Now the Prussian staff had taken up its quarters in this farm-house. The old peasant who owned it, Pere Milon Pierre, received them, and gave them the best treatment he could.
For a whole month the German vanguard remained on the look-out in the village. The French were posted ten leagues away without moving; and yet each night, some of the Uhlans disappeared.
All the isolated scouts, those who were sent out on patrol, whenever they started in groups of two or three, never came back.
They were picked up dead in the morning in a field, near a farm-yard, in a ditch. Their horses even were found lying on the roads with their throats cut by a saber-stroke. These murders seemed to have been accomplished by the same men, who could not be discovered.
The country was terrorized. Peasants were shot on mere information, women were imprisoned, attempts were made to obtain revelations from children by fear.
But, one morning, Pere Milon was found stretched in his stable, with a gash across his face.
Two Uhlans ripped open were seen lying three kilometers away from the farm-house. One of them still grasped in his hand his blood-stained weapon. He had fought and defended himself.
A council of war having been immediately constituted, in the open air, in front of the farm-house, the old man was brought before it.
He was sixty-eight years old. He was small, thin, a little crooked, with long hands resembling the claws of a crab. His faded hair, scanty and slight, like the down on a young duck, allowed his scalp to be plainly seen. The brown, crimpled skin of his neck showed the big veins which sank under his jaws and reappeared at his temples. He was regarded in the district as a miser and a hard man in business transactions.
He was placed standing between four soldiers in front of the kitchen table, which had been carried out of the house for the purpose. Five officers and the Colonel sat facing him. The Colonel was the first to speak.