municate with his comrades. Unfortunately for my ease of mind, there were no comrades present with whom I could have conversed in this way. Miller was within 500 metres and saw me all the time, although I did not know this until later.

Talbott's instructions were, ‘If you get lost, go home' - somewhat ambiguous. I knew that my course to the aerodrome was southwest. At any rate, by flying in that direction I was certain to land in France. But with German gunners so keen on the baptism-of-fire business, I had been turning in every direction, and the floating disc of my compass was revolving first to the right, then to the left. In order to let it settle, I should have to fly straight for some fixed point for at least half a minute. Under the circumstances I was not willing to do this. A compass which would point north immediately and always would be a heaven-sent blessing to the inexperienced pilot during his first few weeks at the front. Mine was saying north-northwest

west-southwest-south-southeast-east- and after a moment of hesitation reading off the points in the reverse order. The wind was blowing into Germany, and unconsciously, in trying to find a way out of the éclatements, I was getting farther and farther away from home and coming within range of additional batteries of hostile anti-aircraft guns.

I might have landed at Karlsruhe or Cologne, had it not been for Miller. My love for concentric circles of red, white, and blue dates from the moment when I saw the French cocarde on his Spad.

'And if I had been a Hun!' he said, when we landed at the aerodrome. 'O man! you were fruit salad! fruit salad, I tell you! I could have speared you with my eyes shut.'

I resented the implication of defense

lessness. I said that I was keeping my eye open, and if he had been a Hun, the fruit salad might not have been so palatable as it looked.

"Tell me this. Did you see me?'

I thought for a moment, and then said, 'Yes.'

'When?'

'When you passed over my head.'

'And twenty seconds before that you would have been a sieve if either of us had been a Boche.'

I yielded the point to save further argument.

He had come swooping down fairly suddenly. When I saw him making his way so saucily among the éclatements I felt my confidence returning in increasing waves. I began to use my head, and found that it was possible to make the German gunners guess badly. There was no menace in the sound of shells barking at a distance, and we were soon clear of all of them.

J. B. took me aside the moment I had landed. He had one of his fur boots in his hand and was wearing the other. He had also lighted the cork end of his cigarette. To one acquainted with his magisterial orderliness of mind and habit, these signs were eloquent.

'Now keep this quiet!' he said. 'I don't want the others to know it, but I've just had the adventure of my life. I attacked a German. Great Scott! what an opportunity! and I bungled it through being too eager!'

'When was this?'

'Just after the others dove. You remember

I told him, briefly, of my experience, adding, 'And I did n't know there was a German in sight until I saw the smoke of the tracer bullets.'

'Neither did I, only I did n't see even the smoke.'

This cheered me immensely. 'What! you did n't!'

'No. I saw nothing but sky where

the others had disappeared. I was looking for them when I saw the German. He was about four hundred metres below me. He could n't have seen me, I think, because he kept straight on. I dove, but did n't open fire until I could have a nearer view of his black crosses. I wanted to be sure. I had no idea that I was going so much faster. The first thing I knew I was right on him. Had to pull back on my stick to keep from crashing into him. Up I went and fell into a nose-dive. When I came out of it there was no sign of the German, and I had n't fired a shot!'

'Did you come home alone?'

'No, I had the luck to meet the others just afterward. Now not a word of this to any one!'

But there was no need for secrecy. The near combat had been seen by both Talbott and Porter. At luncheon we came in for our share of ragging.

'You should have seen them following us down!' said Porter; 'like two old rheumatics going into the subway. We saw them both when we were taking height again. The scrap was all over hours before, and they were still a thousand metres away.'

'You want to dive vertically. Need n't worry about your old 'bus. She'll stand it.'

'Well, the Lord has certainly protected the innocent to-day!'

'One of them was wandering off into Germany. Bill had to waggle Miller to page him.'

'And there was Drew, going down on that biplane we were chasing. I've been trying to think of one wrong thing he might have done which he did n't do. First he dove with the sun in his face, when he might have had it at his back. Then he came all the way in full view, instead of getting under his tail. Good thing the mitrailleur was firing at us. After that, when he had the

chance of a lifetime, he fell into a vrille and scared the life out of the rest of us. I thought the gunner had turned on him. And while we were following him down to see where he was going to splash, the Boche got away.'

