The frightened eyes closed in evident relief. The man seemed to sleep.
“But you?” I asked.
“I’m German—a soldier,” he said.
“Lost?”
“Missing.” He used the German word vermisst—the word employed in the official lists of losses to designate the wounded or dead who are not recovered, and those lost by capture or desertion.
“You understand, Baas?”
“No, monsieur.”
“He says he is a German soldier—a deserter, I suppose, trying to make his way over the frontier to Holland. And he is starving.”
The Baas’s face became a battleground of emotions. His kindly eyes glared merrily, his lips twisted until his beard seemed to spread to twice its natural width. Instantly his face became grave again, then puzzled, even anxious. A stream of invective and imprecation in mingled French and Flemish poured from his troubled lips, and he stamped his feet vigorously.
“He can’t stay here,” I concluded.