"They went to look even in the church; they respect nothing, the brutes," she went on, forgetting her prudence, and, pointing to the picture of the Rheims Cathedral cut out of an illustrated paper, "This, Monsieur, was no human work. Men can construct churches, of course, and beautiful ones too, but the Cathedral was more than that; it was divine, and they have destroyed it. "They have shelled God's house," she said, "just because Germans are, and will always be, jealous of all that is beautiful and gentle and refined. I should not talk like this. I am too old to hate anybody, but I can't help it. I have been in Berlin ten years now, and I am afraid I will never see France again. Perhaps it is better so. I could not stand seeing the eagle where the tricolour was. But we must win; the world will never have peace until Germany is beaten." I tried to persuade her that this was also my opinion, and I got her to speak about the condition of the foreigners in Berlin. "I don't know about the others," she said, "but the French are having an awful time of it." "Have they been put into Concentration Camp?" I asked. "No; only the young fellows are detained, and they are, I believe, the most fortunate. A lot of French women and children are starving, as the fathers are refused work everywhere, and even the shopkeepers refuse to sell stuff to them." I waited for her to write the letter to her son, and I left the little bit of France in German territory with a sense of distress. The last words of the old lady were, "Walk out quickly, if you please; and don't stop outside the door. A polizist is generally there, and if you are seen walking out of this place there will probably be trouble for you." No polizist saw me leaving the presbytery; I walked down Iäger Strasse to the house of a well-known writer on military subjects, who holds a high position at the Embassy of a neutral Power in Berlin, and who was the only person who knew the reason of my visit. He was rather surprised at the way I managed to get on, and when I gave him my impressions he agreed on most points. "I believe," he said, "that the war will in a month's time or so assume a sort of defensive character as far as the Germans are concerned. They will occupy the whole of Belgium, and cover at the west a front strengthened with temporary fortification works like those which are being fully carried out at the back of the German fighting line. Then the war will assume a more careful character; I daresay the Kaiser will start economising the lives of his men, which he has freely spent up to now. The attempt to take Paris by storm with a daring march forward, _coute que coute_, which was not the plan of the German military command, but the Kaiser's, has completely failed."