“Yes, yes, I know,” he assented, with a visible effort at impartiality. “Only, you see--as one gets nearer....” He went on to say that, when he had been sent from the ambulance at the front to a hospital at Moulins, he had been for a day or two in a ward next to some wounded German soldiers--bad cases, they were--and had heard them talking. They didn’t know he knew German, and he had heard things.... There was one name always coming back in their talk, von Scharlach, Oberst von Scharlach. One of them, a young fellow, said: “I wish now I’d cut my hand off rather than do what he told us to that night.... Every time the fever comes I see it all again. I wish I’d been struck dead first.” They all said “Scharlach” with a kind of terror in their voices, as if he might hear them even there, and come down on them horribly. Réchamp had asked where their regiment came from, and had been told: From the Vosges. That had set his brain working, and whenever he saw a ruined village, or heard a tale of savagery, the Scharlach nerve began to quiver. At such times it was no use reminding him that the Germans had had at least three hundred thousand men in the East in August. He simply didn’t listen.... III The day before we started for Réchamp his spirits flew up again, and that night he became confidential. “You’ve been such a friend to me that there are certain things--seeing what’s ahead of us--that I should like to explain”; and, noticing my surprise, he went on: “I mean about my people. The state of mind in my _milieu_ must be so remote from anything you’re used to in your happy country.... But perhaps I can make you understand....” I saw that what he wanted was to talk to me of the girl he was engaged to. Mlle. Malo, left an orphan at ten, had been the ward of a neighbour of the Réchamps’, a chap with an old name and a starred château, who had lost almost everything else at baccarat before he was forty, and had repented, had the gout and studied agriculture for the rest of his life. The girl’s father was a rather brilliant painter, who died young, and her mother, who followed him in a year or two, was a Pole: you may fancy that, with such antecedents, the girl was just the mixture to shake down quietly into French country life with a gouty and repentant guardian. The Marquis de Corvenaire--that was his name--brought her down to his place, got an old maid sister to come and stay, and really, as far as one knows, brought his ward up rather decently.