Before mobilisation had begun or hostilities declared, the "suspects" were forcibly torn from their families and confined in cells, without trial, in the military prison of Metz. A few days after they set out, without saying goodbye to their families, for Coblentz. When taken to the fort of Ehrenbreitstein they only escaped the frenzy of an excited populace on account of thirty German bayonets which surrounded them. Worn out with exhaustion, they were shut up in the casemates which were used some years before the war for confining to barracks soldiers undergoing disciplinary punishment and which had been evacuated under the orders of the authority on account of their unhealthy condition.
For months they existed in these dungeons under the most deplorable physical and moral conditions. Some of them, by depositing a surety of 30,000 marks, left to go and live under a kind of penal regime in the Prussian Rhineland. The less submissive element stayed where they were more than two years and were then subjected to the same regime as their comrades who had already left. They were absolutely forbidden to enter the fortress of Metz.
These "suspects" never knew the reasons for their arrest until August 1917. Permission to return to their town was given them in November 1918 by the "Soldiers Council" which had replaced the Imperial Government.
Several inhabitants of Metz were promptly seized and drafted into the units sent up to the front, especially the Russian front. Among them, one of the brothers Samain, president of the "Lorraine Sportive" was sent to the French front in the batteries most exposed to danger. When crippled in the legs he was brought back from the front and thrown into prison.
The Germans subjected Metz to a regime of terror. The German inquisition was not confined to the street, but it intruded into the homes. Everything that reminded them of France, books, sacred family relics, had to disappear.
Speaking French became a provocation.
To say "Merci, Monsieur" and "Bonjour, Madame" were court-martial offences at the courts—ordinary and extra-ordinary—which sat permanently at Metz. Sentences never stopped. All the French newspapers were suppressed and only the official German papers were allowed.
The German authorities instituted an organ, La Gazette de Lorraine, to be modelled on the infamous Gazette des Ardennes and to further the same purpose, the demoralisation of the French nation. In this gazette, the Germans carefully published, in the first issues all the sentences pronounced by the courts-martial, in the hope of terrifying and cowing the inhabitants of Metz. It was a vain hope: it had the opposite effect of strengthening their resistance. The system of spies and informers was widespread under official orders.
A young girl, slily exhibiting surprise at seeing a squadron of French aeroplanes pass overhead, shouted in front of her house: "Oh Kolossal!" Denounced by a loyal German woman, she was called before the court-martial (the first of three appearances).
To the military judges who tried to force her to admit to her anti-German sentiments, she replied: "My father who was imprisoned in a fortress is exiled with my mother in Prussia. My two brothers, French officers, are no doubt dead by this time, and I cannot yet love Germany". She was set free this time, but a stricter watch was kept on her.