When an officer was billeted on a house, he would insist on turning the family out of the dining room and drawing room and sleeping in the best bedroom; sometimes he would eject people entirely from their home.
By contrast the docile private soldier was almost a welcome guest. I remember well one quite friendly fellow who was lodged for some time in the same house as myself and some English over military age in the suburb of Croix. He came to me in great glee one day with a letter from his wife in which she warned him to beware of "the English cutthroats." She went on to give him a long series of instructions for his safety. He was to barricade his bedroom door every night, to sleep always with his knife under his pillow, and never to take anything we offered him to eat or drink.
Despite the temptations to crime and insubordination which naturally attend an idle manufacturing population of some 125,000 people, there were very few civilian offenses against the law, German or French, among the inhabitants of Roubaix.
Time hung heavily on our hands. Cut off from the outer world except by the occasional arrival of smuggled French and English newspapers, we spent our time reading and playing cards, and at the last I hoped I might never be reduced to this form of amusement again. In the two and a half years cut out of my life and completely wasted I played as many games of cards as will satisfy me for the rest of my existence.
[Sidenote: The gendarmerie called "Green devils."]
But even if the inhabitants, in their enforced idleness, had any temptation to be insubordinate, they had a far greater inducement to keep the law in the bridled savagery of the German gendarmerie. These creatures, who from the color of their uniform and the brutality of their conduct were known as the "green devils," seemed to revel in sheer cruelty. They scour the towns on bicycles and the outlying districts on horseback, always accompanied by a dog as savage as his master, and at the slightest provocation or without even the slenderest pretext they fall upon civilians with brutish violence.
It was not uncommon for one of these men to chase a woman on his bicycle, and when he had caught her, batter her head and body with the machine. Many times they would strike women with the flat of their sabres. One of them was seen to unleash his dog against an old woman, and laugh when the savage beast tore open the woman's flesh from thigh to knee.