I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus!


He held out a pair of large fat hands of the consistency of clay; he was
of a full habit and there were pouches under his eyes. In England he
would have been a small tradesman, with strong views on total
abstinence, accustomed to a diet of high tea, and honoured as the
life-long superintendent of a Sunday school. I was more astonished than
sceptical, but perhaps, as the Comte suggested in a whisper, the Uhlan
was drunk. Here, too, we heard tales of loot, especially among ladies'
wardrobes. It is a curious fact that there is nothing the Hun loves so
much as women's underclothing. As to what happens when he gets hold of
the _lingerie_ many scandalous stories are told, and none more
scandalous than the one which appeared in the whimsical pages of _La Vie
Parisienne_. But that is, most emphatically, quite another story.

From La Ferté we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth
as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to
Barcy, where the _maire_, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure
heap, received us with municipal gravity. We were now nearing the
battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the
trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by
lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral
beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a
team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a threshing
machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an
oat-rick. The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional
passage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. As we raced