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of politics—that is not our affair.” He picked up a paper. “This invoice from Mensonnier—I will not pay for crates. Mensonnier knows that. See the accountant, and have that crossed off.”
    It was not altogether easy for Duchene to free his mind from politics, in spite of his preoccupation with the factory. He had lived and worked in Corbeil for over forty years, since he had come into his father’s business as a lad. In that forty years, inevitably since he was the managing director of the largest business in the town, he had become associated with a variety of local charities and enterprises, most of which were now in difficulties and troubles. He cared little enough for most of them; in the changed times they must adjust themselves. He could not free his mind, however, from the affairs of the St. Xavier Asile des Vieux at Château Lebrun.
    Château Lebrun was a village about five miles from Corbeil, and Duchene was a trustee of the Asile des Vieux. The asylum was an organisation with a religious flavour, partly supported by a subsidy from the municipality of Corbeil, partly by local charity, and partly by small sums extracted from the relatives of the occupants. The Vieux were of both sexes and many ofthem were feeble-minded, all being sixty years old or more. It was a useful and on the whole a kindly institution, which collected destitute and unwanted aged people from a wide area of country and saw them unhurried to the end.
    About seventy of them were accommodated in wards in a big, rectangular stone building on the outskirts of the village. The land was flat about Château Lebrun, and suitable for a dispersal aerodrome: a fact that the Germans were quick to grasp. They took the building as a barrack for the air mechanics. The Maître d’Asile came early to the Maire and to Duchene for help, and Duchene rang up the Commission of Control, only to get a short answer. The building was required for military purposes. The inmates would be moved by the German Field Ambulance Service; it was not permitted for civilians to accompany them. All asylums in the occupied zone were to be cleared, and the inmates would be accommodated in the Vichy area. Relatives would be told the new address in a few days.
    So the old people were removed, feebly protesting, in a convoy of field ambulances. Thereafter nothing happened. Most of the relatives dismissed the matter from their minds; they had seldom been to see
Grand-mère
and had more important matters now to think about. A few became insistent and began to bother the Commission of Control with demands for the new address. One by one these received an intimation, with regrets, that the person in question had succumbed to the fatigue of the journey.
    One by one they came to Duchene, at his house or in his office at the factory.
    Worried, he went to the Commission and got a sharp rebuff. Such things were apt to happen, in their view. They could not tell him the location of the new asylum yet; in due course an information would come through. In the meantime, he would kindly not waste the time of German officers with trivialities, but attend to the manufacture of cement.
    Anxious, and a little frightened, he began to make enquiries of his own. The manager of a large industry invariably has ways of getting information which are not available to ordinary men, and in the concrete business Duchene’s influence spread wide. Gradually, in bits and pieces, the truth came to him. The old people had got no farther towards Vichy than the German hospital at Sézanne. There all had died by hypodermic as they lay strapped upon the stretchers in the cars, and had been thrust into a common grave with lime, on the same night.
    Shamefaced, white, and shaken, the old man blurted it outto Simon in the office late one night. “One does not know how to behave now,” he muttered. “One does not know how to address a German officer. It is the act of barbarians, that. Even the beasts, the animals, do not