"Sale bête!" she cried to the German sentry.
He spoke French and understood, and came under the window.
"'Sale bête'? ... For those words you shall go to prison, madame."
She repeated the words, and called him a monster, and at last the man spoke in a shamed way and said:
"Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre. C'est cruelle, la guerre!"
This man had kinder comrades. Pitying the Russian prisoners, they gave them stealthily a little brandy and cigarettes, and some who were caught did two hours' extra drill each day for a fortnight.
"My three sisters were taken away when the Germans left," said a young girl. She spoke her sisters' names, Yvonne, Juliette, and Madeleine, and said they were eighteen and twenty-two and twenty-seven, and then, turning away from me, wept very bitterly.
"They are my daughters," said a middle-aged woman. "When they were taken away I went a little mad. My pretty girls! And all our neighbours' daughters have gone, up from sixteen years of age, and all the men-folk up to fifty. They have gone to slavery, and for the girls it is a great peril. How can they escape?"
How can one write of these things? For the women it was always worst. Many of them had surpassing courage, but some were weak and some were bad. The bad women preyed on the others in a way so vile that it seems incredible. There was no distinction of class or sex in the forced labour of the harvest-fields, and delicate women of good families were forced to labour on the soil with girls strong and used to this toil. There were many who died of weakness and pneumonia and under-feeding.
"Are you not afraid of being called barbarians for ever?" asked a woman of a German officer who had not been brutal, but, like others, had tried to soften the hardships of the people.