where all the women and children took refuge in the cellars. The German batteries opened fire with Yellow Cross shell as our guns passed through. Some of our men, and many of their horses, lay dead in the streets as I passed through; but worse things happened in the cellars below the houses. The heavy gas of the Yellow Cross shells filtered down to where the women and their babies cowered on their mattresses. They began to choke and gasp, and babies died in the arms of dying mothers. . . . Dr. Small, our American, went with a body of English doctors and nurses to the rescue of St. Amand. "I've seen bad things," he told me. "I am not weak in the stomach—but I saw things in those cellars which nearly made me vomit."
He put a hand on my shoulder and blinked at me through his glasses.
"It's no good cursing the Germans. As soon as your troops entered the village they had a right to shell. That's war. We should do the same. War's war. I've been cursing the Germans in elaborate and eccentric language. It did me good. I feel all the better for it. But all the same I was wrong. It's war we ought to curse. War which makes these things possible among civilised peoples. It's just devilry. Civilised people must give up the habit. They must get cured of it. You have heard of typhoid-carriers? They are people infected with the typhoid microbe who spread the disease. When peace comes we must hunt down the war-carriers, isolate them, and, if necessary, kill them."
He waved his hand to me and went off in an ambulance filled with suffocated women.
I met Brand in Valenciennes five days after our liberation of the city, when our troops were making their formal entry with band and banners. He came up to me and said, "Have you heard the news?" I saw by his
