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Now the English officers were lighting cigarettes in the
shelter of a wall, the outline of their features--knightly faces--
touched by the moonlight. There were flashes of gun-fire in the sky
beyond the river.
"A good night for a German air raid," said one of the officers.
"Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep," said the other
man.
The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their
shutters.


XIII

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the
rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice--a big,
grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways,
and above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her
scales. There was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of
French soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that
woman in stone. They used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of
steps, a tragic exhibition of war for passers-by to see. Many of them
revealed no faces, but were white masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round
their heads.


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