er."

"But you say your mother's hands are so lame that she can't hold a pen.
And wouldn't Mlle. Malo have written you the truth?"

At that his frown would lift. "Oh, yes. She would despise any attempt at
concealment."

"Well, then--what the deuce is the matter?"

"It's when I see these devils' traces--" he could only mutter.

One day, when we had passed through a particularly devastated little
place, and had got from the cure some more than usually abominable
details of things done there, Rechamp broke out to me over the
kitchen-fire of our night's lodging. "When I hear things like that I
don't believe anybody who tells me my people are all right!"

"But you know well enough," I insisted, "that the Germans are not all
alike--that it all depends on the particular officer...."

"Yes, yes, I know," he assented, with a visible effort at impartiality.
"Only, you see--as one gets nearer...." He went on to say that, when he
had been sent from the ambulance at the front to a hospital at Moulins,
he had been for a day or two in a ward next to some wounded German
soldiers--bad cases, they were--and had heard them talking. They didn't
know he knew German, and he had heard things.... There was one name
always coming back in their talk, von Scharlach, Oberst von Scharlach.
One of them, a young fellow, said: "I wish now I'd cut my hand off
rather than do what he told us to that night.... Every time the fever
comes I see it all again. I wish I'd been struck dead first." They all
said "Scharlach" with a kind of terror in their voices, as if he might
hear them even there, and come down on them horribly. Rechamp had asked
where their regiment came from, and had been told: From the Vosges.
That had set his brain working, and whenever he saw a ruined village, or
heard a tale of savagery, the Scharlach nerve began to quiver. At such
times it was no use reminding him that the Germans had had at least
three hundred thousand men in the East in August. He simply didn't
listen....

III

The day before we started for Rechamp his spirits flew up again, and
that night he became confidential. "You've been such a friend to me that
there are certain things--seeing what's ahead of us--that I should like
to explain"; and, noticing my surprise, he went on: "I mean about my
people. The state of mind in my _milieu_ must be so remote from anything
you're used to in your happy country.... But perhaps I can make you
understand...."

I saw