n a sentence or two when I questioned them. They
had no grievance even against fate--their own misery was swallowed
up in that of their neighbours; each family knew a worse case than its
own, and so, with a shake of the head, they said there were many
who suffered these things.

Shopkeepers and peasants of Celles, of Conde, of Attichy, along the
way to Berry-au-Bac and from Billy to Sermoise, all those who have
now fled from the Valley of the Vesle and the valley of the Aisne had
just the same story to tell--monotonous, yet awful because of its
tragedy. It was their fate to be along the line of death. One old fellow
who came from Vailly had lived for two months in a continual
cannonade. He had seen his little town taken and retaken ten times in
turn by the French and the Germans.

When I heard of this eye-witness I thought: "Here is a man who has a
marvellous story to tell. If all he has seen, all the horrors and heroism
of great engagements were written down, just as he describes them
in his peasant speech, it would make an historic document to be read
by future generations."

But what did he answer to eager questions about his experience? He
was hard of hearing and, with a hand making a cup for his right ear,
stared at me a little dazed. He said at last, "It was difficult to get to
sleep."

That was all he had to say about it, and many of these peasants were
like him, repeating some trivial detail of their experience, the loss of a
dog or the damage to an old teapot, as though that eclipsed all other
suffering. But little by little, if one had the patience, one could get
wider glimpses of the truth. Another old man from the village of Soupir
told a more vivid tale. His dwelling-place sheltered some of the
Germans when they traversed the district. The inhabitants of Soupir,
he said, were divided into two groups. Able-bodied prisoners were
sent off to Germany, and women and children who were carried off in
the retreat were afterwards allowed to go back, but not until several
poor little creatures had been killed, and pretty girls subjected to
gross indignities by brutal soldiers. Upon entering Soupir the French
troops found in cellars where they had concealed themselves thirty
people who had gone raving mad and who cried and pleaded to
remain so that they could still hear the shells and gibber at death.
"War is so bracing to a nation," says the philosopher. "War purges
peoples of their vanities." If there is a devi