shod, flattened feet took up the music. They began to
dance. Were there ever feet less suited to dancing? That they should
dance was the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases about
the ankles. Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms;
consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque
bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque. It
pierced the heart. What right had the Boche to leave these people so
comic after he had squeezed the life-blood out of them?

All his insults to humanity became suddenly typified in these five
hundred jumping tatterdemalions--the way in which he had plundered the
world of its youth, its cleanness, its decency. I felt an anger which
battlefields had never aroused, where men moulder above ground and
become unsightly beneath the open sky. The slain of battlefields
were at least motionless; they did not gape and grin at you with
the dreadful humour of these perambulating dead. I felt the Galilean
passion which animates every Red Cross worker at Evian: the agony
to do something to make these murdered people live again. This last
convoy came, I discovered, from a city behind the Boche lines against
which last summer I had often directed fire. It was full in sight from
my observing station. I had watched the very houses in which these
people, who now walked beside me, had sheltered. For three and a half
years these women's bodies had been at the Hun's mercy. I tried to
bring the truth home to myself. Their men and young girls had been
left behind. They themselves had been flung back on overburdened
France only because they were no longer serviceable. They were
returning actually penniless, though seemingly with money. The thrifty
German makes a practice of seizing all the good redeemable French
money of the repatries before he lets them escape him, giving them in
exchange worthless paper stuff of his own manufacture, which has no
security behind it and is therefore not negotiable.

We came to the Casino, where endless formalities were necessary. First
of all in the big hall, formerly devoted to gambling, the repatries
were fed at long tables. As I passed, odd groups seeing my uniform,
hurriedly dropped whatever they were doing and, removing their caps,
stood humbly at attention. There was fear in their promptness. Where
they came from an officer exacted respect with the flat of his
sword. What a dumb, helpless jumble of humanity! It was a