erman retirement was not at
all a rout. When an army is in flight it leaves baggage and equipment
behind, guns in the mud. The Germans had left very little; they were
falling back in good order. Their soldiers were good fighters,
especially when well led. They might lack the individual initiative of
Frenchmen, the nervous energy with which Frenchmen would keep on
fighting after mere bone and muscle had had enough, but they had plenty
of courage. Their officers--the dragoon paused. Yesterday, he said,
they had run into a troop of cavalry. The German officer ordered his
men to charge, and instead they wavered and started to fall back. He
turned on them. "Schweinhunde!" he shouted after them, and, flinging his
horse about, charged alone, straight at the French lances.

"Kill him?" asked the man at the head of the table.

The dragoon nodded. "It was a pity. Joli garcon he was"--he ran a hand
round a weather-beaten cheek as if to suggest the other's well-made
face--"monocle in his eye--and he never let go of it until it fell off--
a lance through his heart."

As we talked two secret-service-men entered, demanded our papers,
examined them, and directed us to call at the Maine for them next
morning at eight o'clock. Now, indeed, we were walking a tight rope.
Following the genius who had got us our suppers, we emerged into the
dark street, walked down it a few doors, entered a courtyard full of
cavalry horses, where men in spurred boots were clanking up and down
stairs. He thrust a heavy key into a lock, opened a door and ushered us
into an empty and elegantly furnished house.

Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with
satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of
them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as
its owner had left it. Who he might be, why we should be here, how our
mysterious, conductor--who knew no one in Villers-Cotteret and had but
landed there himself that night--had arranged this occupation, was
beyond finding out. At the moment, with military motor-trucks rumbling
past outside, soldiers coming and going in the court and tramping about
in the room overhead--an extension of the adjoining house--one scarcely
thought of trying to find out. One merely accepted it, enchained by
that uplifted finger and "Leave it to me!" For a time we talked under
the dining-room light, with doors bolted and wooden shutters on stree