What particular crime Villers-aux-Vents had committed to merit destruction I cannot tell. Perhaps it never committed any. The Crown Prince was not always a minister of Justice promulgating sentence upon crime. He was more often a Nero loving a good red blaze for its own sake, or it may be an æsthete of emotion, a super-sensualist of cruelty, or just a devil hot from the stones of hell.
Whatever the reason, Villers was doomed. Out came the pastilles and the petrol-sprayers: the most determined destruction was carried on. Not only were the houses themselves destroyed but the outhouses, the stables, solid brick and mortar constructions running back to a depth of several feet. And I gathered that the usual pillage inaugurated the reign of fire.
Of this, however, Madame knew nothing. She and her seventy-nine companions in misery were marched away to the north, mile after mile to Stenay, and if you look at the map you will see that the distance is not small, it was a march of several days.
Madame, as I have told you, was old, and her slippers had soles of felt, and so the time came when her feet were torn and bleeding, and when, famished and exhausted, she could no longer keep step with her guards. Her pace became slower and slower. Ah, God, what was that? Only the butt-end of a rifle falling heavily across her back. She nerved herself for another effort, staggered on to falter once more. Again the persuasion of the rifle. Again the shrewd, cruel blow, and a bayonet flashing under her eyes.
A diet of black bread three times a day does not encourage one to take violent exercise, but black bread was all that they got, and I think the rifle-butts worked very hard during that long weary march.
On arrival they were herded into a church and then into a prison, where they were brutally treated at first, but subsequently, when French people were put in charge, found life a little less intolerable. And later on some residents still living in the town were kind to her, but during all the months—some eight or nine—that she was imprisoned there she had no dress but the one, nothing to change into, nothing to keep out the sharp winter cold.
Madame Walfard the basket-maker told me some gruesome tales about Stenay, and what happened there, but this is not a book of atrocities. Perhaps it ought to be, perhaps every one who is in a position to do so should cry aloud the story in a clear clarion call to the civilised world, but—isn't the story known? Can anything I have to say add a fraction of a grain of weight to the evidence already collected? Is the world even now so immature in its judgment that it supposes that the men who sacked Louvain, the men who violated Belgium behaved like gallant gentlemen in the sunnier land of France? Do we not know all of us that, added to the deliberate German method, there was the lasciviousness of drunkenness? That the Germans poured into one of the richest wine-growing countries in the world during one of the hottest months of the year, that their thirst at all times is a mighty one, and when excited by the frenzy of battle it was unassuageable? They drank, and they drank again. They rioted in cellars containing thousands of bottles of good wine, and they emerged no longer men but demons, whose officers laughed to see them come forth, sure now that no lingering spark of human or divine fire would hold them back from frightfulness.
Of course we know it was so, and therefore I am not going to dilate upon horrors. Let the kharma of the Germans be their witness and their judge. Only this in fairness should be told—that the behaviour of the men varied greatly in different regiments. "It all depended upon the Commandant," summed up one narrator, "and the first armies were the worst."
"And the Crown Prince's army?" I asked; "what of that?"