leave their city. They lived in cellars, into which they had dragged their
beds and stores, and when the shell fire slackened they emerged,
came out into the light of day, looked around at the new damage, and
went about their daily business until cleared underground again by
another storm of death. There were two old ladies with an elderly
daughter who used to sit at table in the salle-a-manger of a hotel in
Paris a week or two ago. I saw them arrive one day, and watched the
placid faces of these stately old dames in black silk with little lace
caps on their white hair. It was hardly possible to believe that for three
months they had lived in a cellar at Rheims, listening through the day
and night to the cannonading of the city, and to the rushing of the
shells above their own house.

Yet I think that even in a cellar those old women of France preserved
their dignity, and in spite of dirty hands (for water was very scarce)
ate their meagre rations with a stately grace.

14

More miserable and less armed with courage were the people of
France who lived in cities held by the enemy and secure from shell-
fire--in Lille, and St. Quentin, and other towns of the North, where the
Germans paraded in their pointed casques. For the most part in
these great centres of population the enemy behaved well. Order was
maintained among the soldiers with ruthless severity by German
officers in high command. There were none of the wild and obscene
acts which disgraced the German army in its first advance to and its
retreat from the Marne. No torch bearers and tablet scatterers were
let loose in the streets. On the contrary any German soldier
misbehaving himself by looting, raping, or drunken beastliness found
a quick death against a white wall. But to the French citizens it was a
daily agony to see those crowds of hostile troops in their streets and
houses, to listen to their German speech, to obey the orders of
generals who had fought their way through Northern France across
the bodies of French soldiers, smashing, burning, killing along the
bloody track of war. These citizens of the captured soil of France
knew bitterness of invasion more poignantly than those who hid in
cellars under shell-fire. Their bodies were unwounded, but their spirits
bled in agony. By official placards posted on the walls they read of
German victories and French defeats. In the restaurants and cafes,
and in their own houses, they had to serve men who wer