every one of these people had something good
to say about some German soldier who had been billeted with them. "He
was a good-natured fellow. He chopped wood for me and gave the children
his own bread. He wept when he told me that the village was to
be destroyed." Even some of the German officers had deplored this
destruction. "The world will have a right to call us barbarians," said
one of them in Ham. "But what can we do? We are under orders. If we do
not obey we shall be shot. It is the cruelty of the High Command. It is
the cruelty of war."

On the whole it seemed they had not misused the women. I heard no
tales of actual atrocity, though some of brutal passion. But many women
shrugged their shoulders when I questioned them about this and said:
"They had no need to use violence in their way of love--making. There
were many volunteers."

They rubbed their thumbs and fingers together as though touching money
and said, "You understand?"

I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and saw a crowd of
young mothers with flaxen-haired babies, just arrived from the liberated
districts. "All those are the children of German fathers," said the old
Reverend Mother. "That is the worst tragedy of war. How will God punish
all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty."

Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a house in Cologne,
where a British outpost was on the Hohenzollern bridge. There was a
babies' creche in an upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty
little ones whose chorus of "Guten Tag! Guten Tag!" was like the
quacking of ducks.

"After to-morrow there will be no more milk for them," she said.

"And then?" I asked.

"And then many of them will die."

She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in Amiens, and of the
old Reverend Mother.

"How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for
the guilty."

Of those things General Ludendorff does not write in his Memoirs, which
deal with the strategy and machinery of war.

III

Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the
German retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He
sent forward outposts to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and
prepared to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the lines round
Arras. This new battle by British troops was dictated by French strategy
rather than by ours. General Nivelle, the new generalissimo, was
or