In a little over two hours I learned an astonishing lot about La Ferte
itself: it was a co-educational receiving station whither were sent from
various parts of France (a) males suspected of espionage and (b) females
of a well-known type found in the zone of the armies. It was pointed out
to me that the task of finding such members of the human race was _pas
difficile:_ in the case of the men, any foreigner would do provided his
country was neutral (e.g. Holland); as for the girls, inasmuch as the
armies of the Allies were continually retreating, the _zone des armees_
(particularly in the case of Belgium) was always including new cities,
whose _petites femmes_ became automatically subject to arrest. It was not
to be supposed that all the women of La Ferte were _putains_: there were
a large number of respectable women, the wives of prisoners, who met
their husbands at specified times on the floor below the men's quarters,
whither man and woman were duly and separately conducted by _plantons_.
In this case no charges had been preferred against the women; they were
voluntary prisoners, who had preferred to freedom this living in
proximity to their husbands. Many of them had children; some babies. In
addition there were certain _femmes honnettes_ whose nationality, as in
the case of the men, had cost them their liberty; Marguerite the
washerwoman, for example, was a German.

La Ferte Mace was not properly speaking a prison, but a Porte or
Detention Camp: that is to say, persons sent to it were held for a
Commission, composed of an official, a lawyer, and a captain of
_gendarmes_, which inspected the Camp and passed upon each case in turn
for the purpose of determining the guiltiness of the suspected party. If
the latter were found guilty by the Commission, he or she was sent off to
a regular prison camp for the duration of the war; if not guilty, he or
she was (in theory) set free. The Commission came to La Ferte once every