is retreat from home. They had gone beyond the need of tears.

From one of these women, a lady named Mme. Duterque, who had
left Arras with a small boy and girl, I heard the story of her
experiences in the bombarded town. There were hundreds of women
who had similar stories, but this one is typical enough of all those
individual experiences of women who quite suddenly, and almost
without warning, found themselves victims of the Invasion.

She was in her dressing-room in one of the old houses of the Grande
Place in Arras, when at half-past nine in the morning the first shell
burst over the town very close to her own dwelling-place. For days
there had been distant firing on the heights round Arras, but now this
shell came with a different, closer, more terrible sound.

"It seemed to annihilate me for a moment," said Mme. Duterque. "It
stunned all my senses with a frightful shock. A few moments later I
recovered myself and thought anxiously of my little girl who had gone
to school as usual a few streets away. I was overjoyed when she
came trotting home, quite unafraid, although by this time the shells
were falling in various parts of the town."

On the previous night Mme. Duterque had already made preparations
in case the town should be bombarded. Her house, like most of the
old houses in Arras, had a great cellar, with a vaulted roof, almost as
strong as a castle dungeon. She had stocked it with a supply of
sardines and bread and other provisions, and as soon as she had
her little daughter safe indoors again she took her children and the
nurse down to this subterranean hiding-place, where there was
greater safety. The cave, as she called it, was dimly lighted with a
paraffin lamp, and was very damp and chilly, but it was good to be
there in this hiding-place, for at regular intervals she could hear the
terrible buzzing noises of a shell, like some gigantic hornet, followed
by its exploding boom; and then, more awful still, the crash of a
neighbouring house falling into ruins.

"Strange to say," said Mme. Duterque, "after my first shock I had no
sense of fear, and listened only with an intense interest to the noise of
these shells, estimating their distance by their sound. I could tell quite
easily when they were close overhead, and when they fell in another
part of the town, and it seemed to me that I could almost tell which of
my friends' houses had been hit. My children, too, were strangely
fearless. They seemed to