I have just been weeping! After such a flood of miseries and abominable acts my heart over flows!
Now I pursue my sad story; and I will try never to forget that I am relating a true history, which everybody knows; which all the world has seen.
That same day, toward evening, several vans full of Alsacians, returning from Blamont, passed through our village to return home. The Prussians had obliged them to walk; their horses were nothing but bags of bones; and the people, emaciated, yellow-looking, had been so battered with blows, so famished with hunger, that they staggered at every step.
They had not received so much as a ration of bread on the whole journey; the Germans devoured everything! They would have seen our poor fellows—whom they had compelled to bear the burden of their baggage—they would have seen them drop with weariness and starvation before their eyes, without giving them a drop of water! But for our unhappy invaded Lorraine brothers, who fed them out of their own poverty, they would have perished, every one.
This is the truth! We experienced it ourselves not long afterward; for the same fate was reserved to us.
After the passage of these miserable creatures, to whom I gave a little bread—though we had scarcely any left, since the Germans, only two days before, had robbed us of twenty-seven loaves just fresh out of the oven—after this melancholy sight, we saw coming with a terrible clatter and ringing of sabres, one after the other, three Prussian aides-de-camp, who were announced to us; the first as a colonel, the second a general, and the third I cannot remember what—a duke, a prince, something of that kind!
It was the colonel whom I had the honor, as they called it, to entertain, Colonel Waller, of the 10th regiment of Silesian grenadiers; and then followed the general, who did me the honor to sup at my house at my expense. This man's name was Macha-Cowsky. They had the pleasure of informing us that that very night Phalsbourg was going to be thoroughly shelled. Those gentlemen are full of the greatest delicacy; they imagined that this good news was going to delight me, my wife, and my daughter!
The flag of the Silesian grenadiers was brought into the colonel's apartment. This regiment was arriving from the Austrian frontier; it had waited for the declaration of neutrality of the good Catholics down there, to come by rail and unite with the twelve army corps which were invading us with so much glory.
I learned this by overhearing their conversation.
That was a very bad night for us. The officers wanted to be waited on separately, one after the other; my poor wife was obliged to cook for them, to bring them plates—in a word, to be their servant; and Grédel, in spite of her indignation, was helping her mother, pale with passion and biting her lips to keep it down.