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 to
the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at
the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.

As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now. I thought of
that mournful passage as I wandered next day among the ruins of
Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de
Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their
burnt-out homes.

If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day
he would hav