ever heard a single word of pity for the people
of the regions overrun by her armies--except, of course, the
Pecksniffian variety used by her diplomats. It was now any rare
privilege to return with German refugees to _their_ ruined country,
and they vied with one another when they talked to me in the
presence of my guides in accusing the Russians of every crime under
the sun. The war had been brought home to them, but in the
meantime other Germans had brought the war home even more forcibly
to the citizens of Belgium and northern France, but the thing could
not balance in the minds of those affected.

I was conducted to a combination home and chemist's shop, the upper
part of which had been wrecked by a shell. The Russians had looted
the place of chemicals and had searched through all the letters in
the owner's desk. These they had thrown upon the floor instead of
putting them back neatly in the drawers.

My guides laid great stress on such crimes, but I took mental note
of certain other things which were not pointed out to me. The
beasts--as they always called them--had been quartered here for
three weeks, but not a mirror had been cracked, not a scratch
marred the highly polished black piano, and the well-stocked,
exquisitely carved bookcase was precisely as it had been before the
first Cossack patrol entered the city.

The owner viewed his loss philosophically. "When we have placed a
war indemnity upon Russia I shall be paid in full," he declared in
a voice of supreme confidence.

My guides never gave me an opportunity to talk alone with the few
civilians in the place, and at the sausage and beer lunch the
conversation was based on the "wanton destruction by the beasts of
an innocent town."

After they had drunk so much beer that they both fell asleep I
slipped quietly away and went about amid the ruins. I came upon
human bodies burned to a crisp. Heaps of empty cartridge shells
littered the ground, which I examined with astonishment for they
were Russian, not German, shells, and must have been used by men
defending the town.

I met a pretty girl of seventeen drawing water at a well, who had
remained during the three weeks that the Russians were there to
care for her invalid father, and had not suffered the slightest
insult. Yet all my informants had told me that the Russians had
spared none of the weaker sex who had remained in their path.

Further investigations had revealed that the Russians had