ty. A band played ragtime and light
music while the warriors fed, and all these generals and staff officers,
with their decorations and arm-bands and polished buttons and crossed
swords, were waited upon by little W. A. A. C.'s with the G. H. Q.
colors tied up in bows on their hair, and khaki stockings under
their short skirts and fancy aprons. Such a chatter! Such bursts of
light-hearted laughter! Such whisperings of secrets and intrigues and
scandals in high places! Such careless--hearted courage when British
soldiers were being blown to bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and
shell-shocked in places that were far--so very far--from G. H. Q.!

XI

There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our
quarters--women's voices, excited, angry, passionate. An orderly came
into the mess--we were at breakfast--and explained the meaning of
the clamor, which by some intuition and a quick ear for French he had
gathered from all this confusion of tongues.

"There's a soldier up the road, drunk or mad. He has been attacking a
girl. The villagers want an officer to arrest him."

The colonel sliced off the top of his egg and then rose. "Tell three
orderlies to follow me."

We went into the roadway, and twenty women crowded round us with a
story of attempted violence against an innocent girl. The man had been
drinking last night at the estaminet up there. Then he had followed
the girl, trying to make love to her. She had barricaded herself in the
room, when he tried to climb through the window.

"If you don't come out I'll get in and kill you," he said, according to
the women.

But she had kept him out, though he prowled round all night. Now he was
hiding in an outhouse. The brute! The pig!

When we went up the road the man was standing in the center of it, with
a sullen look.

"What's the trouble?" he asked. "It looks as if all France were out to
grab me."

He glanced sideways over the field, as though reckoning his chance of
escape. There was no chance.

The colonel placed him under arrest and he marched back between the
orderlies, with an old soldier of the Contemptibles behind him.

Later in the day he was lined up for identification by the girl, among a
crowd of other men.

The girl looked down the line, and we watched her curiously--a slim
creature with dark hair neatly coiled.

She stretched out her right hand with a pointing finger.

"Le voila!... c'est l'homme."

There was no mistake about