All this happened months ago, but every trifling incident connected with our first patrol is still fresh in mind. And twenty years from now, if I chance to hear the 'Chanson sans Parole,' or if I hum to myself a few bars of a ballad, then sure to be long forgotten by the world at large, ‘O movin' man, don't take ma baby grand!' I shall have only to close my eyes, and wait passively. First Tiffin will come with the lighted candle: 'Beau temps, monsieur.' I shall hear Talbott shouting, 'Rendezvous two thousand over field. If-get lost-better- home.' J.B. will rush up smoking the cork end of a cigarette. 'I've just had the adventure of my life!' And Miller, sitting on an essence-case, will have lost none of his old conviction. 'O man! you were fruit salad! fruit salad, I tell you! I could have speared you with my eyes shut!'

And in those days, happily, still far off, there will be many another old graybeard with such memories; unless they are all to wear out their days uselessly regretting that they are no longer young, there must be clubs where they may exchange reminiscences. These need not be pretentious affairs. Let there be a strong odor of burnt castor oil and gasoline as you enter the door; a wide view from the verandahs of earth and sky; maps on the walls; and on the roof a canvas 'pantaloon-leg' to catch the wind. Nothing else very much matters. There they will be as happy as any old airman can expect to be, arguing about the winds and disputing each other's judgment about the height of the clouds.

If you say to one of them, "Tell us

something about the great war,' as likely as not he will tell you a pleasant story enough. And the pity of it will be that, hearing the tale, a young man will long for another war. Then you must say to him, 'But what about the

shell-fire? Tell us something of machines falling in flames.' Then, if he is an honest old airman whose memory is still unimpaired, the young one who has been listening will have sober second thoughts.

LIFE in the invaded provinces of France, during the years 1914 and 1915, remained under a pall of mystery and silence; one would have said that that strip of our territory had fallen into an abyss, so rigorously did the Germans keep our compatriots in secret durance. It was not until after a year of this seclusion that some repatriated persons began to emerge at first, at rare intervals, then in frequent batches; but in what a state of pallid exhaustion! Let this one physical fact suffice: all of them without exception, even in 1916, had lost a fifth, a fourth, or a third of their weight. They all looked as if they had escaped from a torture chamber. Morally they are unconquered, all quivering alike with indignation and contempt for the barbarians; or, if there are some who prefer to hold their peace, they do it only from excess of inward horror, and in this way give voice, perhaps, to an even more tragic protest.

Indeed, as we shall see, the German tyranny does not consist simply in an exorbitant application of the dogma of might. It has special mortifications, peculiar to the race, which make it even more painful, if that is possible. It is not inspired solely by the systematic

despotism and immorality cynically adopted by Germany; it is not a pure, unadulterated application of any doctrine: it springs from a genuine lack of morality, and from a well-spring of vicious animalism, which psychologists have so often detected in the German blood.

Not that I am so foolish as to hold that all Germans are low, malignant, and brutal; but it can be said without hesitation that such is, generally speaking, their psychical type, more or less emphasized; that such are their racial characteristics, as appears from innumerable facts gathered from the lips of our repatriates of every locality.

I

One of the most amazing manifestations of the Germanic spirit, in invaded France, is the compulsory salutation which the officers impose upon all males, and, by a refinement of tyranny, upon the women and girls. Even in ancient Latium, at the Caudine Forks, only the men were made to pass under the yoke, and that but once. But the Teuton, in his insensibility to human dignity, is never weary of trampling

upon other men's souls and of treating man like a beast of the field.

This enforced tragi-comic salute to the invaders and intruders naturally wounded to the quick the high sense of their own dignity and of the truth characteristic of Frenchmen. Resistance appeared on all sides. Force was necessary to gratify a caprice that Gessler might have delighted in. At Noyon, at Vergnier, in hundreds of places, those who infringed the regulation were thrown into jail. Sexagenarian priests who had neglected to bare their heads before sub-lieutenants were dragged away to prison beyond the Rhine. Officers did not blush to horsewhip passersby who did not salute them, or who did not bow low enough. At Étreux a blind man was struck by a colonel whom he could not see.

Above all, the salute extorted from women displays to the full an innate vulgarity peculiar to the German. We recall our own Louis XIV, always the first to salute the women in his service, absolute master as he was. Our secular French tradition of courtesy and chivalry rises in revolt. But nothing is more German than to lay the heavy hand of oppression on women. Why, at SaintQuentin, in 1915, an elderly woman, in her terrified haste to salute an officer and make way for him on the sidewalk, fell and broke her leg. Sometimes this female salute is elaborated; women are compelled to smile when bowing. These anxious and grief-stricken women, torn from their husbands and children and brothers, these women who are robbed and whose homes are constantly searched and tossed and turned over like the bedding of cattle, are commanded to smile upon the invaders!

