mill-wheel hung in the stream. Everything else was as flat as your dinner-table.     

       “Was this what you were trying to see from that rise?” I asked; and I saw a tear or two running down his face.     

       “They were the kindest people: their only son got himself shot the first month in Champagne—”      

       He had jumped out of the car and was standing staring at the level waste.       “The house was there—there was a splendid lime in the court. I used to sit under it and have a glass of vin cris de Lorraine with the old people.... Over there, where that cinder-heap is, all their children are buried.” He walked across to the grave-yard under a blackened wall—a bit of the apse of the vanished church—and sat down on a grave-stone. “If the devils have done this here—so close to us,” he burst out, and covered his face.     

       An old woman walked toward us down the road. Réchamp jumped up and ran to meet her. “Why, Marie Jeanne, what are you doing in these ruins?” The old woman looked at him with unastonished eyes. She seemed incapable of any surprise. “They left my house standing. I’m glad to see Monsieur,” she simply said. We followed her to the one house left in the waste of stones. It was a two-roomed cottage, propped against a cow-stable, but fairly decent, with a curtain in the window and a cat on the sill. Réchamp caught me by the arm and pointed to the door-panel. “Oberst von Scharlach” was scrawled on it. He turned as white as your table-cloth, and hung on to me a minute; then he spoke to the old woman. “The officers were quartered here: that was the reason they spared your house?”      

       She nodded. “Yes: I was lucky. But the gentlemen must come in and have a mouthful.”      

       Réchamp’s finger was on the name. “And this one—this was their commanding officer?”      

       “I suppose so. Is it somebody’s name?” She had evidently never speculated on the meaning of the scrawl that had saved her.     

       “You remember him—their captain? Was his name Scharlach?” Réchamp persisted.     

       Under its rich weathering the old woman’s face grew as pale as his. “Yes, that was his name—I heard it often enough.”      

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