She points with shaking finger to the wayside crucifix from which the Christ looks down with infinite patience. He also has been miraculously preserved. He gazes still over His tiny sanctuary, now but two blackened, battered walls. The vicarage has disappeared as though in an earthquake. The incendiary tablets have done their work well. The little garden with its pretty rose trees has been ploughed up, it would seem, by giant shares.
Stay, in one corner, down by the brook, there is planted a rough wooden cross.
The old curé had refused to leave his post when the stream of refugees had passed through. They told him of the horror behind them. He stood firm. Jeannette, too, would stay with her uncle.
They came. The curé, they said, must be a spy left behind by the French troops. Besides, he had carrier-pigeons. "What need have we of further witnesses?"
And so they tied him against the stem of his pigeon-cote. He met his death as a gallant gentleman of France.
The girl. Ah, young and tender! Good sport for the plucking! First let her bury the old man. "Rather hard work using a spade when you're not used to it, isn't it?—Done? Good, now get us dinner."
After dinner, a dance—Eastern slave fashion. First, good sport for the officers. "When we have finished throw her to the men."
What need to tell the horrors of it? The village marked the ebb of the tide. The French and British had turned at last. Hurried orders came to retire at dawn. The girl had not been such good sport after all—fainted too easily.
A leering, drunken satyr slashes at her naked breasts with his bayonet and Jeannette falls dead over the threshold. The house is fired, the body is pitched on to the pyre.
One village in France? No, one of a hundred where such things were done. And this is almost as nothing beside such as this England of ours has, by God's gracious mercy, been spared. What does England know of this war?