II

It is not the salute alone which shows us the Germans engaged in actively

persecuting women. In September, 1914, the troops constantly pointed their guns at Frenchwomen to force them to wait upon them; the officers as constantly had their revolvers in their hands. In the districts where game is abundant, girls, whatever their station in life, act as beaters when the officers hunt, and those who refuse are imprisoned in a cellar three days for each such refusal.

The period of actual assaults has passed, but there remains the pleasant pastime of frightening young girls by discharging firearms at close range, and firearms held in whose hands-in those of the assassins of Tamines and Dinan!

Since January 1, 1917, the civil mobilization has exhibited this female slavery in all its hideousness. Even before that the women had been forced to wait upon the officers at table, and to wash their linen. The German authorities had already laid upon them all possible tasks taking no account of social position or of physical strength. Middle-class women of Lille and La Fère were sent to dig potatoes a hundred kilometres from their homes. The widow of a French colonel killed in action was in turn chambermaid and farm laborer in Germany. In the region about Laon one could see women working under the lash. Worse still, they are sent out to work in close proximity to the firing-line, where the Germans themselves find it unsafe to go. Or again, when aircraft are passing over, the women are forbidden to leave their work, while their keepers run to cover. Mrs. Edith Wharton even saw elderly women whose arms or legs Boche officers had broken with their sabres.

The harassing and insulting of women take also another turn. Women and girls of good social position are compelled to undress on the pretext of search or medical examinations. The

German has no respect for girls; he has torn them from their families by thousands. Nor does he respect maternity: in 1915, the wife of the mayor of Le Catelet, sentenced to three months confinement for not making known her husband's presence in her house, was separated from the infant she was nursing and led away between two policemen. In many places mothers were torn from their children in arms, from sobbing and desperate little girls, who threw themselves on their knees without avail.

III

From what has gone before it will be seen that the nation that deceives,' as Nietzsche himself called his compatriots, is at the same time the nation that degrades, the nation that tramples at pleasure upon all the laws of civilization, of justice, and of honor, and drags in the gutter all things of spiritual worth, everything that lifts us above the beasts of the field.

In their souls, no less than in their flesh and blood, do these Germans exert themselves to wound the helpless French. They have cast off all restraint in this respect. Passing over the merely humiliating measures, which are constantly being added to, such, for example, as transforming the school-boys of Saint-Quentin into street-sweepers,

we may mention the method of requisitioning copper and iron, which was adopted in our northern towns. Each inhabitant was required to deliver his metal personally at the Kommandantur. In vain did the mayors implore them to spare the bleeding patriotism of the French, asking them to strip the houses, themselves, of all their copper and iron, but to relieve Frenchmen from the hateful necessity of carrying to the enemy with their own hands materials with which to sow death in the ranks of their brethren. At Lille, a

retired officer of 1870 vainly invoked his past career to those Huns. Pointing to his gray hair, he called his persecutors to witness that in requiring him to surrender his copper to their munition factory, they required him to surrender his honor and to belie his whole life. Taken to jail as a rebel, he fell dead on the threshold, suffocated with indignation.

Thus far we have dealt only with the method of requisition. What shall we say of the requisition itself, and, worse yet, of the enforced labor of our people upon German munitions. In very truth, the enrollment of captive Frenchmen in the enemy munition factories has enlarged the confines of human degradation. French and Belgians who refused to lay aside their moral obligations have been deprived of food, or have been immersed for hours at a time, in winter, in pools of ice-cold water, or bound to trees and flogged, until they were changed into mere beasts of burden.

Let no one believe that such enslavement of captives is an inevitable consequence, a new and rigorous law of war. No, it is a German decree, an outward manifestation of their innate materialism, their faint notion of conscience and human dignity.

The Germans also impose upon the French the dishonoring obligation of informing upon one another. Many mayors were sentenced to years of imprisonment in German fortresses for having neglected to denounce the mobilized men of their communes.

It is as if one were looking on at a general proscription of souls which are being hunted down on all sides. The barbarians carry their outrages so far as to cast obloquy upon our reverence for our dead. Not content with erecting over the charnel-houses of the battlefield carved monuments insulting to our gallant troops, they even profane