Durupt devotes to the indulgence of his national hatred the whole of that conscience which his Christianity (quasi-jansenist in type) has produced in him. He hates as a duty. He injures as a duty. How can he injure the Germans now that he is at their mercy? By demoralizing their men! Having an excellent knowledge of German, he has made it his mission at Fort Orff to prove by a + b to our successive relays of guards—Landwehr men on their way to the frontier, or men wounded in the first onslaught and now returning cured to the firing-line—that Germany is beaten in advance. He arrived here on August 30th, three days after Dutrex, and the whole of Germany in the fort, from the commissariat captain down to the last _Gemeiner_ (the commandant, whose conduct towards us has throughout been a model of courtesy, always excepted), set to work forthwith to din into his ears, “Paris _kaput_”—literally translated, “Paris pulverized.” For a whole fortnight this was the refrain. When the quartermaster, an ill-natured beast, stupid and uncouth, came down to the kitchens, his way of saying good-day was to laugh maliciously as he announced a new _kaput_: Verdun _kaput_; Rheims _kaput_; Manonviller _kaput_! Even the _Verpflegsoffizier_, Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Weidner, of the Prinz Ludwig regiment, a Nuremberg merchant with a lofty air, very erect, much mustachioed, with frank blue eyes, did not disdain, from time to time, to unfold ostentatiously among the stoves, under the noses of Dutrex and Durupt, copies of the _Nürnberger Zeitung_ and the _Münchener Neueste Nachrichten_ with headlines screaming victory. These were their happy days. The gateway leading to the open was black on Sundays with a gaping crowd: townsfolk in their Sunday best, wearing cocks’ feathers in their green felt hats; rich farmers’ wives trying to look comfortable in hats; swarms of children, for the most part bare-footed; peasants in ill-fitting ready-made clothes; pathetic village dames, clad as in Dürer’s pictures, the head covered with a kerchief, a black fichu over the shoulders, a wadded corsage to fill out their figures. All these idlers, looking poverty stricken when compared with those of like class in France, would spend hour after hour staring at the “pantalons rouges,” occasionally shouting through the bars their eternal “Paris _kaput_,” the cry which had been reiterated from Dieuze to Strasburg, from Stuttgart to Ingolstadt, and with which our ears had been ringing since our capture. This foolish jubilation exasperated Durupt. He kept quiet about it for some days. At length, however, having recovered his spirits, he threw himself heart and soul into the task of keeping up our hopes.