The Red Cross Barge by Marie Belloc Lowndes

After leaving the square, the Herr Doktor and Jeanne Rouannes found / every street and every alley barred. And though the uniform of the / 'Militaer-Arzt' generally opened a way without much difficulty, Max / Keller soon realised, with bitter, dumb self-reproach that he had wasted / priceless minutes in asking and in answering futile questions. Perhaps / because he had now spent a length of treasure-stored days in a country / where time means at once so very much more, and so very much less, than / it does in modern Germany, he was no longer in mental touch with the / type of human being created by the sinister amalgam of sentimental / idealism and military discipline.

To a German officer any waste of time, especially on active service, is / abhorrent, and during the half-hour the Herr Doktor and his companion / had spent in the square, Valoise had been rapidly divided into / districts, and the looting therein, as far as was possible, / systematised. Thus as soon as a certain number of marauders had been / allowed to go through into it, further entry to a street was barred; / and to the Herr Doktor there was something horribly grotesque in the / contrast between the sharp discipline enforced by the patrols who sealed / each thoroughfare, and the orgy of thieving and senseless destruction / which they were apparently set there to supervise and protect.