man officers and that in
leaving they had carried out much loot. The Teuton taste has been
chiefly for enamels and lingerie. The interior of the house looked
more like a pig-sty than a human dwelling. The Germans had broken all
locks and emptied the contents of all bureaus, closets, and desks upon
the floor, the more easily to pick and choose what they wanted. The
floors were covered ankle-deep in the resulting litter which was
composed of everything from lace to daguerreotypes, from bric-a-brac
to hosiery. The relics and treasures of past generations of the
owner's family carpeted the house, until each room seemed in a worse
state than the last, and the whole was altogether a most superlative
mess. M. Guyot had shoveled paths through the different rooms as one
shovels through several inches of newly fallen snow.

We stood in amazement that anyone could so completely have turned
upside down an orderly house. As an example of absolute disorder, the
dining-room was a veritable work of art. The German orderlies had
evidently prepared and served four or five meals to their officers.
Each time they had set the table with fine linen and old china and
then as soon as the repast was over had taken up the tablecloth by its
edges and corners and had thrown it with the china, bottles, linen,
tableware, dirty dishes, and remnants of food, into a corner of the
room. At each succeeding meal the process had been repeated with a new
setting of china and fresh linen from the nearly inexhaustible
supplies with which the house was furnished. This was housekeeping
reduced by German "efficiency" to its simplest terms. The same
"efficiency" had been employed in the kitchen where each meal had been
prepared with a fresh set of cooking utensils which, after use, had
been piled up under the tables and sinks, together with such debris as
potato peels and coffee grounds. Perhaps a good housekeeper would have
been most disgusted by the condition of the kitchen; to me the
dining-room, where the post-mortems of meals were added to the results
of pillaging, seemed the more shocking.

The house contained a dozen large bedrooms and all the beds had been
slept in by Germans, some of whom had not taken pains to remove their
boots. M. Guyot told us we might sleep where we chose and showed us
where the fresh linen was kept, apologizing for the fact that we would
be obliged to make up our own beds.

He introduced us to three French aviators who were alre