When we had finished our luncheon, I rose to return to the other travelers.
“The compartment reserved for you will not be here for two hours,” said the young officer. “If you would like to rest, ladies, I will come for you at the right time.” He went away, and before long I was sound asleep. I was nearly dead with fatigue. Mlle. Soubise touched me on the shoulder to rouse me. The train was ready to start, and the young officer walked with me to it. I was a little amazed when I saw the carriage in which I was to travel. It had no roof, and was filled with coal. The officer had several sacks put in, one on the top of the other, to make our seats less hard. He sent for his officer’s cloak, begging me to take it with us, and send it back, but I refused this odious disguise most energetically. It was a deadly cold day, but I preferred dying of cold to muffling up in a cloak belonging to the enemy.
The whistle was blown, the wounded officer saluted, and the train started. There were Prussian soldiers in the carriages. The subordinates, the employés, and the soldiers were just as brutish and rude as the German officers were polite and courteous.
The train stopped without any plausible reason; it started again to stop again, and it then stood still for an hour on this icy cold night. On arriving at Creil, the stoker, the engine driver, the soldiers, and everyone else got out. I watched all these men, whistling, bawling to each other, spitting, and bursting into laughter as they pointed to us. Were they not the conquerors and we the conquered?
At Creil we stayed more than two hours. We could hear the distant sound of foreign music, and the hurrahs of Germans who were making merry. All this hubbub came from a white house about five hundred yards away. We could distinguish the outlines of human beings locked in each others’ arms, waltzing, and turning round and round in a giddy revel.
It began to get on my nerves, for it seemed likely to continue until daylight. I got out with Villaret, intending at any rate to stretch my limbs. We went toward the white house, and then, as I did not want to tell him my plan, I asked him to wait there for me.
Very fortunately, though, for me, I had not time to cross the threshold of this vile lodging-house, for an officer, smoking a cigarette, was just coming out of a small door. He spoke to me in German.
“I am French,” I replied, and he then came up to me, speaking my language, for they could all talk French.
He asked me what I was doing there, and my nerves were so overstrung that I burst out sobbing, and told him, through my sobs, of our lamentable odyssey since our departure from Gonesse, and finally of our waiting two hours in an icy cold carriage, while the stokers, engine drivers, and conductors, were all dancing in this house.
“But I had no idea that there were passengers in those carriages, and it was I who gave permission to these men to dance, and drink. The guard of the train told me that he was taking cattle and goods, and that he did not need to arrive before eight in the morning, and I believed him....”