I am moved to write again of the old men and women and of the young women and children who have been liberated by our advance, because I have just been among these people again, seeing their tears, hearing their pitiful tales, touched by hands which plucked my sleeve so that I should listen to another story of outrage and misery. All they told me, and all I have seen, builds up into a great tragedy. These young girls, who wept before me, shaken by the terror of their remembrance, these old brave men, who cried like children, these old women who did not weep but spoke with strange, smiling eyes as to life's great ironies, revealed to me in a fuller way the enormous agony of life behind the German lines now shifted back a little so that these people have escaped. It is an agony which includes the German soldiers, themselves enslaved, wretched, disillusionized men, under the great doom which has killed so many of their brothers, ordered to do the things many of them loathe to do, brutal by order even when they have gentle instincts, doing kind things by stealth, afraid of punishment for charity, stricken both by fear and hunger. "Why do you go?" they were asked by one of the women who have been speaking to me. "Because we hope to escape the new British attacks," they answered. "The English gun-fire smashed us to death on the Somme. The officers know we cannot stand that horror a second time." They spoke as men horribly afraid. "I was the bailiff of Mme. la Marquise de Caulaincourt," said an elderly man, taking off his peaked cap to show me a coronet on the badge. "When the Germans came first to our village they seized all the tools, and all the farm-carts, and all the harvesting, and then they forced us all to work for them, the men at three sous an hour, the women at two sous an hour, and prison for any who refused to work. From the château they sent back the tapestries, the pictures, and anything which pleased this Commandant or that, until there was nothing left. Then in the last days they burnt the château to the ground and all the village and all the orchards." "It was the same always," said a woman. "There were processions of carts covered with linen, and underneath the linen was the furniture stolen from good houses."