Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/293

Rh clothing and straying to the edge of the coverlet. For the young girl's throat had been laid open by a sabre. But the stains and the agony hadn't driven from the pretty face a vague and helpless determination, very like the mother's.

“You see," the woman was saying, with a mechanical hoarseness, you cannot spend the night here."

With awkward and sympathetic gestures they slipped past her and quietly left that house. In the turbulence of the storm they read a welcome.

Like hotel espionage, the use of one's own people behind the enemy's line has two sides. During that visit to Rheims, I heard something there that made me ponder pretty uncomfortably. I knew there must be some explanation of the systematic destruction beyond the fact that the Germans had, for a short time, occupied the town. I remember questioning the cheerful little staff officer. He looked away.

"The bombardment," he said, is directed from within. Some of the Boches have remained. They direct the bombardment of their neighbours' homes. There have been many and there still are some Boche spies in Rheims. You see great quantities of Boches lived and worked here before the war."