How fiercely they had set their hearts on it, the old Curé of Senlis,
who is the chief depository of the story of the town, was to make us
feel anew.

One enters Senlis from Paris by the main street, the Rue de la
République, which the Germans deliberately and ruthlessly burnt on
September 2nd and 3rd, 1914. We moved slowly along it through the
blackened ruins of houses large and small, systematically fired by the
German _pétroleurs_, in revenge for a supposed attack by civilians upon
the entering German troops. _Les civils ont tiré_--it is the universal
excuse for these deeds of wanton barbarism, and for the hideous
cruelties to men, women, and children that have attended them--beginning
with that incident which first revealed to a startled world the true
character of the men directing the German Army--the burning and sack of
Louvain. It is to be hoped that renewed and careful investigation will
be made--(much preliminary inquiry has already of course taken
place)--after the war into all these cases. My own impression from what
I have heard, seen, and read--for what it may be worth--is that the plea
is almost invariably false; but that the state of panic and excitement
into which the German temperament falls, with extraordinary readiness,
under the strain of battle, together with the drunkenness of troops
traversing a rich wine-growing country, have often accounted for an
honest, but quite mistaken belief in the minds of German soldiers,
without excusing at all the deeds to which it led. Of this abnormal
excitability, the old Curé of Senlis gave one or two instances which
struck me.

We came across him by chance in the cathedral--the beautiful cathedral I
have heard Walter Pater describe, in my young Oxford days, as one of the