The priest’s eyes grew sombre. “Many women suffered abominable things. I thank God that so many kept their pride, and their honour. There were, no doubt, some bad men and women in the city--disloyal, venal, weak, sinful--may God have mercy on their souls--but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of Lille.” Pierre Nesle had listened to that monologue with a visible and painful emotion. He became pale and flushed by turns, and when the priest spoke about the forcible recruitment of the women a sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief. I see his face now in profile, sharply outlined against some yellowing folios in a bookcase behind him, a typical Parisian face in its sharpness of outline and pallid skin, with a little black moustache above a thin, sensitive mouth. Before I had seen him mostly in gay moods--though I had wondered sometimes at the sudden silences into which he fell and at a gloom which gave him a melancholy look when he was not talking, or singing, or reciting poetry, or railing against French politicians, or laughing, almost hysterically, at the satires of Charles Fortune--our “funny man”--when he came to our mess. Now he was suffering as if the priest’s words had probed a wound--though not the physical wound which had nearly killed him in Souchez Wood. He stood up from the wooden chair with its widely-curved arms in which he had been sitting stiffly, and spoke to the priest. “It is not amusing, _mon père_, what you tell us, and what we have all guessed. It is one more chapter of tragedy in the history of our poor France. Pray God the war will soon be over.” “With victory!” said the old priest. “With an enemy beaten and bleeding beneath our feet. The Germans must be punished for all their crimes, or the justice of God will not be satisfied.” There was a thrill of passion in the old man’s voice and his nostrils quivered. “To all Frenchmen that goes without saying,” said Pierre Nesle. “The Germans must be punished, and will be, though no vengeance will repay us for the suffering of our _poilus_--nor for the agony of our women behind the lines, which perhaps was the greatest of all.” The Abbé Bourdin put his claw-like old hands on the young man’s shoulders and drew him closer and kissed his Croix de Guerre. “You have helped to give victory,” he said. “How many Germans have you killed? How many, eh?” He spoke eagerly, chuckling, with a kind of childish eagerness for good news. Pierre Nesle drew back a little and a faint touch of colour crept into his face, and then left it whiter. “I did not count corpses,” he said. He touched his left side and laughed awkwardly. “I remember better that they nearly made a corpse of me.” There was a moment’s silence, and then my friend spoke in a casual kind of way.