“Stay in your room then.”
Stay in my room, indeed, when ten, twenty times a day my help is sought in smoothing over difficulties, interpreting orders for the enemy or the peasants. A likely plan!
A Cuirassier speaks of himself and the family he never expects to see again.
“My five brothers are all serving in the army,” he says, “the sixth is a prisoner in Russia. My two sisters’ husbands are soldiers too. My father an engineer, aged sixty-five and in weak health, has also been compelled to come forward and serve his country. My mother was like that when we came away,” he passes the back of his hand across his eyes.
I begin to pity the German women nearly as much as I pity the Belgian peasants. But then the former have suffered no atrocities—as yet.
MAPS AND MINES
One day I ask the Cuirassier why he has no markings on his shoulder straps. He coughs, blushes, then unbuttons one and turns it back to show a large N. surmounted by an Imperial crown embroidered in blood red.
“The Czar was our Colonel, Fräulein,” he says, in the horrified accents usually reserved for the mention of the Prince of Darkness.
The fact does not seem to me so awful. I hide a smile.
“Many of the men tore the straps off their uniforms before they would go on active service,” he says seriously.