few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets
and under a feather bed. They were used to change, and the mere coming
of armies could not be permitted to derange them.

Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs had been crowded
with English soldiers in retreat; then with Germans--stern, on edge,
sure of being in Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans falling
back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing French.
And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that kept
pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could hobble
over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down.

Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive
unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go galloping away,
leaving a laugh and a few sous behind. Madame would come in from the
kitchen, raise her arms and sigh something about closing their doors,
but, after all, they knew they should keep right on giving as long as
they had anything to give. One of their daughters, a strapping,
light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things they had seen
as she paused in the hall after preparing our rooms. Her sister stood
beside her, and together they declaimed in an inimitable sort of
recitative.

How the English soldiers had come in, all laughing, and the young
officers so handsome; but the German soldiers were all like this--and
the young woman gave a quick gesture as of one taking nose and mouth in
her hand and pulling it stiffly down a bit. The French officers and
their men were like fathers and sons, but the Germans had a discipline
you would not believe--she had seen one officer strike a man with his
whip, she said, because he was not marching fast enough, and another,