I was building up in my mind the historic meaning of the day. Before nightfall I should have to get it written--the spirit as well as the facts, if I could--in time for the censors and the despatch-riders. The facts? By many scraps of conversation with men and women in the streets I could already reconstruct pretty well the life of Lille in time of war. I found many of their complaints rather trivial. The Germans had wanted brass and had taken it, down to the taps in the washing-places. Well, I had seen worse horrors than that. They had wanted wool and had taken the mattresses. They had requisitioned all the wine but had paid for it at cheap rates. These were not atrocities. The people of Lille had been short of food, sometimes on the verge of starvation, but not really starved. They complained of having gone without butter, milk, sugar; but even in England these things were hard to get. No, the tragedy of Lille lay deeper than that. A sense of fear that was always with them. “Every time there was a knock at the door,” said one man, “we started up in alarm. It was a knock at our hearts.” At any time of the day or night they were subject to visits from German police, to searches, arrests, or orders to get out of their houses or rooms for German officers or troops. They were denounced by spies, Germans, or debased people of their own city, for trying to smuggle letters to their folk in other towns in enemy occupation, for concealing copper in hiding-places, for words of contempt against the Kaiser or the Kommandantur, spoken at a street-corner between one friend and another. That consciousness of being watched, overheard, reported and denounced, poisoned the very atmosphere of their lives, and the sight of the field-grey men in the streets, the stench of them--the smell was horrible when German troops marched back from the battlefields--produced a soul-sickness worse than physical nausea. I could understand the constant fret at the nerves of these people, the nagging humiliation,--they had to doff hats to every German officer who swaggered by--and the slow-burning passion of people, proud by virtue of their race, who found themselves controlled, ordered about, bullied, punished for trivial infractions of military regulations, by German officials of hard, unbending arrogance. That must have been abominable for so long a time; but as yet I heard no charges of definite brutality, or of atrocious actions by individual enemies. The worst I had heard was that levy of the women for forced labour in unknown places. One could imagine the horror of it, the cruelty of it to girls whose nerves were already unstrung by secret fears, dark and horrible imaginings, the beast-like look in the eyes of men who passed them in the streets. Then the long-delayed hope of liberation--year after year--the German boasts of victory, the strength of the German defence that never seemed to weaken, in spite of the desperate attacks