Towards the Goal

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"'So this is your quiet town, Monsieur le Maire! I arrest you, and you shall answer with your life for the lives of my soldiers.'

"Two men with revolvers were set to guard him. The officer himself presently took him outside the town, and left him under guard, at the little village of Poteau, at the edge of a wood."

* * * * *

What had happened? Unluckily for Senlis and M. Odent, some of the French rear-guard—infantry stragglers, and a small party of Senegalese troops—were still in the southern quarter of the town when the Germans entered. They opened fire from a barrack near the Paris entrance and a sharp engagement followed which lasted several hours, with casualties on both sides. The Germans got the better, and were then free to wreak their fury on the town.

They broke into the houses, plundered the wine shops, first of all, and took fifty hostages, of whom twenty-six perished. And at half-past five, while the fighting was still going on, the punitive burning of the town began, by a cyclist section told off for the work and furnished with every means for doing it effectively. These men, according to an eyewitness, did their work with wild shouts—"cris sauvages."

A hundred and seventeen houses were soon burning fiercely. On that hot September evening, the air was like a furnace. Before long the streets were full of blazing débris. Two persons who had hidden themselves in their cellars died of suffocation; yet to appear in the streets was to risk death at the hands of some drunk or maddened soldier.

At the opening of the French attack, a German officer rushed to the hospital, which was full of wounded, in search of francs-tireurs. Arrived there, he saw an old man, a chronic patient of the hospital and half idiotic, standing on the steps of the building. He blew the old man's brains out. He then forced his way into the hospital, pointing his revolver at the French wounded, who thought their last hour had come. He himself was wounded, and at last appeared to yield to the remonstrances of the Sister in charge, and allowed his wound to be dressed. But in the middle of the dressing, he broke away without his tunic, and helmetless, in a state of mad excitement, and presently reappeared with a file of soldiers. Placing them in the street opposite the rooms occupied by the French wounded, he ordered them to fire a volley. No one was hurt, though several beds were struck. Then the women's wards were searched. Two sick men, éclopés without visible wounds, were dragged out of their beds and would have been bayoneted then and there but for the entreaties of the nurses, who ultimately released them.

An awful night followed in the still burning or smouldering town. Meanwhile, at nine o'clock in the evening a party of German officers betook themselves to the hamlet of Poteau—a village north of Senlis—where M. Odent had been kept under guard since the afternoon. Six other hostages were produced, and they were all marched off to a field near Chamant at the edge of a wood. Here the Maire was called up and interrogated. His companion, eight or nine metres away, too far to hear what was said, watched the scene. As I think of it, I seem to see in the southern sky the glare of burning Senlis; above it, and spread over the stubble fields in which the party stood, a peaceful moonlight. In his written account, the Curé specially mentions the brightness of the harvest moon.

Presently the Maire came back to the six, and said to one, Benoit Decreys, "Adieu, my poor Benoit, we shall not see each other again —they are going to shoot me." He took his crucifix, his purse containing a sum of money, and some papers, out of his pocket, and asked that they should be given to his family. Then pressing the hands held out to him, he said good-bye to them all, and went back with a firm step to the group of officers. Two soldiers were called up, and the Maire was placed at ten paces' distance. The soldiers fired, and M. Odent fell without a sound. He was hastily buried under barely a foot of earth, and his six companions were left on the spot through the night expecting the same fate, till the morning, when they were released. Five other hostages, "gathered haphazard in the streets," were shot the same night in the neighbourhood of Chamant.

Meanwhile the Curé, knowing nothing of what was happening to the Maire, had been thinking for his parishioners and his church. When the bombardment began he gathered together about a hundred and twenty of them, who had apparently no cellars to take refuge in, and after sheltering them in the Presbytère for a time, he sent them with one of his vicaires out of the town. Then—to continue his narrative: