Mr. Liegeay is now living in a neighbour’s cellar, his own being fully occupied by the debris of his charming house.  He told us the story of the three days of the German occupation; how he and his wife and niece, and the niece’s babies, took to their cellar while the Germans set the house on fire, and how, peering through a door into the stable-yard, they saw that the soldiers suspected they were within and were trying to get at them.  Luckily the incendiaries had heaped wood and straw all round the outside of the house, and the blaze was so hot that they could not reach the door.  Between the arch of the doorway and the door itself was a half-moon opening; and Mr. Liegeay and his family, during three days and three nights, broke up all the barrels in the cellar and threw the bits out through the opening to feed the fire in the yard.

Finally, on the third day, when they began to be afraid that the ruins of the house would fall in on them, they made a dash for safety.  The house was on the edge of the town, and the women and children managed to get away into the country; but Mr. Liegeay was surprised in his garden by a German soldier.  He made a rush for the high wall of the adjoining cemetery, and scrambling over it slipped down between the wall and a big granite cross.  The cross was covered with the hideous wire and glass wreaths dear to French mourners; and with these opportune mementoes Mr. Liegeay roofed himself in, lying wedged in his narrow hiding-place from three in the afternoon till night, and listening to the voices of the soldiers who were hunting for him among the grave-stones.  Luckily it was their last day at Gerbeviller, and the German retreat saved his life.

Even in Gerbeviller we saw no worse scene of destruction than the particular spot in which the ex-mayor stood while he told his story.  He looked about him at the heaps of blackened brick and contorted iron.  “This was my dining-room,” he said.  “There were some good old paneling on the walls, and some fine prints that had been a wedding-present to my grand-father.”  He led us into another black pit.  “This was our sitting-room:  you see what a view we had.”  He sighed, and added philosophically:  “I suppose we were too well off.  I even had an electric light out there on the terrace, to read my paper by on summer evenings.  Yes, we were too well off...”  That was all.

Meanwhile all the town had been red with horror—­flame and shot and tortures unnameable; and at the other end of the long street, a woman, a Sister of Charity, had held her own like Soeur Gabrielle at Clermont-en-Argonne, gathering her flock of old men and children about her and interposing her short stout figure between them and the fury of the Germans.  We found her in her Hospice, a ruddy, indomitable woman who related with a quiet indignation more thrilling than invective the hideous details of the bloody three days; but that already belongs to the past, and at present she