tepped out with their sharp command to stop.

The result of the raid? It was largely moral, a part of that campaign
of terrorisation which is so strangely a part of the German system,
which has set its army to burning cities, to bombarding the
unfortified coast towns of England, to shooting civilians in conquered
Belgium, and which now sinks the pitiful vessels of small traders and
fishermen in the submarine-infested waters of the British Channel. It
gained no military advantage, was intended to gain no military
advantage. Not a soldier died. The great stores of military supplies
were not wrecked. The victims were, as usual, women and children. The
houses destroyed were the small and peaceful houses of noncombatants.
Only two men were killed. They were in a side street when the first
bomb dropped, and they tried to find an unlocked door, an open house,
anything for shelter. It was impossible. Built like all French towns,
without arcades or sheltering archways, the flat facades of the closed
and barricaded houses refused them sanctuary. The second bomb killed
them both.

Through all that night after the bombardment I could hear each hour
the call of the trumpet from the great overhanging tower, a double
note at once thin and musical, that reported no enemy in sight in the
sky and all well. From far away, at the gate in the wall, came the
reply of the distant watchman's horn softened by distance.

"All well here also," it said.

Following the trumpets the soft-toned chimes of the church rang out a
hymn that has chimed from the old tower every hour for generations,
extolling and praising the Man of Peace.

The ambulances had finished their work. The dead lay with folded
hands, surrounded by candles, the lights of faith. And under the
fading moon the old city rested and watched.

CHAPTER IX

NO MAN'S LAND

FROM MY JOURNAL:

I have just had this conversation with the little French chambermaid
at my hotel. "You have not gone to mass, Mademoiselle?"

"I? No."

"But here, so near the lines, I should think--"

"I do not go to church. There is no God." She looked up with
red-rimmed, defiant eyes. "My husband has been killed," she said.
"There is no God. If there was a God, why should my husband be killed?
He had done nothing."

This afternoon at three-thirty I am to start for the front. I am to
see everything. The machine leaves the _Mairie_ at three-thirty.

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