Then the miserable march of the other old men began again.  They are dragged along in the wake of the retreating Germans.  The day is very hot, the roads are crowded with troops and lorries.  They are hustled and hurried, and their feeble strength is rapidly exhausted.  The older ones beg that they may be left to die; the younger help them as much as they can.  When anyone falls out, he is kicked and beaten till he gets up again.  And all the time the passing troops mock and insult them.  At last, near Coulombs, after a march of two hours and a half, a man of seventy-three, called Jourdaine, falls.  His guards rush upon him, with blows and kicks.  In vain.  He has no strength to rise, and his murderers finish him with a ball in the head and one in the side, and bury him hastily in a field a few metres off.

The weary march goes on all day.  When it ends, another old man—­seventy-nine years old—­“le pere Milliardet”—­can do no more.  The next morning he staggered to his feet at the order to move, but fell almost immediately.  Then a soldier with the utmost coolness sent his bayonet through the heart of the helpless creature.  Another falls on the road a little farther north—­then another—­and another.  All are killed, as they lie.

The poor Maire, Lievin, struggles on as long as he can.  Two other prisoners support him on either side.  But he has a weak heart—­his face is purple—­he can hardly breathe.  Again and again he falls, only to be brutally pulled up, the Germans shouting with laughter at the old man’s misery. (This comes from the testimony of the survivors.) Then he, too, falls for the last time.  Two soldiers take him into the cemetery of Chouy.  Lievin understands, and patiently takes out his handkerchief and bandages his own eyes.  It takes three balls to kill him.

Another hostage, a little farther on, who had also fallen was beaten to death before the eyes of the others.

The following day, after having suffered every kind of insult and privation, the wretched remnant of the civilian prisoners reached Soissons, and were dispatched to Germany, bound for the concentration camp at Erfurt.

Eight of them, poor souls! reached Germany, where two of them died.  At last, in January 1915, four of them were returned to France through Switzerland.  They reached Schaffhausen with a number of other rapatries, in early February, to find there the boundless pity with which the Swiss know so well how to surround the frail and tortured sufferers of this war.  In a few weeks more, they were again at home, among the old farms and woods of the Ile-de-France.  “They are now in peace,” says the Meaux Librarian—­“among those who love them, and whose affection tries, day by day, to soften for them the cruel memory of their Calvary and their exile.”

A monument to the memory of the murdered hostages is to be erected in the village market-place, and a plaque has been let into the wall of the farm where the old men and the women passed their first night of agony.