* * * * *

“You astonish me,” I said to the maire, as he concluded his narrative.  We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines.  “You know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a municipal magistrate for less.  I wonder they didn’t make up their minds to shoot you.”  The maire smiled.  “They did,” he said quietly.  He carefully nicked the ash off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer of his escritoire.  He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me.  It was an order in German to shoot the maire on the evacuation of the town.

“You see, monsieur,” he exclaimed, “your brave soldiers were a little too quick for them.  You made a surprise attack in force early one morning and drove the enemy out.  So surprising was it that the Staff officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my sideboard!  You are smoking one of them now—­a very good cigar, is it not?” It was.  “And they left a good many official papers behind—­what you call ‘chits,’ is it not?—­and this one among them.  Please mind your cigar-ash, monsieur!  You see I rather value my own death-warrant.”

Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my hand.  The maire took it in mild surprise.  “Monsieur,” I said frankly, if crudely, “you are a brave man.  And you have endured much.”

“Yes, monsieur,” said the maire gravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, “that is true.  I have often been tres fache to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycee should have put my name to that thing over there."[26]

FOOTNOTES: 

[25] Deputy.

[26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by the maire of the town in question.  But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the investiture of fiction.  It is, however, true “in substance and in fact.”—­J.H.M.

XXIV

THE HILL

It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun.  The sky was without a cloud and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was ascending in transports of exultant song.  The hill on which we stood was covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet.  Here and there in the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone.  A copper wire ran from pole to pole down the slope of the hill and glittered in the sun like a thread of gold.  A little to our right two circular mirrors,