I comply. I even graciously ask them to feel my hair. They both do so. They are satisfied.
I show some notes to the English-speaking lady and fervently hope their unspeakable stupidity will convince her of my innocence.
The Bourgmestre’s wife looks pleased. I admire her beauty, her fine air of courage. If they only hadn’t such a dreadful sense of duty, these Teutons.
“Es ist unsere pflicht,” they say.
She would have shot me herself, without a tremor, but she will be glad, I believe, if my innocence is proved.
HOMEWARD BOUND
A little procession of housewives arrives at the town hall late at night. I see them through the chinks of the door from the room where I lie. “We have given our all to the troops,” they say, “we have nothing to eat.”
“Nothing to eat.” So the German haus-frau can be just as compassionate as the Belgian peasant. I go to sleep in a comfortable bed, locked-in prisoner though I am, and dream sweeter dreams than I ever enjoyed in the little Ardennois village.
At four in the morning I am told to get up. My door is unlocked and I am taken to the dining-room where the kind Bourgmestre’s wife gives me breakfast. Her husband is in uniform. After surrendering me to the authorities at Cologne he will rejoin his regiment. The wife speaks to me with tears running down her cheeks as if I were an old friend. “It is so hard, so very hard, Fräulein, that he must go. What will happen to me and my three little ones?”
On the just or the unjust side, in war as in life, it is always the woman who pays....