t set forth the German attitude in this regard by quoting a
general whom we interviewed on the subject:

"We do not destroy for the pleasure it gives us. We destroy only when
it is necessary. The French rural populace are more rational, more
tractable and much less turbulent than the Belgians. To a much greater
degree than the Belgians they have refrained from acts against our men
that would call for severe retaliatory measures on our part.
Consequently we have spared the houses and respected the property of the
French noncombatants."

Personally I had a theory of my own. So far as our observations went,
the people living immediately on both sides of the line were an
interrelated people, using the same speech and being much alike in
temperament, manners and mode of conduct. I reached the private
conclusion that, because of the chorus of protest that arose from all
the neutral countries, and particularly from the United States, against
the severities visited on Belgium in August and September, the word went
forth to the German forces in the field that the scheme of punishment
for offenders who violated the field code should be somewhat softened
and relaxed. However, that is merely a personal theory. I may be
absolutely wrong about it. The German general who interpreted the
meaning of the situation may have been absolutely right about it.
Certainly the physical testimony was on his side.

Also, it seemed to me, the psychology of the people--particularly of the
womenfolk--in northern France was not that of their neighboors over the
frontier. In a trade way the small shopkeepers here faced ruin; the
Belgians already had been ruined. The Frenchwomen, whose sons and
brothers and husbands and fathers were at the front, walked in the
shadow of a great fear, as you might tell by a look into the face of any
one of them. They were as peppercorns between the upper millstone and
the nether, and the sound of the crunching was always in their ears,
even though their turn to be ground up had not yet come.

For the Belgian women, however, the worst that might befall had already
happened to them; their souls could be wrung no more; they had no terror
of the future, since the past had been so terrible and the present was a
living desolation of all they counted worth while. You might say the
Frenchwomen dreaded what the Belgians endured. The refilled cup was at
the lips of France; Belgium had drained it dry.

Yet in both c