when a soldier had come too near, had kicked him. And they all thought
surely they were going into Paris--"Two days more," they had laughed as
they drank down-stairs, "Paris, and then--kaput!"

You can imagine that gray horde rolling through the streets--narrow,
cobblestoned streets, with steep-roofed stone houses and queer little
courts, and the air over all of having been lived in for generations on
generations. There is the remnant in Crepy of one of the houses that
used to belong to the Dukes of Valois, and at the end of one winding
street you find yourself unexpectedly looking through a grilled iron
gateway into the ordered stateliness of an old-time chateau. On the
outward side the walls of the chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or
forty feet to the edge of the ravine. What a place to wait for an
approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; and the Germans
evidently thought so too, for from this part of town they carefully kept
away. They burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate as to
live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, they pillaged the
houses whose owners had run away, and they ordered the town to pay them
one hundred thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the fortitude
to stay behind were not molested. The enemy were even polite, one woman
told us--"Pas peur!" said the officer who visited her house, taking off
his hat. On the gate of another house was scrawled in German script,
"Sick Woman--keep away!" and as we passed the open windows, sure enough
there was the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just as she had
been when the Germans came.

On another door we read, also in German script, "Good people--they give
everything!" and on several were orders to leave those within alone. And
there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute--
Schoenen!" chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their lives