irit who
persuaded the Germans to their great retreat from the Noyon front this
last spring of 1917!

Coming into the _Place_, and stopping in front of the Hotel de Ville,
gave me the oddest sense of unreality, because, when we were in Paris
the other day, I saw the scene in a moving picture: the first joyful
entry of the French soldiers into the town, when the Germans had cleared
out. I could hardly believe that I wasn't just a figure flickering
across a screen, and that the film wouldn't hurry me along somewhere
else, whether I wanted to go or not.

There were the venerable houses with the steep slate roofs, and
singularly intelligent-looking windows, whose bright panes seemed to
twinkle with knowledge of what they had seen during these dreadful
eighteen months of German occupation. There were the odd, unfinished
towers of the cruciform cathedral--quaint towers, topped with wood and
pointed spirelets--soaring into the sky above the gray colony of
clustered roofs. There was the cobbled pavement, glittering like masses
of broken glass, after a shower of rain just past; and even more
interesting than any of these was the fantastically carved facade of the
Hotel de Ville, which has lured thousands of tourists to Noyon in days
of peace. Who knows but they have been coming ever since 1532, when it
was finished?

At first sight, we should never have guessed what Noyon had suffered
from the Germans. It was only after wandering through the splendid old
cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripped of everything worth stealing, and
going from street to street (we paused a long time in the one where
Calvin was born, a disagreeable, but I suppose useful, man!) that we
began to realize the slow torture inflicted by the Germans. Of course,
"lessons" had to be taught. Rebellious persons had to be "punished."
Nothing but justice had been done upon the unjust by their just
conquerors. And oh, how thorough and painstaking they were in its
execution!

As they'd destroyed all surrounding cities and villages, they had to put
the "evacuated" inhabitants somewhere (those they couldn't use as slaves
to work in Germany), so they herded the people by the thousand into
Noyon. That place had to be spared for the Germans themselves to live
in, being bigger and more comfortable than others in the neighbourhood;
so it was well to have as many of the conquered as possible interned
under their own sharp eyes. Noyon was "home" to six thousand souls
before t