heroes and a thousand years of worship.  The German shells were still falling about it, and its great walls stood grim and battered in a wrack of smoke.  For nine months the city of Rheims has suffered the wounds of war.  Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary shells and monstrous marmites had fallen within its boundaries week by week; sometimes only one or two on an idle day, sometimes in a raging storm of fire, but always killing a few more people, always shattering another house or two, always spoiling another bit of sculptured beauty.  Nevertheless, there were thousands of citizens, women as well as men, who would not leave their city.  They lived in cellars, into which they had dragged their beds and stores, and when the shell fire slackened they emerged, came out into the light of day, looked around at the new damage, and went about their daily business until cleared underground again by another storm of death.  There were two old ladies with an elderly daughter who used to sit at table in the salle-a-manger of a hotel in Paris a week or two ago.  I saw them arrive one day, and watched the placid faces of these stately old dames in black silk with little lace caps on their white hair.  It was hardly possible to believe that for three months they had lived in a cellar at Rheims, listening through the day and night to the cannonading of the city, and to the rushing of the shells above their own house.

Yet I think that even in a cellar those old women of France preserved their dignity, and in spite of dirty hands (for water was very scarce) ate their meagre rations with a stately grace.

14

More miserable and less armed with courage were the people of France who lived in cities held by the enemy and secure from shell-fire—­in Lille, and St. Quentin, and other towns of the North, where the Germans paraded in their pointed casques.  For the most part in these great centres of population the enemy behaved well.  Order was maintained among the soldiers with ruthless severity by German officers in high command.  There were none of the wild and obscene acts which disgraced the German army in its first advance to and its retreat from the Marne.  No torch bearers and tablet scatterers were let loose in the streets.  On the contrary any German soldier misbehaving himself by looting, raping, or drunken beastliness found a quick death against a white wall.  But to the French citizens it was a daily agony to see those crowds of hostile troops in their streets and houses, to listen to their German speech, to obey the orders of generals who had fought their way through Northern France across the bodies of French soldiers, smashing, burning, killing along the bloody track of war.  These citizens of the captured soil of France knew bitterness of invasion more poignantly than those who hid in cellars under shell-fire.  Their bodies were unwounded, but their spirits bled in agony.  By official placards posted on the walls they read of German victories and French defeats.  In the restaurants and cafes, and in their own houses, they had to serve men who were engaged in slaughtering their kinsfolk.  It was difficult to be patient with those swaggering young officers who gave the glad eye to girls whose sweethearts lay dead somewhere between the French and German trenches.