SHOULD SHE HAVE LIED?
In one little town near Clearmont we came in for a strange echo of war. A woman in a high cart drove past quickly. I was talking with a woman of the inn.
There was silence, then an outburst from the handsome Sibyl-faced hostess who had two sons at war. “Think of it,” she said; “three of our soldiers were chased from the fight at Creil. They took refuge with her. She is rich and has a garden. She hid them in a hayloft and threw their uniforms in the garden. The Germans came. They slept in her house.
“They said: ‘We are forced to fight; it is not of our seeking. The French attacked us.’
“They found the uniforms. They put a pistol to her breast.
“ ‘We will shoot you if you do not say where these soldiers are.’
“She cried: ‘In the loft.’
“They shot them all—three traitors—and it would have been so easy to lie.”
GERMAN CAVALRY AFOOT
The London Daily Express’s Paris correspondent says that the British captured seventeen howitzers and a number of smaller guns. The German cavalry losses were appalling. A captured German cavalry officer estimates the wastage of horses, especially in the Belgian campaign, at about two-thirds of the total allotted to the army operating in the direction of Paris.