a fire in the stove. It was very cold.

And why were the houses burned? No; it was not the result of
bombardment. Gerbéviller was not bombarded until after the houses were
burned. They were burned by the Germans systematically. They went from
house to house with their torches and oil and pitch. They did not
explain why they burned the houses, but it was because they were angry.

The old woman paused a moment, and a faint flicker of a smile showed in
the wrinkles about her eyes. I asked her to continue her story.

"You said because they were angry," I prompted. The smile broadened. Oh,
yes, they were very angry, she explained. They did not even make the
excuse that the villagers fired upon them. They were just angry through
and through. And it was all because of those seventy-five French
chasseurs who held the bridge. Some one called to her from the house.
She hobbled to the door. "Anyone can tell you about the seventy-five
chasseurs," she said, disappearing within.

I went on down the road and stood upon the bridge over the swift little
river. It was a narrow little bridge only wide enough for one wagon to
pass. Two roads from the town converged there, the one over which I had
passed and another which formed a letter "V" at the juncture with the
bridge. Across the river only one road led away from the bridge and it
ran straight up a hill, when it turned suddenly into the broad national
highway to Lunéville about five miles away.

One house remained standing almost at the entrance to the bridge, at the
end nearest the town. Its roof was gone, and its walls bore the marks of
hundreds of bullets, but it was inhabited by a little old man of fifty,