Behind the lines the German officers and men lived comfortably in French billets, and organized amusements for battalions in rest. At Bapaume they had a little theatre with painted scenery. Two of the wings were among the few things left in the rubbish-heaps of that poor destroyed town, burnt and sacked by the Germans before they left, and when I went in there with our troops some Australian soldiers propped them up against the walls of a gutted house and inscribed upon them in white chalk the name "Maison de la Co-ee," inviting their comrades to walk up and see the finest show on earth. In Nesle the Germans turned the Café de Commerce into their casino, and played military bands, whose music did not cheer the hearts of wan women whose children were starving. Strange fellows! Who knows what to make of them? The French people just liberated from their rule, which was a reign of terror in the severity of its official regulations, contradict themselves in expressing their white-hot hatred of the German character and their liking for the individual soldiers who were quartered on them. "They were kind to the children ... but they burnt our houses."--"Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away.... But he helped to smash up the neighbours' furniture with an axe."--"The lieutenant was a good fellow ... but he carried out the orders of destruction." A woman told me, with a quivering rage in her voice, that a German officer rode his horse into her room one day. Another woman showed me the cut down her hand and arm which she had received from a German soldier who tried to force his way into her house at night. Other stories have been told me by women white with passion.... Yet it is clear that, on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and all that was in them. IV THE CURÉ OF VOYENNES MARCH 25 In the village of Voyennes, not far from Ham, and one of the few hamlets not utterly destroyed, because the people of the district were herded here while their own houses were being burnt, I went into the ruins of the church. It was easy to see how the flames had licked about its old stones, scorching them red, and how the high oak roof had come blazing down before the walls and pillars had given way. Everything had been licked down by flame except one figure on an encalcined fragment of wall. Only one hand of the Christ there had been burned, and the body hanging on the Cross was unscathed, like so many of those Calvaries which I have seen in shell-fired places.