g-crops, sitting on the counter, and
turning over the pages of La Vie for the latest convention in ladies'
legs.

Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told me, but her
musical studies were seriously interrupted by business and air raids,
which one day ceased in Amiens altogether after a night of horror, when
hundreds of houses were smashed to dust and many people killed, and the
Germans brought their guns close to the city--close enough to scatter
high velocities about its streets--and the population came up out of
their cellars, shaken by the terror of the night, and fled. I passed the
bookshop where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this house which
had escaped by greater luck than its neighbors. She turned as I passed
and raised her hand with a grave gesture of resignation and courage.
"Ils ne passeront pas!" she said. It was the spirit of the courage of
French womanhood which spoke in those words.

III

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three
Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the
British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was never
tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst of them, and
studying their types. All the types of young English manhood came down
this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war,
especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or
more of slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of hunted look in their eyes;
and Death was the hunter. They stared into the shop windows in a dazed
way, or strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to the
right nor to the left, and white, haggard faces, as expressionless as
masks. Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps, the Hunter would track them
down. Other English officers showed no sign at all of apprehension or
lack of nerve-control, although the psychologist would have detected
disorder of soul in the rather deliberate note of hilarity with which
they greeted their friends, in gusts of laughter, for no apparent cause,
at "Charlie's bar," where they would drink three cocktails apiece on an
empty stomach, and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as things
that were very funny. They dined and wined in Amiens at the "Rhin," the
"Godebert," or the "Cathedrale," with a kind of spiritual exaltation in
good food and drink, as though subconsciously they believed that this
might be their last dinn