A colonel told her that there were still a few moments at her disposition in which to write to her family, her friends, or to make her last will….
"To whom shall I write?" said Freya. "I haven't a single friend in the world…."
"Then it was," continued the lawyer, "that she took the pen as if a recollection had occurred to her, and traced some few lines…. Then she tore up the paper and came toward me. She was thinking of you, Captain: her last letter was for you and she left it unfinished, fearing that it might never reach your hands. Besides, she wasn't equal to writing; her pulse was nervous: she preferred to talk…. She asked me to send you a long, very long letter, telling about her last moments, and I had to swear to her that I would carry out her request."
From that time on the maître had seen things badly. Emotion was perturbing his sensibilities, but there yet lived in his mind Freya's last words on coming out of the jail.
"I am not a German," she said repeatedly to the men in uniform. "I am not German!"
For her the least important thing was to die. She was only worried for fear they might believe her of that odious nationality.
The attorney found himself in an automobile with many men whom he scarcely knew. Other vehicles were before and behind theirs. In one of them was Freya with the nuns and the priest.
A faint streak was whitening the sky, marking the points of the roofs. Below, in the deep blackness of the streets, the renewed life of daybreak was slowly beginning. The first laborers going to their work with their hands in their pockets, and the market women returning from market pushing their carts, turned their heads, following with interest this procession of swift vehicles almost all of them with men in the box seat beside the conductor. To the working-folk, this was perhaps a morning wedding…. Perhaps these were gay people coming from a nocturnal fiesta…. Several times the cortege slackened its speed, blocked by a row of heavy carts with mountains of garden-stuff.
The maître, in spite of his emotions, recognized the road that the automobile was following. In the place de la Nation he caught glimpses of the sculptured group, le Triomphe de la Republique, piercing the dripping mistiness of dawn; then the grating of the enclosure; then the long cours de Vincennes and its historic fortress.
They went still further on until they reached the field of execution.