Sometimes he moaned gently. He sat like this all day, refusing to talk to anybody, or to eat anything, or to be comforted. The farmer's wife told us that the day before a shell had hit his cottage and killed his horse. He was the village carrier. The horse was perhaps as old as himself--as horses' years are measured--still it had been his companion and means of livelihood, and now it was taken from him. He could not understand it all--why the shell had come to wreck his home and kill his horse. He just sat there moaning and staring before him. We turned away. Neither we nor the farmer's wife could do anything. But with the weeping woman at the table it might be different. The farmer's wife thought that we, being British officers, could do something. She brought the woman up to us and she told us her tale. Her husband, it seemed, had been hit by a bullet while working in his field. He now lay out there wounded. She could not say she was sure if he was dead, but could we go and get him in. They had fired at her when she tried to go out to him. It was terrible to feel he was still lying there. We asked where the field was and then looked at each other helplessly. It lay in no man's land, between ours and the German lines. Perhaps at night, but for the rest of the day, no--we could do nothing. While we were drinking our soup two more refugees came in: a broken-looking middle-aged peasant, with red-rimmed eyes and thin shambling legs, and his wife. He was clinging round his wife's neck, tears pouring from the red-rimmed eyes. He, too, like the old peasant by the stove, was speechless; his wife told us that the Germans had taken him and made him march in front of them for three days. She repeated the words "_trois jours_," her voice shaking with passion. The farmer's wife set the couple at the table and gave them soup from the pot. I wondered that she, too, did not join in the general weeping; but she went quietly and sadly about her work, saying little, giving food and drink to the afflicted people who had come to her kitchen, tending her pots and pans and fire. She asked no questions about the enemy, where they were or when we should drive them from the farm. She showed no signs of the night of terror she must have passed as the fight raged about her house. It was as though she stood for the spirit of France, proud to suffer for her country, confident in the prowess of her men, and patient and undoubting that they would succeed.