"A high officer arrived this same day (when she was prisoner) and said:
"'It is necessary to put to death the people here. They must be shot. This nation must disappear.'"
Monsieur Guilley of Nomeny told me how Charles Michel, a boy of seventeen, was killed. He said: "A patrol of scouts, composed of six Bavarians, said: 'We are going down there to kill, yes, kill all the people of Nomeny.'
"Arrived at Nomeny, they asked where the farm was. They then came along the side of the farm where there was a little door. Three entered there, the other three came around by the big door. We were ready for supper, sitting around a table. We heard blows on blows of the bayonets before the doors, with cries and exclamations in German. They came into the place where we were sitting to eat, and placed themselves facing us, with nothing to say. They took all that they wanted from the table. Five of them left, going by a way in front of the farm. The sixth stayed there, ruminating and thinking. I believed that he was meditating to himself a crime, but I thought to myself, 'They wouldn't kill a man as they would kill a rabbit.'
"We went into the kitchen. The man was always there. I closed the door. Two men of my farm were eating in the kitchen. Now, from the kitchen leading into the stable there was a door. The little Michel went out by this door. He did not see the German who was there. The soldier fired at him. I heard the rifle shot go. Then I saw the man following the same way that the others had taken, to rejoin them at a trot."
"How long did he remain there thinking before he accomplished his crime?" we asked.
"Plenty long, a good quarter of an hour. He was a Bavarian, big and strong."
I find that strange racial brooding and melancholy in the diary of a sub-officer of the Landwehr. On September 3, 1914, he writes:
"It is well enough that Germany has the advantage everywhere up to the present; I am not able to conquer a singular impression, a presentiment that, in spite of all that, the end will be bad."