and smashed their small ambitions and booted them out of a country
which had given them a friendly welcome. On the other side of the
fixed bayonets were some women who wept as they called out
"Adieu!" to their fair-haired fellows. One of them held up a new-born
baby between the guards as she ran alongside, so that its little
wrinkled face touched the cheek of a young man who had a look of
agony in his eyes.

That night I heard the shrill notes of bugle calls and going to my
bedroom window listened to the clatter of horses' hoofs and saw the
dim forms of cavalry and guns going through the darkness--towards
the enemy. No sound of firing rattled my window panes. It still
seemed very quiet--over there to the East. Yet before the dawn came
a German avalanche of men and guns might be sweeping across the
frontier, and if I stayed a day or two in the open town of Nancy I might
see the spiked helmets of the enemy glinting down the streets. The
town was not to be defended, I was told, if the French troops had to
fall back from the frontier to the fortresses of Belfort and Toul.

A woman's voice was singing outside in the courtyard when I
awakened next day. How strange that any woman should sing in an
undefended town confronted by such a peril. But none of the girls
about the streets had any fear in their eyes. German frightfulness had
not yet scared them with its nameless horrors.


28


I did not stay in Nancy. It was only the French War Office in Paris who