carry off their shells, so they had left them behind. But they had had
time to empty the bottles. Absinthe, brandy, rum, champagne, beer, and
wine had all been consumed, and the labels lay alongside of each
other. Drunken, bloodthirsty brutes, thieving, sickening, nauseous
beasts were what had descended upon France and passed through her
country. Ruins, ashes and filth were the traces left behind by the
German mob.

Some hundreds of yards from the village I noticed a woman lost in the
immense beet fields. Apparently she was unharmed. I walked in her
direction, thrusting aside with my legs corpses of men and horses,
scaling the trenches, making a circuit around the craters made by
shells. Suddenly what was my surprise at seeing two German soldiers,
accompanied by a farmer, coming along a footpath! They stopped at six
paces, gave me a military salute, and pointed to the white brassard of
the Red Cross they wore on their arms.

"Where do you come from?" I asked. "What are you doing here?"

"We come from that farm, where we have been for two days caring for
two of our wounded. We didn't see any French soldier or officer. We
don't know what to do. We want to go to the village down there," they
pointed out a hamlet two or three kilometers off, "where we left a
doctor and one hundred and fifty-three wounded."

"Very good," I said, "follow me."

Obediently the two orderlies marched behind me to the village they had
pointed out. It was situated on the national highway to Soissons. In
this place were a hundred and fifty or two hundred Germans, quartered