Such as they were, the gentlemen amused themselves. Some maintained even that they made conquests. I am touching here on a very delicate subject--the relations between the invaders and the women of the invaded countries. There has been much talk of rape. Compared with the crimes committed in Belgium and in Lorraine, the misdeeds we shall mention are but little things. To be sure, there were rapes, but, thanks be to God, they were few, and they took place at the beginning of the invasion, chiefly after the Germans' retreat on the Marne. In Jouville I heard many a sad story. There was the story of a young woman of Chevregny who went mad after her misfortune, and of several old women too. For, hardly credible as it seems, old women often fell victims to acts of violence, because they lacked agility to run away. At Braye, several soldiers fell upon a woman of eighty, knocked her down, and beat her most unmercifully. At Chamouille, in October 1914, a few women were living in a cellar, frightened to death. "One evening," one of them told me, "we heard a loud cry; there was a falling of stones, and a young woman tumbled down into the cellar through a shell-hole. Thus she escaped from her pursuers, but her companion, an old woman of sixty-eight, fell defenceless into the hands of the filthy fellows." Ah, we had many proofs of the respect the Germans have for old age! A woman of Cerny, eighty-seven years old, small and white-haired, with red eyes and a shaking head, told us how she had left her lodging. "I had a small bundle of clothes ready lying on the table. But the soldiers did not allow me to go in and take it; they beat me. As I didn't go--I had money, too, in my bundle--they forced me to go; they all flocked around me, they were twelve, and ... how am I to say it?..." In short, the twelve rascals had driven the poor old woman out of her house by directing towards her that which a famous statue innocently eternises in Brussels. Stripped of her spare clothes and money, filthy, disgusted at what she had seen, the unhappy woman had to go to a neighbour to beg for a bodice and a petticoat, that she might cast away her soiled clothes. When the Germans settled themselves upon us, these feats of the satyr were no longer common. Here and there evil deeds were still spoken of, and a doctor of the neighbourhood told us in the spring of 1915 that nearly every week there was an act of violence. I must confess that many a woman was the victim of her own imprudence. When you have lived all your life in a quiet village, among kind people, you have some difficulty in believing that you must be on your guard for months together, that you are for ever surrounded with brutes. So more than one villager had reason to regret having gone alone to the forest, or having persisted in living in a lonely house.