ut. One sausage and a piece of white bread to each
person, men, women, and children. The joy on their faces was wonderful
to behold. As they received their share they ran off to the shelter of
some ruins, or up into the church, to cook their wonderful gifts. I
filmed the scene, and I shall never forget it.

The last of the batch had disappeared when up the road came hobbling a
woman whose age I should say was somewhere about forty-five. I could see
she was on the point of exhaustion. She had a huge bundle upon her back
and a child in her arms, another about seven years clinging to her
skirts. They halted outside the ruins of a cottage, the woman dropped
her bundle, and crouching down upon it clung convulsively to the babe in
her arms and burst into tears.

I went up to her and gently asked her the cause.

"This, monsieur, was my house. Two days past the Germans drove me away
with my children. My husband has already been killed at the front. They
drove me away, and I come back to-day and now my home, all that I had in
the world, monsieur, is gone. They have burnt it. What can I do,
monsieur? And we are starving."

The babe in her arms began to send forth a thin lifeless wail. I helped
the poor woman to her feet and told her to go to the church, and that I
would bring her bundle and some food for her.

God above, what despair! The grim track of war in all its damnable
nakedness was epitomised in this little French hamlet. Houses burnt,
horses taken away, agricultural implements wilfully smashed, fruit trees
and bushes cut down, even the hedges around their little gardens, their
cemetery violated and the remains of their dead strewn to the four winds
of heaven. Their wells polluted with garbage and filth; in some cases
deliberately poisoned, in others totally destroyed by dynamite. Their
churches used as stables for horses and for drunken orgies. All the
younger men deported, and the prettiest of the girls. In some cases
their clothes had been forcibly taken away from them and sacks had been
given in exchange to clothe themselves with. They were robbed of every
penny they possessed.

But when the wonderful sound of the British guns and the tramp of our
soldiers crept nearer and nearer, terrifying, relentless, and
irresistible, the Germans left, fleeing with their ill-gotten spoil like
demons of darkness before the angels of light, leaving in their trail
the picture I have unfolded to you.

Wishing to push on furthe