This morning there was excitement at the Convent; someone was reading a three weeks' old journal to the soldiers and for a moment everybody forgot his particular aches and black heads lifted themselves from their pillows and gaunt forms swayed to and fro on shaky elbows. The lust of battle lit up wooden countenances, fire sprang from eyes yet heavily veiled by crusted lids and a fervent "bien fait" or "vivent les Belges," trembled from heretofore silent corners.

Madame AndrÉ, who comes to see her boy every day, remarked my looking at her dress which was all darned and mended in the most unaccountable places, "O, Mademoiselle," she said. "I suppose you are wondering about my waist? But wasn't it lucky I was here with AndrÉ when the troops passed through our village? The soldiers fired haphazard in the windows and the wardrobe in which my clothes were hanging caught seven bullets and the headboard of my bed, four."

All the afternoon troops were coming back from Namur in evident haste and apparent rout, for they had such a tired, bedraggled look. About five o'clock a company with ammunition wagons, Red Cross ambulances and baggage trucks dashed madly into the orchard among the apple trees, nearly wrecking themselves and everything else. Immediately after, three officers came to the house to beg lodging for the night. They were frightful-looking individuals covered with mud and dirt, with half-grown beards and one could not tell what uniforms. They asked the most humble apartment—a corner, the floor—anything, "and, Madame, a little hot water, s'il vous plait." We were sitting on the terrace tonight just before dinner when down came the three new arrivals, beautiful as the morning, shaven and shining in their gray-green uniforms, polished boots and bracelets set with precious stones—officers of the "Emperor's Own," though these men did not seem like Germans, but were much more the lighter build and elegant type of the Austrians.

They were a bit haughty at first, but dinner thawed them out and then what tales they told us; the most promising imagination could not rival their flights in the air. They acted like people who walk in their sleep and had that same vague expression of the eye. But it is not to be wondered at, coming as they did from a frightful battlefield and fatigued by a hard march. It must be true that battle intoxicates men for these latter, being of a sensible age, did say very ridiculous things. Hitherto the officers who have been here were fairly modest though always showing an undeniable confidence, while these three openly bragged. The young lieutenant who sat next to me spoke French fluently and never stopped talking all the evening. Among countless other things, he said, "We are being sent back from Namur as Paris is taken" (ejaculation from me "I cannot believe it") "and they have no more need of us in that direction," he went on without turning a hair. "So we are en route for England or Russia, in the morning, to conquer the seven nations (he included Monaco in the list) who have declared war against our beloved Vaterland."

"And, Mademoiselle," he continued, "they fired on our ambulances!"

"Ah?" I answered, nonchalantly, "the Germans have already done that here."

He was a bit taken aback at this rejoinder; then with a prodigiously sorrowful look he exclaimed in a hushed voice, "Oui, la guerre est terrible."

The victories they exploited on land and sea were fantastic and the funny part is, they believed thoroughly all they said. It is strange to hear serious people fabricate such yarns as they did, with as much dexterity as a spider spins its web.