THE “TERRIBLE” FRENCH!
This is a gala day. Company to lunch! The Tax-collector has walked here from a small town thirty miles away, en route for Aywaille, another twenty, where he intends to fetch his son from school.
“Quelle désastre que cette guerre,” is his opening remark as we fraternise over the vegetable soup.
I agree.
He draws something from his pocket and throws it across to me. It is a bullet. He shows me a large blister on his finger. “I was over-zealous for that keepsake this morning,” he says, laughing, “and tried to pick it up when it was red hot. There was a fight raging round my little house before I left. Picture to yourself a patrol of Uhlans breakfasting in the hotel-barn opposite. A company of French ride up and demand if the enemy is within. The innkeeper answers, trembling, ‘No.’ ‘The truth!’ thunder the Frenchmen, covering him with revolvers. He confesses. Mon Dieu! What a scene! The French force the innkeeper and his son to set fire to their own barn, and when at length the Germans come out, one by one, stifled with smoke, they calmly pot them off, as if they were so many rabbits. Stay! One Frenchman rushes in before the fire has done its work. He dies a moment later, shot through the heart. I found on him two letters, to his mother and his sweetheart. Such letters!”
“The French are very brave,” I say.
“I tell you they fight—not like men but—comme les démons. They don’t ride up as the Uhlans do. They just ‘appear’ like lightning or earthquake or any other phenomenon and then—phew—le déluge.”
“Every German who comes in here says that the Belgians have cut off the ears and gouged out the eyes of their wounded before Liège,” I say. “We on our side are horrified at the tale of German atrocities. Each time a German enters this village we feel that the tragedy of Visé may be enacted over again.”
The Tax-collector shrugs his shoulders as he fingers a cigarette.
“You must remember it is against the rules of warfare for non-combatants to fire,” he murmurs.
“Have they?”
He flicks an infinitesimal spot of dust from the table-cloth, and does not answer me.
Yet if one’s country be invaded who shall say that one may not avail oneself of any means to oust the hated foe?
The nostalgia of war seizes me. I know a country where such things could not be. Shall I ever see England, dear England again? Involuntarily I breathe the words aloud. The Tax-collector leans across to me and speaks firmly but very gently as one would address a tired child, “You will never see England again, never, Mademoiselle. Make up your mind to that.”
I scrape my chair back along the wooden boards and rise in a flurry because “it is so hot, so hot”—and escape to my room to dream of what might have been but never can be now——