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Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told me, but her
musical studies were seriously interrupted by business and air raids,
which one day ceased in Amiens altogether after a night of horror,
when hundreds of houses were smashed to dust and many people killed,
and the Germans brought their guns close to the city--close enough to
scatter high velocities about its streets--and the population came up
out of their cellars, shaken by the terror of the night, and fled. I
passed the bookshop where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this
house which had escaped by greater luck than its neighbors. She turned
as I passed and raised her hand with a grave gesture of resignation
and courage. "Ils ne passeront pas!" she said. It was the spirit of
the courage of French womanhood which spoke in those words.


III

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three
Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the
British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right.


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