our Allies and the significance of the things my companion pointed out to me as we drove:  here a row of trees felled to provide a field of fire, there a gun emplacement, and reserve trenches all the way from Paris to Soissons.  They are leaving nothing to chance.

Our journey was uneventful until we reached Coulommiers, where we had certain inquiries to make which have nothing to do with this narrative.  We interviewed the maire in his parlour at the Hotel de Ville, a little man, and spirited, who had hung on at his post during the German occupation, and done his best to protect his fellow-townsmen against the lust and rapine of the Huns.  Under such circumstances the office of municipal magistrate is no sinecure.  It is, in fact, a position of deadly peril, for by the doctrine of vicarious punishment, peculiar to the German Staff, an innocent man is held liable with his life for the faults of his fellow-townsmen, and,