“This is the greatest day of my life! And I am perfectly ashamed of myself. In spite of my beard and my gig-lamps and my anarchical appearance, these dear people take me for an English officer and a fighting hero. And I feel like one. If I saw a German now I truly believe I should cut his throat. Me--a non-combatant and a man of peace! I’m horrified at my own blood-thirstiness. The worst of it is I’m enjoying it. I’m a primitive man for a time, and find it stimulating. To-morrow I shall repent. These people have suffered hell’s torments. I can’t understand a word the little old lady is telling me but I’m sure she’s been through infernal things. And this pretty girl. She’s a peach, though slightly tuberculous, poor child. My God--how they hate! There is a stored-up hatred in this town enough to burn up Germany by mental telepathy. It’s frightening. Hatred and joy, I feel these two passions like a flame about us. It’s spiritual. It’s transcendental. It’s the first time I’ve seen a hundred thousand people drunk with joy and hate. I’m against hate, and yet the sufferings of these people make me see red so that I want to cut a German throat!” “You’d stitch it up afterwards, doctor,” I said. He blinked at me through his spectacles and said: “I hope so. I hope my instinct would be as right as that. The world will never get forward till we have killed hatred. That’s my religion.” “Bandits! Assassins!” grumbled the old lady. “Dirty people!” “_Vivent les Anglais!_” shouted the crowd, surging about the little man with the beard. The American doctor spoke in English in a large explanatory way. “I’m American. Don’t you go making any mistake. I’m an Uncle Sam. The Yankee boys are further south and fighting like hell, poor lads. I don’t deserve any of this ovation, my dears.” Then in French, with a strong American accent, he shouted: “_Vive la France!_‘Rah! ‘Rah! ‘Rah!” “_Merci, merci, mon Général!_” said an old woman, making a grab at the little doctor’s Sam Brown belt and kissing him on the beard. The crowd closed round him and bore him away.... I met another of our crowd when I went to a priest’s house in a turning off the Rue Royale. Pierre Nesle, our _liaison_ officer--a nice simple fellow, who had always been very civil to me--was talking to the priest outside his door, and introduced me in a formal way to a tall, patrician-looking old man in a long black gown. It was the Abbé Bourdin, well known in Lille as a good priest and a patriot. “Come indoors, gentlemen,” said the old man. “I will tell you what happened to us, though it would take four years to tell you all.”