of the Middle Age.  As I lay in my bed that night at the inn I turned over the pages of my pocket volume of M. Zeller’s Histoire de France racontee par les contemporains, and hit on the “Souvenirs du brigand Aimerigot Marches,” ravisher of women, spoiler of men, devourer of widows’ houses.  And as I read, it seemed as though I were back in the department du Contentieux of the Ministry of War in Paris deciphering the pages of a German officer’s field note-book.  For thus speaks Aimerigot Marches in the delectable pages of Froissart distilled by M. Zeller into modern French: 

There is no time, diversion, nor glory in this world like that of the profession of arms and making war in the way we have.  How blithe were we when we rode forth at hazard and hit on a rich abbe, an opulent prior or merchant, or a string of mules from Montpelier, Narbonne, Limoux, Toulouse, or Carcassonne laden with the fabrics of Brussels or furs from the fair of Lendit, or spices from Bruges, or the silks of Damascus and Alexandria!  All was ours or was to ransom at our sweet will.  Every day we had more money.  The peasants of Auvergne and Limousin provisioned us and brought to our camp corn and meal, and baked bread, hay for the horses and straw for their litter, good wines, oxen, and fine fat sheep, chicken, and poultry.  We carried ourselves like kings and were caparisoned as they, and when we rode forth the whole country trembled before us.  Par ma foi, cette vie etait bonne et belle.

Is not that your very Hun?  He is a true reversion to type.  Only, whereas among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he is a product of the kultured present.  And to turn from the field note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, lust, and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer’s egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the picture with its tale of ruined homes and untilled fields, was just such an experience as it had been to turn from the glittering pages of Froissart to the sombre story of Jean de Venette,[9] a monk of Compiegne, Little Brother of the Poor and chronicler of his times, as he pondered on these things in the scriptorium: 

In this year 1358, the vines, source of that beneficent liquor which gladdens the heart of man, were no longer cultivated; the fields were neither tilled nor sown; the oxen and the sheep went no longer to the pasture.  The churches and houses, falling into decay, presented everywhere traces of devouring flames or sombre ruins and smouldering.  The eye was no longer gladdened as before with the sight of green meadows and yellowing harvests, but rather afflicted by the aspect of briers and thistles, which clustered everywhere.  The church bells no longer rang joyously to call the faithful