Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/108

 "O my God!" she said, "those devils have gone at last! What have they not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses—we were innkeepers—and last night they sent us to this part of the town and burnt all of them." She used a queer word in French. "Last night," she said, "they made a devil's charivari and set many houses on fire."

Her husband spoke to me over his wife's shoulder.

"Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down for four years. They are bandits and robbers."

"We are hungry," said the thin little girl.

By her side the boy, with a white pinched face, echoed her plaint.

"We have eaten our bread, and I am hungry."

They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with them, but I could not wait.

The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands.

"You will come back?" she asked.

"I will try," I said.

Then she wept again, and said:

"We are grateful to the English soldiers. It is they who saved us."

That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those last two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German machine-gun rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered many towns and villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people. I remember the girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their best frocks and clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a little while that we found they were starving and had not even a crust of bread in all the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of the girls were killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That was worse in St. Amand, by Valenciennes,