y
exclaimed: "Lille! It is a crime. What shall we do? How shall we live?"

And I could see fear in her eyes, fear for her belongings as well as for
her life, fear which made her forget for a moment the "good cause of
this war" as she had often put it to me, fear which made her heart give
out a note of real selfishness.

So far as I can remember it was on October 8 that all the gates of the
city were closed, and that there was fighting on the Grand Boulevard,
the great wide thoroughfare which connects Lille with its sister-cities
of Roubaix and Tourcoing. There was also fighting near one of the gates.

On the following day, on returning from my work in Hospital 105, the
people with whom I was living told me of the terrible spectacle they had
witnessed when they had gone to get news of some relations living near
the gate where the fight had taken place. One woman said:

"The fight was on the bridge, which was covered in the evening with the
dead bodies of Germans, amongst them two wounded men whom the Germans
had left behind. By the bridge there is an inn, and we have been told
that five men, civilians, who were there, killed the two 'Boches' by
strangling them. This makes two less of them!"

I looked at her in horror, thinking that fright had turned her brain. I
could find no words to reply. I turned to go to my own room, when she
added:

"In any case, the 'Boches' won't know of it for the bodies are buried
under a heap of stones."

I left her with the words of the woman of Orchies echoing through my
brain: "Who can tell which side is the more barbarous?"

Some of these people I had known before the war to be peaceful, quiet
citizens; they now appeared to me to have suddenly turned into devils.
Fear and danger had made them crazy with hatred. Everywhere one went it
was the same. If I tried to escape it, and took refuge in the street, I
seemed to feel hatred rising from the very ground.

Amongst the fugitives one saw, many had run away before even seeing a
German helmet, but all were full of atrocious tales, all were mad with
hatred and revenge.

Not until the actual shelling of the town began did I fully realise the
havoc that fear and hatred can work! To feel helpless while shells go
whirling over one's head at the rate of sixty a minute, while houses are
burning on either side of one, is a horrible experience. To have to bear
all these horrors without being able to put a stop to them, is
maddening. At such