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, it may be, for those of the enemy
also. Doubtless it appeals to their sinister sense of humour, when two
of their own men get drunk and shoot at one another, to execute a French
citizen by way of punishment. It happened that during the German
occupation of Coulommiers the gas suppl