They broke into the houses, plundered the wine shops, first of all, and took fifty hostages, of whom twenty-six perished.  And at half-past five, while the fighting was still going on, the punitive burning of the town began, by a cyclist section told off for the work and furnished with every means for doing it effectively.  These men, according to an eyewitness, did their work with wild shouts—­“cris sauvages.”

A hundred and seventeen houses were soon burning fiercely.  On that hot September evening, the air was like a furnace.  Before long the streets were full of blazing debris.  Two persons who had hidden themselves in their cellars died of suffocation; yet to appear in the streets was to risk death at the hands of some drunk or maddened soldier.

At the opening of the French attack, a German officer rushed to the hospital, which was full of wounded, in search of francs-tireurs.  Arrived there, he saw an old man, a chronic patient of the hospital and half idiotic, standing on the steps of the building.  He blew the old man’s brains out.  He then forced his way into the hospital, pointing his revolver at the French wounded, who thought their last hour had come.  He himself was wounded, and at last appeared to yield to the remonstrances of the Sister in charge, and allowed his wound to be dressed.  But in the middle of the dressing, he broke away without his tunic, and helmetless, in a state of mad excitement, and presently reappeared with a file of soldiers.  Placing them in the street opposite the rooms occupied by the French wounded, he ordered them to fire a volley.  No one was hurt, though several beds were struck.  Then the women’s wards were searched.  Two sick men, eclopes without visible wounds, were dragged out of their beds and would have been bayoneted then and there but for the entreaties of the nurses, who ultimately released them.

An awful night followed in the still burning or smouldering town.  Meanwhile, at nine o’clock in the evening a party of German officers betook themselves to the hamlet of Poteau—­a village north of Senlis—­where M. Odent had been kept under guard since the afternoon.  Six other hostages were produced, and they were all marched off to a field near Chamant at the edge of a wood.  Here the Maire was called up and interrogated.  His companion, eight or nine metres away, too far to hear what was said, watched the scene.  As I think of it, I seem to see in the southern sky the glare of burning Senlis; above it, and spread over the stubble fields in which the party stood, a peaceful moonlight.  In his written account, the Cure specially mentions the brightness of the harvest moon.