"One of the Germans seized little Lisa, while another caught little John.
"'Where is your father?' he asked in a harsh voice. 'Where are the French that passed here?'
"Lisa raised her blue eyes to this foreign soldier and, all trembling, replied in dialect. John did the same. The soldiers, irritated, suspecting a trick, searched the house, but did not find the trap-door which had been previously covered with dirty straw. They threatened to cut the children's throats. They told them they would kill their mother, too, if they did not answer. The poor children began to cry, but, faithful to their mother's directions, they repeated, through their tears, the same phrase.
"The French soldiers who were in the cellar and who heard everything through a ventilator felt their blood boil, and, but for their officer, would have come forth to protect the poor children, and, without doubt, would have been killed, for they were outnumbered.
"The Prussians did not think that such young children, threatened with death, would be capable of such heroic discretion; they ended by believing that they could not make themselves understood and rode away.
"And that is how two little children, Lisa, aged 8, and John, aged 10, by their obedience to their mother and by courage kept thirty men from being killed, twenty-eight wives still have their husbands, and forty-seven little children have their papas. Among these forty-seven little children my little Marcella and my little Charlie will perhaps see their papa again."
I leave this story in its fine simplicity. A workman who had become a soldier chats with his children far away. But the chief attraction in it for me is that the fact reported is quite authentic. I know the farm in the district of Meurthe et Moselle, and later on I shall tell its name, as well as those of the farmer's wife and the two children, who have received a well-earned reward.