[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
Photo-Play_

THE VOICE OF THE TEMPTER.]

I should judge that she was about fifteen. She told me she was sixteen. She
was piquant and pretty in appearance, but her features were drawn and her
expression was sad. She had a questioning wistfulness in her eyes, but she
showed no fear of the many British soldiers round.

This young girl, little over a child, was all alone. She awaited in terror
the coming of her baby, and the fiends who had outraged her had brutally
cut off her right arm just a little above the elbow.

"How did this happen to you, Mademoiselle?" I asked in French.

"Ah, Monsieur," she replied, "_les Allemands_, they did--chop it off."

"Why, Mademoiselle, surely no German would do such a hideous thing as that
without some reason."

At that time I believed, as apparently do the majority of people in this
country to-day believe, that the Germans did not commit the atrocities that
were attributed to them. But it is all true.

"But, _oui_, Monsieur,... _les Allemands_, they have no reason. They kill
my two brothers ... my father I have not seen, my mother I have not seen
... no, not for five months. _Les Allemands_, they have taken them also ...
they are dead also, _peutetre_."