The maire resumed his dictation to the hypnotised clerk, while the officer sat astride a chair and executed an impatient pas seul with his heels upon the parquet floor. Once or twice he spat demonstratively, but the maire took no notice. In a few minutes the soldier returned with a written order, which the officer threw upon the desk without a word.
The maire scrutinised it carefully. "Ten thousand kilos of bread! Monsieur, we provide five thousand a day for the refugees, and this will tax us to the uttermost. The bakers of the town are nearly all sous les drapeaux. Very well, monsieur," he added in reply to an impatient exclamation from the officer, "we shall do our best. But many a poor soul in this town will go hungry to-night. And the receipts?" "The requisitioning officer will go with you and give receipts," retorted the officer, who had apparently forgotten that he had placed the maire under arrest.
Subdued lights twinkled like glow-worms in the streets as the maire returned across the square to the Hôtel de Ville. He threaded his way through groups of infantry, narrowly escaped a collision with three drunken soldiers, who were singing "Die Wacht am Rhein" with laborious unction, skirted the park of ammunition waggons, and reached the main entrance. He had been on his feet for hours visiting the boulangeries, the pâtisseries, the hay and corn merchants, persuading, expostulating, beseeching, until at last he had wrung from their exiguous stores the apportionment of the stupendous tribute. It was a heavy task, nor were his importunities made appreciably easier by the receipt-forms tendered, readily enough, by the requisitioning officer who accompanied him, for the inhabitants seemed to view with terror the possession of these German documents, suspecting they knew not what. But the task was done, and the maire wearily mounted the stairs.
The officer greeted him curtly. The maire now had leisure to study his appearance more closely. He had high cheek-bones, protruding eyes, and a large underhung mouth which, when he was pleased, looked sensual, and, when he was annoyed, merely cruel. The base of his forehead was square, but it rapidly receded with a convex conformation of head, very closely shaven as though with a currycomb, and his ears stood out almost at right angles to his skull. The ferocity that was his by nature he seemed to have assiduously cultivated by art, and the points of his moustaches, upturned in the shape of a cow's horns, accentuated the truculence of his appearance. In short, he was a typical Prussian officer. In peace he would have been merely comic. In war he was terrible, for there was nothing to restrain him.
Meanwhile the officer called for a corporal's guard to place the maire under arrest. "But you will first sign the following affiche—by the General's orders," he exclaimed roughly.
Le Maire informe ses concitoyens que le commandant en chef des troupes allemandes a ordonné que le maire et deux notables soient pris comme otages pour la raison que des civils aient tiré sur des patrouilles allemandes. Si un coup de fusil était tiré à nouveau par des civils, les trois otages seraient fusillés et la ville serait incendiée immédiatement.
Si des troupes alliées rentraient le maire rappelle à la population que tout civil ne doit pas prendre part à la guerre et que si l'un d'eux venait à y participer le commandant des troupes allemandes ferait fusilier également les otages.
"One moment," said the maire as he took up a pen, "'les civils'! I ordered the civil population to deposit their arms at the mairie two days ago, and the commissaire de police and the gendarmes have searched every house. We have no armed civilians here."
"Es macht nichts," said the officer; "we shall add 'ou peut-être des militaires en civil.'"
The maire shrugged his shoulders at the disingenuous parenthesis. It was, he knew, useless to protest. For all he knew he might be signing his own death-warrant. He studied the style a little more attentively. "Mon Dieu, what French!" he said to himself; "'était,' 'seraient,' 'venait'! What moods! What tenses! Monsieur le Capitaine," he continued aloud, "if I had used such French in my exercises at the Lycée my instituteur would have said I deserved to be shot. Pray allow me to make it a little more graceful." But the Prussian's ignorance of French syntax was only equalled by his suspicion of it. The maire's irony merely irritated him and his coolness puzzled him. "I give you thirty seconds to sign," he said, as he took out his watch and the inevitable revolver. The maire took up a needle-like pen, dipped it in the ink, and with a sigh wrote in fragile but firm characters "X—— Y——." The officer called a corporal's guard, and the maire, who had fasted since noon, was marched out of the room and thrust into a small closet upon the door of which were the letters "Cabinet." This, he reflected grimly, was certainly what in military language is called "close confinement." The soldiers accompanied him. There was just room for him to stretch his weary body upon the stone floor; one soldier remained standing over him with fixed bayonet, the others took up their position outside.