destruction or of looting. German troops had marched through in the
advance and in the retreat without being billeted. A hurrying army with
another on its heels has no time for looting. Other villages had been
points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight.
General Mauvaise Chance had it in for them. Shells had wrecked
some houses; others were burned. Where a German non-commissioned
officer came to the door of a French family and said that room must
be made for German soldiers in that house and if anyone dared to
interfere with them he would be shot, there the exhausted human
nature of a people trained to think that "Krieg ist Krieg" and that the
spoils of war are to the victor had its way.

It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is the
effect of war, when men live a year in a day, that he is demonized in a
month. Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken,
crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled. The soldiery which
could not have its Paris "took it out" of the property of their hosts.
Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is
organized destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities
when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are
aroused to the kind of insane passion which war kindles in human
beings. But some indecencies one could not understand in civilized
men. All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations
of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded
that will embarrass the enemy. A certain foully disgusting practice
was too common not to have had the approval of at least some
officers, whose conduct in several chateaux includes them as
accomplices. Not all officers, not all soldiers. That there should be a
few is enough to sicken you of belonging to the human species.
Nothing worse in Central America; nothing worse where civilized
degeneracy disgraces savagery.

But do not think that destruction for destruction's sake was done in all
houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle
was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a
looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to
carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the
stoppers of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner
was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.

To their surprise and relief, retu