"And you?" I continued. "Where was your home?"

"Ah, but it is the long story. We live close by Liége. It is a small
village. The Uhlans come and we are sorely frightened. We hide in the
cellar, and do not go out at all. While there _les Allemands_ post a notice
in the village. It is that every person who has a gun, a pistol, a shell,
an explosive, must hand such over to the burgomaster. We do not know of
this, and do nothing. At last, Monsieur, the Uhlans come to our house to
search, and there they see a shotgun and some shot. It is such a gun as you
must know in the house of British, in the house of American. It is the
common gun. We did not know. But there is no pardon for ignorance in war.
My brothers were roughly pulled to the market place and shot dead." Little
Marie choked down a sob. "My mother and my father," she continued, "were
carried away. I refuse. I fight, I bite, I scratch, I scream with frenzy, I
tear. One of _les Allemands_ ... perhaps he was mad, Monsieur, he slash ...
so, and so ... he cut off my arm.

"I remember no more, Monsieur. After a day ... two days, I find that I can
walk. I walk and walk. It is now one hundred and fifty miles from my home
... it is that I stay here until...."

I grasped the girl's left hand and turned away. I was sick. What if she had
been my sister?

And then I thought of the laws read aloud to us that morning. We soldiers,
fighting under the flag of the British Empire, were we to violate one
little rule ... were we to take any property, no matter how small, without
just payment to its owner; were we to drink one glass of beer too much ...
were we to overstep by a hair's breadth the smallest rule of the code of a