'The parish priest? You mean one of the hostages?' The intelligence officer pushed aside a packet of printed forms and sought hastily under it. 'Here is the key of their prison—if indeed it is still standing! To tell you the truth, I have been too busy to concern myself about these two Frenchmen, and it is a good thing for them, Herr Doktor, that you have this business with the Curé! Yes, by all means, bring the priest to the church, and leave him there in charge. As for the Mayor, he can be released later. That Mayor is a truculent fellow!' He smiled a little grimly. 'You can hand this key to the priest just before you move off.'
The Herr Doktor took the key, and walked quietly to the door. Did the Herr Major mean that, but for his, Max Keller's, accidental intervention, the hostages would have been left to await release by their own countrymen? But that was quite against the usages of civilised warfare!
After he had left the Rue de la Mairie and entered the zone of destruction caused by the bombardment of the last few days, the Herr Doktor had to pick, to leap, sometimes almost to excavate, his way through the ruins of what had been a pleasant, residential quarter of the happy little town.
What a scene of tragic and, yes, sordid desolation lay all about him, and what an awful stillness—a stillness which made him start at the sounds made by his own footfalls!
All the landmarks with which he had become vaguely familiar during the last three weeks were gone. They seemed obliterated. Heaps of rubble, and decomposing masses of filth, from which he hastily averted his eyes when warned of their nearness by another of his sensitive senses, rose mountainously round the shattered sides and backs of those houses of which the walls remained standing. Where there had been placid beauty, there was now an ugliness that verged on the diabolic grotesque; where there had been healthy life, there was now foul corruption.
At last, after what seemed an eternity of difficult going, he saw, through a hole blown out in an otherwise still intact wall, a beautiful garden. Beds of blooming, delicately tinted flowers rose amid grass which still looked fresh and green, though here and there, across a stretch of lawn, there yawned a deep pit made by a bursting shell.
He clambered through into the peaceful demesne with a sensation of gasping relief, and wandered on till a turn brought him close to what looked like a massive ruin, out of which, high up above his head, there lurched two large pieces of fine, brass-incrusted, mahogany furniture. With a shock of regret he realised that this was all that now remained of the largest of the villas commanding the Grande Place, for through an open door, set deep in the wall of the garden, he caught a glimpse of the familiar open space.
He hurried forward, relieved to know that his perilous, disagreeable journey was nearing its end.
And then, as he emerged on to the now deserted Grande Place, the Herr Doktor's feelings of relief changed with terrible suddenness to horror. For the first time he felt his nerve give way, and there swept over him an overmastering desire to rush back and obliterate from his memory the hideous sight on which his eyes now rested.