There comes into my mind as I talk the picture of a dreadful sight I saw near Armentières. We had reached a place and entered it, not knowing that the Germans were so near at hand, though we knew that we had them on the drive and that they were going away from us as hard as they could travel. Suddenly we came to a nunnery, where the nuns showed us the dead body of a little French boy, a mere child about five years old. A glance was enough to show that he had been bayoneted in the stomach, and it was clear that the cowardly murder had been done quite recently. One of our officers made inquiries of some nuns, and he was told that a drunken German soldier had killed the child. Can you wonder that when our eyes saw such dreadful evidence of German devilry and German cowardice, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, at any rate, made up their minds that whenever the chance arose the enemy should be severely punished? Nothing has been done by British soldiers in this war that has not been fair and square fighting, but I am glad to think that many a German coward and murderer has paid the penalty of some foul crime at the point of a British bayonet. Even in the way of ordinary warfare many innocent women and children have been killed, quite apart from the large numbers who have been wantonly murdered by German brutes. In one village we passed through one of our men found a woman’s head of hair, which had been cut off, and the body itself was found by civilians. The woman had been maltreated and murdered by the Germans, and on every hand there were signs of the enemy’s ferocity and inhumanity. Buildings were in ruins and homes were wrecked, doors having been battered down so that the savage soldiery could wreak their maddened will on fellow-creatures and their belongings. On every hand there was evidence of outrage. I went to a farm in this village to try and buy some milk and eggs. On entering a room which had a big fireplace, I saw in the corner of the fireplace an old man who seemed to be an idiot. A woman, whom I took to be his wife, and could speak broken English, told me that the Uhlans had taken him away, with his hands tied behind him. “Why did they take him? What had he done?” I asked her.