shed at her with their fists and
bruised all her beauty by the time one of their officers came in and
ordered them away. No one would court her after the lesson they had
given her.

At Saint-Denis-en-Rebais, on September 7, an Uhlan who was eager
for a woman's love saw another pretty woman who tried to hide from
him. There was a mother-in-law with her, and a little son, eight years
of age. But in war-time one has to make haste to seize one's victim or
one's loot. Death is waiting round the corner. Under the cover of his
rifle--he had a restless finger on the trigger--the Uhlan bade the
woman strip herself before him. She had not the pride or the courage
of the other woman. She did not want to die, because of that small
boy who stared with horror in his eyes. The mother-in-law clasped the
child close and hid those wide staring eyes in her skirts, and turned
her own face away from a scene of bestial violence, moaning to the
sound of her daughter's cries.

6

At the town of Coulommiers on September 6 a German soldier came
to the door of a small house where a woman and her husband were
sitting with two children, trying to hide their fear of this invasion
of German troops. It was half-past nine in the evening and almost
dark, except for a glow in the sky. The soldier was like a shadow on
the threshold until he came in, and they saw a queer light in his eyes.
He was very courteous, though rather gruff in his speech. He asked
the husband to go outside in the street to find one of his comrades.
The man, afraid to refuse, left the room on this errand, but before he
had gone far heard piercing cries. It was his wife's voice, screaming in
terror. He rushed back again and saw the German soldier struggling
with his wife. Hearing her husband's shout of rage, the soldier turned,
seized his rifle, and clubbed the man into an adjoining room, where
he stayed with the two little children who had fled there, trying to
soothe them in their fright and listening, with madness in his brain, to
his wife's agony through the open door a yard away. The husband
was a coward, it seems. But supposing he had flung himself upon the
soldier and strangled him, or cut his throat? We know what would
have happened in the Village of Coulommiers.

7

On September 7 ten German horsemen rode into the farm of
Lamermont, in the commune of Lisle-en-Barrois. They were in good
humour, and having drunk plenty of fresh milk, left the farmhouse in a
fri