could guess what
their thoughts must be. Their industries were paralyzed, and their
liberties were curtailed, and every other house was a breached and
worthless shell. Among ourselves we debated as we walked along to the
squalid tavern where we had been quartered, which of the spectacles we
had that day seen most fitly typified the fruitage of war--the
shattered, haunted forts lying now in the moonlight beyond the town, or
the brooding conquered, half-destroyed town itself. I guess, if it
comes to that, they both typified it.

Chapter 14

The Red Glutton

As we went along next day through the town of Maubeuge we heard singing;
and singing was a most rare thing to be hearing in this town. In a
country where no one smiles any more who belongs in that country,
singing is not a thing which you would naturally expect to hear. So we
turned off of our appointed route.

There was a small wine shop at the prow of a triangle of narrow streets.
It had been a wine shop. It was now a beer shop. There had been a
French proprietor; he had a German partner now. It had been only a few
weeks--you could not as yet measure the interval of time in terms of
months--since the Germans came and sat themselves down before Maubeuge
and blew its defenses flat with their 42-centimeter earthquakes and
marched in and took it. It had been only these few weeks; but already
the Germanizing brand of the conqueror was seared deep in the galled
flanks of this typically French community. The town-hall clock was made
to tick German time, which varied by an even hour from French time.
Tacked upon the door of the little cafe where we ate our meals was a
card setting forth, with painful German particularity, the tariff which
might properly be charged for food and for lodging and drink and what
not; and it was done in German-Gothic script, all very angular and
precise; and it was signed by His Excellency, the German commandant; and
its prices were predicated on German logic and the estimated depth of a
German wallet. You might read a newspaper printed in German characters,
if so minded; but none printed in French, whether so minded or not.

So when we entered in at the door of the little French wine shop where
the three streets met, to find out who within had heart of grace to sing
'O Strassburg, O Strassburg', so lustily, lo and behold, it had been
magically transformed into a German beer shop. It was, as we presently
learned, the onl