Sitting there in the priest’s room, barely furnished, with a few oak chairs and a writing-desk littered with papers, and a table covered with a tattered cloth of red plush, we listened to a tragic tale, told finely and with emotion by the old man into whose soul it had burned. It was the history of a great population caught by the tide of war before many could escape, and placed under the military law of an enemy who tried to break its spirit. They failed to break it in spite of an iron discipline which denied them all liberty. For any trivial offence by individuals against German rule the whole population was fined or shut up in their houses at three in the afternoon. There were endless fines, unceasing and intolerable robberies under the name of “perquisitions.” That had not broken the people’s spirit. There were worse things to bear--the removal of machinery from the factories, the taking away of the young men and boys for forced labour, and then, the greater infancy of that night when machine-guns were placed at the street corners and German officers ordered each household to assemble at the front door and chose the healthy-looking girls by the pointing of a stick and the word, “You--you!” for slave-labour--it was that--in unknown fields far away. The priest’s face blanched at the remembrance of that scene. His voice quavered when he spoke of the girls’ screams--one of them had gone raving mad--and of the wailing that rose among their stricken families. For a while he was silent, with lowered head and brooding eyes which stared at a rent in the threadbare carpet, and I noticed the trembling of a pulse on his right temple above the deeply-graven wrinkles of his parchment skin. Then he raised his head and spoke harshly. “Not even that could break the spirit of my people. They only said, ‘We will never forget and never forgive!’ They were hungry--we did not get much food--but they said, ‘Our sons who are fighting for us are suffering worse things. It is for us to be patient.’ They were surrounded by German spies--the secret police--who listened to their words and haled them off to prison upon any pretext. There is hardly a man among us who has not been in prison. The women were made to do filthy work for German soldiers, to wash their lousy clothes, to scrub their dirty barracks, and they were insulted, humiliated, tempted, by brutal men.” “Was there much of that brutality?” I asked. The priest’s eyes grew sombre. “Many women suffered abominable things. I thank God that so many kept their pride and their honour. There were, no doubt, some bad men and women in the city--disloyal, venal, weak, sinful--may God have mercy on their souls; but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of Lille.”