f nights shortened by hard work,
says a few quietly confident things about the general situation, and
then we discuss a problem which one of the party--not a soldier--starts.

Is it true or untrue that long habituation to the seeing or inflicting
of pain and death, that the mere sights and sounds of the trenches tend
with time to brutalise men, and will make them callous when they return
to civil life? Do men grow hard and violent in this furnace after a
while, and will the national character suffer thereby in the future? The
General denies it strongly. "I see no signs of it. The kindness of the
men to each other, to the wounded, whether British or German, to the
French civilians, especially the women and children, is as marked as it
ever was. It is astonishing the good behaviour of the men in these
French towns; it is the rarest thing in the world to get a complaint."

I ask for some particulars of the way in which the British Army "runs"
the French towns and villages in our zone. How is it done? "It is all
summed up in three words," says an officer present, "M. le Maire!" What
we should have done without the local functionaries assigned by the
French system to every village and small town it is hard to say. They
are generally excellent people; they have the confidence of their fellow
townsmen, and know everything about them. Our authorities on taking over
a town or village do all the preliminaries through M. le Maire, and all
goes well.

The part played, indeed, by these local chiefs of the civil population
throughout France during the war has been an honourable and arduous--in
many cases a tragic--one. The murder, under the forms of a
court-martial, of the Maire of Senlis and his five fellow hostages
stands out among the innumerable German cruelties as one of peculiar
horror. Everywhere in the occupied departments the Maire has been the
surety for his fellows, and the Germans have handled them often as a
cruel boy torments some bird or beast he has captured, for the pleasure
of showing his power over it.

From the wife of the Maire of an important town in Lorraine I heard the
story of how her husband had been carried off as a hostage for three
weeks, while the Germans were in occupation. Meanwhile German officers
were billeted in her charming old house. "They used to say to me every
day with great politeness that they _hoped_ my husband would not be
shot. 'But why should he be shot, monsieur? He will do nothing to