The French soldiers held the last houses with effective fire. Then, for ten days the Germans held the town; and destroyed it, for amusement! The Mayor and other elderly burgesses were set in front of the hotel, in single file, and shot with a single discharge, for practice. They were not allowed to speak to their wives and children, who stood by. Proud of the fact, the General and his aide-de-camp have signed their names large in the hotel book--may they be kept, for execration! The hostess of the hotel was forced to open every room, with a pistol held at her throat. The two old maid-servants who had stayed to look after the "great house"--now a smoking shell--were abused and injured. One wanders half an idiot in the village, still weeping. Eighteen hundred bottles of champagne--they would have no other wine--were looted from the cellars. Double them, and you will not be able to account for the ankle-deep litter of glass in the streets. Hardly a house of importance is left with roof or floor. And how do you think it was done? Straw was piled. The tapers were stolen from the shrines and cathedral, and the soldiers amused themselves by throwing the lighted candles in at the windows of the houses. No wonder the small, crêpe-covered population is all in the streets. Here and there I saw a woman scraping in the burnt ashes, to clear a kitchen hearth, or look for some remnants. The station is a bleak ruin. Only the Cathedral tower, exquisite and light, protests against the sunlit sky. But they were finely caught. The Zouaves, Chasseurs d'Afrique, who are pouring up through this country, arrived in trains of taxi-cabs between four and five a.m. The officer--no matter how he was occupied--fled out in his shirt; could not find his regiment; and was shot. The rest decamped--those who escaped. The prisoners I saw being sent back. Not a crust is left in the neighbouring villages. At Mont l'Evigne the few surviving men snarled at the mention of bread. You will hear with the less revolt of the horror I passed earlier in the day--some two hundred and forty Prussians, dead in one farm together, black and unburied, for want of peasants to bury them. They were killed by shell-fumes possibly, but had been bayoneted for double security. It would be easy to amplify the details--the utter destruction of the houses, the stories of the insolence of the invading horde. The inhabitants, poor folk! are taking it with the quiet, deep indignation of a civilised people. Wagons of the wounded, of the American ambulance, passed in long train through the town, back from the front.