For a whole year once the French were not allowed out farther than that strip of street, sunless and frozen in the winter, dusty in the summer, and crowded all the year round. The pretext was a reprisal for some imagined wrong done to Turkish prisoners in France. We suffered from a continual threat of reprisals like this. Six Englishmen were once imprisoned for months in a loathsome hole in Constantinople for some crime of our Government, probably invented, and one of the six died as a result. And there were other minor cases of the same kind. It is useless for a civilized people to swap reprisals with savages: the savages will win every time. The French temperament was totally different from the English. They used to get extraordinarily elated at times, and at other times they became desperately depressed. We did both of these things too, but our pendulum was longer and did not swing so suddenly. In the great German offensive of the spring of 1918 we refused to be downhearted. “They will take Paris!” the French would cry. “Very likely,” we would reply; “perhaps we are leading them on.” There was unpleasantness over this kind of divergence, and they would say despairingly, “Oh! you bloody English! You do not understand.” But no real quarrel ever resulted. The most frequent offender was an Irish major, who assiduously studied French. His joy was to lead his tutor to the verge of hysterics by calculated callousness regarding German victories. The poor tutor would scream at him, but they were really the best of friends. “Unless I rouse him,” the major would say, “he won’t speak fast enough to give me the practice in conversation that I require.” I shall never forget a scene in the church, where, by the way, the French beat us at all points in quiet endurance of a detestable experience. A certain French officer resented having his belongings searched, and certain articles of Turkish clothing “stolen” from him. In revenge he shaved off his moustache, fitted a large newspaper cocked hat upon his head, and strutted fiercely up and down the central aisle, looking the very personification of _revanche_. He was a tiny man, very clever, and a great mathematician. Why he did it the Lord alone knows, but he did; and he felt as one embarking upon a forlorn hope. There was not a smile in the affair--on his side--from beginning to end. The French senior officer was a very fine man, one of the best-read and all-round best-informed men I have ever met, and he ran his rather difficult mixed French and British house tactfully and well.