s though the
occupants of a morgue had become galvanised and had temporarily risen
from their slabs.

The band had been augmented by trumpets. It took its place in the
gallery and deluged the hall with patriotic fervour. An old man
climbed on a table and yelled, "Vive La France!" But they had grown
tired of shouting; they soon grew tired. The cry was taken up faintly
and soon exhausted itself. Nothing held their attention for long.
Most of them sat hunched up and inert, weakly crying. They were not
beautiful. They were not like our men who die in battle. They were
animated memories of horror. "What lies before us? What lies before
us?" That was the question that their silence asked perpetually. Some
of them had husbands with the French army; others had sweethearts.
What would those men say to the flaxen-haired babies who nestled
against the women's breasts? And the sin was not theirs--they were
such tired, pretty mites. "What lies before us?" The babies, too,
might well have asked that question. Do you wonder that I at last
began to share the Frenchman's hatred for the Boche?

An extraordinary person in a white tie, top hat and evening dress
entered. He looked like a cross between Mr. Gerard's description of
himself in Berlin and a head-waiter. He evidently expected his advent
to cause a profound sensation. I found out why: he was the official
welcomer to Evian. Twice a day, for an infinity of days, he had
entered in solemn fashion, faced the same tragic assembly, made the
same fiery oration, gained applause at the climax of the same rounded
periods and allowed his voice to break in the same rightly timed
places. Having kept his audience in sufficient suspense as regards
his mission, he unwrapped the muffler from his neck, removed his coat,
felt his throat to see whether it was in good condition, swelled out
his chest, including his waist-coat which was spanned by the broad
ribbon of his office, then let loose the painter of his emotion and
slipped off into the mid-stream of perfunctory eloquence. With all his
disrobing he had retained his top-hat; he held it in his right hand
with the brim pressed against his thigh, very much in the manner of
a showman at a circus. It contributed largely to the opulence of his
gestures.

He always seemed to have concluded and was always starting up afresh,
as if in reluctant response to spectral clapping. He called upon the
repatries never to forget the crimes that had been wrought