. One of their daughters, a strapping,
light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things they had seen
as she paused in the hall after preparing our rooms. Her sister stood
beside her, and together they declaimed in an inimitable sort of
recitative.

How the English soldiers had come in, all laughing, and the young
officers so handsome; but the German soldiers were all like this--and
the young woman gave a quick gesture as of one taking nose and mouth in
her hand and pulling it stiffly down a bit. The French officers and
their men were like fathers and sons, but the Germans had a discipline
you would not believe--she had seen one officer strike a man with his
whip, she said, because he was not marching fast enough, and another,
when a soldier had come too near, had kicked him. And they all thought
surely they were going into Paris--"Two days more," they had laughed as
they drank down-stairs, "Paris, and then--kaput!"

You can imagine that gray horde rolling through the streets--narrow,
cobblestoned streets, with steep-roofed stone houses and queer little
courts, and the air over all of having been lived in for generations on
generations. There is the remnant in Crepy of one of the houses that
used to belong to the Dukes of Valois, and at the end of one winding
street you find yourself unexpectedly looking through a grilled iron
gateway into the ordered stateliness of an old-time chateau. On the
outward side the walls of the chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or
forty feet to the edge of the ravine. What a place to wait for an
approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; and the Germans
evidently thought so too, for from this part of town they carefully kept
away. They burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate as to
live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, they pillaged the
houses whose owners had run away, and they ordered the town to pay them
one hundred thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the fortitude
to stay behind were not molested. The enemy were even polite, one woman
told us--"Pas peur!" said the officer who visited her house, taking off
his hat. On the gate of another house was scrawled in German script,
"Sick Woman--keep away!" and as we passed the open windows, sure enough
there was the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just as she had
been when the Germans came.

On another door we read, also in German script, "Good people--they give
everythin