The father between bites told us his tale—­such a tale as we had heard dozens of times already and were to hear again a hundred times before that crowded week ended—­he telling it with rolling eyes and lifting brows, and graphic and abundant gestures.  Behind him and us, penning our table about with a living hedge, stood the leading burghers of Nivelles, now listening to him, now watching us with curious eyes.  And, as he talked on, the landlord dimmed the oil lamps and made fast the door; for this town, being in German hands, was under martial law and must lock and bar itself in at eight o’clock each night.  So we sat in a half light and listened.

They lived, the two Putzeys, at a hamlet named Marchienne-au-Pont, to the southward.  The Germans had come into it the day before at sunup, and finding the French there had opened fire.  From the houses the French had replied until driven out by heavy odds, and then they ran across the fields, leaving many dead and wounded behind them.  As for the inhabitants they had, during the fighting, hidden in their cellars.

“When the French were gone the Germans drove us out,” went on the narrator; “and, of the men, they made several of us march ahead of them down the road into the next village, we holding up our hands and loudly begging those within the houses not to fire, for fear of killing us who were their friends and neighbors.  When this town surrendered the Germans let us go, but first one of them gave me a cake of chocolate.

“Yet when I tried to go to aid a wounded Frenchman who lay in the fields, another German, I thought, fired at me.  I heard the bullet—­it buzzed like a hornet.  So then I ran away and found my son here; and we came across the country, following the canals and avoiding the roads, which were filled with German troops.  When we had gone a mile we looked back and there was much thick smoke behind us—­our houses were burning, I suppose.  So last night we slept in the woods and all day we walked, and to-night reached here, bringing with us nothing except the clothes on our backs.

“I have no wife—­she has been dead for two years—­but in Brussels I have two daughters at school.  Do you think I shall be permitted to enter Brussels and seek for my two daughters?  This morning they told me Brussels was burning; but that I do not believe.”

Then, also, he told us in quick, eager sentences, lowering his voice while he spoke, that a priest, with his hands tied behind his back, had been driven through a certain village ahead of the Germans, as a human shield for them; and that, in still another village, two aged women had been violated and murdered.  Had he beheld these things with his own eyes?  No; he had been told of them.

Here I might add that this was our commonest experience in questioning the refugees.  Every one of them had a tale to tell of German atrocities on noncombatants; but not once did we find an avowed eye-witness to such things.  Always our informant had heard of the torturing or the maiming or the murdering, but never had he personally seen it.  It had always happened in another town—­never in his own town.