officer's helmet. He described with vivid and disgusting gestures how
he had cut off the man's head--he clicked his tongue to give the
sound of it--and how he had bathed his hands in the blood of his
enemy, before carrying this trophy to his trench. He held out his
hands, staring at them, laughing at them as though they were still
crimson with German blood. ... A Frenchwoman shivered a little and
turned pale. But another woman laughed--an old creature with
toothless gums--with a shrill, harsh note.

"Sale race!" she said; "a dirty race! I should be glad to cut a German
throat!"

Outside the Invalides, motor-cars were always arriving at the
headquarters of General Galièni. French staff officers came at full
speed, with long shrieks on their motor-horns, and little crowds
gathered round the cars to question the drivers.

"Ça marche, la guerre? Il y a du progrès?"

British officers came also, with dispatches from headquarters, and
two soldiers with loaded rifles in the back seats of cars that had been
riddled with bullets and pock-marked with shrapnel.

Two of these men told their tale to me. They had left the trenches the
previous night to come on a special mission to Paris, and they
seemed to me like men who had been in some torture chamber and
suffered unforgettable and nameless horrors. Splashed with mud,
their faces powdered with a greyish clay and chilled to the bone by
the sharp shrewd wind of their night near Soissons and the motor
journey to Paris, they could hardly stand, and trembled and spoke