ith pawns in a game of
chess. The old witchcraft was better than this new witchcraft, and not
so fraudulent in its power of duping the ignorant masses.

My guide had no such sentiment. As he led me through a fringe of
forest land he told me his own adventures, and heaped curses upon
the enemy.

He had killed one of them with his own hand. As he was walking on
the edge of a wood a Solitary Uhlan came riding over the fields,
below the crest of a little hill. He was one of the outposts of the strong
force in Crepy-en-Valois, and had lost his way to that town. He
demanded guidance, and to point his remarks pricked his lance at the
chest of the garde champetre.

But the peasant had been a soldier, and he held a revolver in the side
pocket of his jacket. He answered civilly, but shot through his pocket
and killed the man at the end of the lance. The Uhlan fell from his
horse, and the peasant seized his lance and carbine as souvenirs of
a happy moment.

But the moment was brief. A second later and the peasant was sick
with fear for what he had done. If it should be discovered that he, a
civilian, had killed a German soldier, every living thing in his village
would be put to the sword--and among those living things were his
wife and little ones.

He dragged his trophies into the forest, and lay in hiding there for two
days until the enemy had passed.

Afterwards I saw the lance--it reached from the floor to the ceiling of
his cottage--and for years to come in the village of Rouville it will be
the centre-piece of a thrilling tale.

Other peasants joined my friendly gravedigger, and one of them--the
giant of his village--told me of his own escape from death. He was
acting as the guide of four British officers through a part of the forest.
Presently they stopped to study their maps; and it was only the guide
who saw at the other end of the glade a patrol of German cavalry.
Before he could call out a warning they had unslung their carbines
and fired. The British officers fell dead without a cry, and the peasant
fell like a dead man also, rolling into a ditch, unwounded but
paralysed with fear. They did not bother about him--that little German
patrol. They rode off laughing, as though amused with this jest of
death.

There have been many jests like that--though I see no mirth in them--
and I could fill this chapter with the stories I have heard of this kind
of death coming quite quickly in woods and fields where peasants