But other houses, which had been spared by shell fire, had not been spared by the Kaiser's soldiery. The Barbarians had placed their claws on them. Everything had been taken out of the houses and scattered to the four winds of heaven. Here is a portrait that has been wrenched from its frame and trampled on. A baby's bathtub has been carried into the garden, and the soldiers have deposited their excrement in it. There are chairs that have been smashed by the kicks of heavy boots and wardrobes that have been disemboweled. Here is a fine old mahogany table that has been carried into the fields for five hundred meters and then broken in two. An old red damask armchair, with wings at the sides, one of those old armchairs in which the grandmothers of France sit by the fire in the evening has been torn in shreds by knife thrusts. Linen is mixed with mud; the white veil some girl wore at her first communion is defiled with excrement.... An old man is wandering among the ruins. He has just come back to the devastated village. He says to me simply: "I saw them in 1870. They came here, but they didn't do this. They are savages." A woman was there, too. She had come an hour or so ago with the old man, and she stood on the step of her defiled, despoiled home where the curtains hung in tatters at the windows. She saw me pass by. She wanted to speak to me, but her voice stuck in her throat. There she stood, her arms extended like a great cross. She could only sob: "Look! Look!" And she was like a symbol of the whole wretched business. The men who do such deeds are the men France is fighting. * * * * * Vincy-Manoeuvre was another one of the villages. It is situated near the border of the Department of the Oise. It was still in flames when I entered it. On the outskirts of the hamlet there used to be a large factory. Only the iron framework of this factory remained; the ashes had commenced to smoke, giving forth flames from time to time. Here also every house had been destroyed and pillaged. Only the church remained standing, and on the belfry which was silhouetted against the sky, the weather cock seemed to shudder with horror.