The band had been augmented by trumpets.  It took its place in the gallery and deluged the hall with patriotic fervour.  An old man climbed on a table and yelled, “Vive La France!” But they had grown tired of shouting; they soon grew tired.  The cry was taken up faintly and soon exhausted itself.  Nothing held their attention for long.  Most of them sat hunched up and inert, weakly crying.  They were not beautiful.  They were not like our men who die in battle.  They were animated memories of horror.  “What lies before us?  What lies before us?” That was the question that their silence asked perpetually.  Some of them had husbands with the French army; others had sweethearts.  What would those men say to the flaxen-haired babies who nestled against the women’s breasts?  And the sin was not theirs—­they were such tired, pretty mites.  “What lies before us?” The babies, too, might well have asked that question.  Do you wonder that I at last began to share the Frenchman’s hatred for the Boche?

An extraordinary person in a white tie, top hat and evening dress entered.  He looked like a cross between Mr. Gerard’s description of himself in Berlin and a head-waiter.  He evidently expected his advent to cause a profound sensation.  I found out why:  he was the official welcomer to Evian.  Twice a day, for an infinity of days, he had entered in solemn fashion, faced the same tragic assembly, made the same fiery oration, gained applause at the climax of the same rounded periods and allowed his voice to break in the same rightly timed places.  Having kept his audience in sufficient suspense as regards his mission, he unwrapped the muffler from his neck, removed his coat, felt his throat to see whether it was in good condition, swelled out his chest, including his waist-coat which was spanned by the broad ribbon of his office, then let loose the painter of his emotion and slipped off into the mid-stream of perfunctory eloquence.  With all his disrobing he had retained his top-hat; he held it in his right hand with the brim pressed against his thigh, very much in the manner of a showman at a circus.  It contributed largely to the opulence of his gestures.

He always seemed to have concluded and was always starting up afresh, as if in reluctant response to spectral clapping.  He called upon the repatries never to forget the crimes that had been wrought against them—­to spread abroad the fire of their indignation, the story of their ravished womanhood and broken families all over France.  They watched him leaden-eyed and wept softly.  To forget, to forget, that was all that they wanted—­to blot out all the past.  This man with the top-hat and the evening-dress, he hadn’t suffered—­how could he understand?  They didn’t want to remember; with those flaxen-haired children against their breasts the one boon they craved was forgetfulness.  And so they cowered and wept softly.  It was intolerable.