come with us from Paris. They had heard that some Germans had
already been taken prisoners across the frontier, and they were angry
that the men were still alive.

"Prisoners? Pah! Name of a dog! I will tell you what I would do with
German prisoners!"

It was nothing nice that that man wanted to do with German
prisoners. He indulged in long and elaborate details as to the way in
which he would wreath their bowels about his bayonet and tear out
their organs with his knife. The other man had more imagination. He
devised more ingenious modes of torture so that the Germans should
not die too soon.

I watched the men as they spoke. They had the faces of murderers,
with bloodshot eyes and coarse features, swollen with drink and vice.
There was a life of cruelty in the lines about their mouths, and in their
husky laughter. Their hands twitched and their muscles gave
convulsive jerks, as they worked themselves into a fever of blood-
lust. In the French Revolution it was such men as these who leered
up at the guillotine and laughed when the heads of patrician women
fell into the basket, and who did the bloody Work of the September
massacre. The breed had not died out in France, and war had
brought it forth from its lairs again.


23


These men were not typical of the soldiers of France. In the