Everything is tossed about as green hay in the harvest field. The very sheets are torn from the beds and lie in little white ghostly heaps on the dark-stained boards. The Brandenburgers come out into the street where a row of stalwart bayoneting Cuirassiers are keeping order. My nice blond giant has a huge cigar between his teeth, the Commandant’s cigar, so has my swashbuckling bully. They both lunch at the inn and fall to as if they had had nothing to eat for the last ten months. I am made to translate and can scarcely speak for anger. I suspect them of every crime. _Saturday._—The blond giant comes in at all hours. Everyone in the village likes him now in spite of his behaviour at the Gendarmerie. He seems gentle, mild-eyed and very courteous. We have been used to different treatment. He arranges everything so nicely, too. For instance, he begs us all not to put our noses out of the houses after twilight, under any pretext. “I can’t bear to think of your being frightened; my sentries might make a mistake,” he says, smiling pleasantly. The poor literal peasants don’t see that this is an euphuism for shooting us on sight. Orders, no doubt. _Sunday._—I get up early and go to Mass with Mlle Irma, having first obtained permission from the soldiers. We walk along the sides of the road, under the shadow of the trees, a wise precaution these days. Osterre chapel is packed to the doors. I have a curious feeling that those paint and plaster saints high up on their little pedestals are alive. St. Antoine’s nose looks longer and more pinched than ever, and he is gazing down as though ashamed to be of so little use to us in our hour of need. St. Christopher is mild, so is St. Joseph; the Madonna seems to smile at us with a modest kind of shrinking sympathy across pots of flaming geraniums. Osterre chapel is packed. The sheep-and-goats division of the sexes appears to obtain in the Ardennes. The women’s side is over-crowded. We could hang out “standing room only” and be merely truthful. The men’s scarcely less so. All the women are as scrupulously neat in their Sunday silk blouses and flower-trimmed hats as though they had never heard of such a thing as war. One or two of the black-bonneted old peasants are making their rosaries damp with tears. I can see the beads, so brightly reflected against the polished wooden seats, shaking a little. At the end of the service, a box like a newly opened sardine tin, at the end of a long pole, is thrust before me by a tiny acolyte. Then we rise and go home comforted. We have shifted the burden of our troubles to other—wiser shoulders. COALS OF FIRE The Tax-collector is resting here for a few hours on his way home. He has brought with him his son, who looks dead tired with his twenty-mile walk. The lad’s luggage has all been left behind. But Aywaille was too near Liège to be safe. The Tax-collector will be glad to reach his journey’s end.