Of course this was an abominable lie; but the Prussians are not afraid of lying.
That hussar—whose name I cannot remember, although I have often heard it from others—said besides, that, after having ridden a couple of hours through the forest of Elsashausen, he had fallen upon the village of Gundershoffen, where a few companies of French infantry had established themselves, and that he had surprised and massacred them all to the last man, without the loss of a single horseman!
Then he began to laugh again, saying that in war you often might have an agreeable time of it, and that this would be among his most cheerful reminiscences.
Hearing him from my seat behind the stove, I said: "And are these men called Christians? Why, they are worse than wolves! They would drink human blood out of skulls, and boast of it!"
They went on talking in this fashion, when a very young officer came to say that the defenders of Phalsbourg refused to surrender, and that they were going to shell the town, to set fire to it.
I could listen no longer. Grédel and my wife went to shut themselves in upstairs, and I went out to breathe a different air from these wild monsters.
It was raining still. I wanted fresh air—I should have liked to throw myself into the river with all my clothes on.
Fresh regiments were passing. Now it was white cuirassiers; they extended along the meadows below Metting; other regiments in dense masses advanced on Sarrebourg. Down there the bayonets and the helmets sparkled and glistened in the setting sun, in spite of the torrents of rain. It was easy to see that our unfortunate army of two hundred thousand men could not resist such a deluge.
But the three hundred thousand other soldiers that we should have had, and which we had been paying for the last eighteen years, where then were they? They were in the reports presented by the Ministers of War to the Legislative Assembly; and the money which should have paid for their complete equipment and their armament, that was in London, put down to his Majesty's account: the honest man, he had laid up savings.
All these Germans, encamped as far as the eye could see under the rain, were beginning to cut down our fruit-trees to warm themselves; in all directions our beautiful apple-trees, our pear-trees, still laden with fruit, came to the ground; then they were stripped bare, chopped to pieces, and burnt with the sap in them: the falling rain did not prevent the wood from lighting, on account of the quantity underneath which the fire dried at last.