Close to me was a group of peasants⁠—a study for a painter like Millet. One of them shouted out to me, “ Voilà les Boches! ” waving his arm to left and right, and then shaking a clenched fist at them.

A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an open bodice munched an apple, like Audrey in As You Like It , and between her bites told me that she had had a brother killed in the war, and that she had been nearly killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came bursting all round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed to great holes in the field), and described the coming of the Germans into her village over there, when she had lied to some Uhlans about the whereabouts of French soldiers and had given one of those fat Germans a blow on the face when he had tried to make love to her in her father’s barn. Her mother had been raped.