Once some jolly Sisters
of Charity took us in at their Hospice, and we slept two nights in
an ice-cold whitewashed cell--but what tales we heard around their
kitchen-fire! The Sisters had stayed alone to face the Germans, had seen
the town burn, and had made the Teutons turn the hose on the singed
roof of their Hospice and beat the fire back from it. It's a pity those
Sisters of Charity can't marry....

Rechamp told me a lot in those days. I don't believe he was talkative
before the war, but his long weeks in hospital, starving for news, had
unstrung him. And then he was mad with excitement at getting back to his
own place. In the interval he'd heard how other people caught in their
country-houses had fared--you know the stories we all refused to believe
at first, and that we now prefer not to think about.... Well, he'd been
thinking about those stories pretty steadily for some months; and he
kept repeating: "My people say they're all right--but they give no
details."

"You see," he explained, "there never were such helpless beings. Even if
there had been time to leave, they couldn't have done it. My mother
had been having one of her worst attacks of rheumatism--she was in bed,
helpless, when I left. And my grandmother, who is a demon of activity in
the house, won't stir out of it. We haven't been able to coax her into
the garden for years. She says it's draughty; and you know how we all
feel about draughts! As for my father, he hasn't had to decide anything
since the Comte de Chambord refused to adopt the tricolour. My father
decided that he was right, and since then there has been nothing
particular for him to take a stand about. But I know how he behaved just
as well as if I'd been there--he kept saying: 'One must act--one
must act!' and sitting in his chair and doing nothing. Oh, I'm not
disrespectful: they were _like_ that in his generation! Besides--it's
better to laugh at things, isn't it?" And suddenly his face would
darken....

On the whole, however, his spirits were good till we began to traverse
the line of ruined towns between Sainte Menehould and Bar-le-Duc. "This
is the way the devils came," he kept saying to me; and I saw he was hard
at work picturing the work they must have done in his own neighbourhood.

"But since your sister writes that your people are safe!"

"They may have made her write that to reassure me. They'd heard I was
badly wounded. And, mind you, there's never been a line from my moth