business in the desolated, paralysed organism with an indifference
which is as resigned as it is stoic. Those ladies might well have
been blown to bits as they crossed the courtyard bearing a dish of
cherries or a bottle of wine. The sun shone steadily on the rich
foliage of the street, and dogs and children rollicked mildly beneath
the branches. Several officers were with us, including two Staff
officers. These officers, not belonging to the same unit, had a great
deal to tell each other and us: so much, that the luncheon lasted
nearly two hours. Some of them had been in the retreat, in the
battles of the Marne and of the Aisne, and in the subsequent trench
fighting; none had got a scratch. Of an unsurpassed urbanity and
austerity themselves, forming part of the finest civilisation which this
world has yet seen, thoroughly appreciative of the subtle and
powerful qualities of the race to which they belong, they exhibited a
chill and restrained surprise at the manners of the invaders. One
had seen two thousand champagne bottles strewn around a
chateau from which the invaders had decamped, and the old butler
of the house going carefully through the grounds and picking up the
bottles which by chance had not been opened. The method of
opening champagne, by the way, was a stroke of the sabre on the
neck of the bottle. The German manner was also to lay the lighted
cigar on the finest table-linen, so that by the burnt holes the
proprietors might count their guests. Another officer had seen a
whole countryside of villages littered with orchestrions and absinthe-
bottles, groundwork of an interrupted musical and bacchic fete
whose details must be imagined, like many other revolting and
scabrous details, which no compositor would consent to set up in
type, but which, nevertheless, are known and form a striking part of
the unwritten history of the attack on civilisation. You may have read
hints of these things again and again, but no amount of previous