While as yet the evacuation had been a thing of the remote future, the people of St. Meuse had borne the yoke lightly, and indeed had, I believe, privily congratulated themselves on the substantial advantages in the way of money spent in the place and the immunity from taxation which were incidental to the foreign occupation. But as the day for the evacuation drew closer and closer, one became dimly conscious of an electrical condition of the social atmosphere which any trifle might stimulate into a thunderstorm. Blouses gathered and muttered about the street-corners, scowling at and elbowing the German soldiers as they strode to buy sausages to stay them in the homeward march. The gamins, always covertly insolent, no longer cloaked their insolence, and wagged little tricolour flags under the nose of the stolid German sentry on the Pont St. Croix. At the _table d'hôte_ the painful politeness of the German civilians had no effect in thawing the studied coldness of the French habitués.
As for myself, I was a neutral, and professing to take no side, flattered myself that I could keep out of the vortex of the soreness. Soon after my arrival at St. Meuse I had called upon the Mayor at his official quarters in the Hôtel de Ville, and had received civil speeches in return for civil speeches. Then I had left my card on General Manteuffel, with whom I happened to have a previous acquaintance; and those formal duties of a benevolent neutral having been performed I had held myself free to choose my own company. Circumstances had some time before brought me into familiar contact with very many German officers, and I had imbibed a liking for their ways and conversation, noisy as the latter is. Several of the officers then in St. Meuse had been personal acquaintances in other days and it was at once natural and pleasant for me to renew the intercourse. I was made an honorary member of the mess; I spent many hours in the officers' casino; I rode out with the officers of the squadron of Uhlans. All this was very pleasant; but as the day of the evacuation became close I noticed that the civility of the French captain of gendarmes grew colder, that the cordiality of the French habitués of the _table d'hôte_ visibly diminished, and that I encountered not a few unfriendly looks when I walked through the streets by myself. It began to dawn upon me that St. Meuse was getting to reckon me a German sympathiser, and as there was no half-way house, therefore not in accord with the emotions of France and St. Meuse.