Lallemand—­his name ought to have saved him—­was chased by some soldiers when he fled for refuge to the kitchen of his fellow-citizen Tautelier, and shot there on his hearthside.  His friend had three bullet-wounds in the hand with which he had tried to protect the hunted man.  Mlle. Proces, the young girl who had made the complaint which led to this trouble, fled into the garden with her mother and her grandmother and an aunt named Mile.  Mennehard, who was eighty-one years old.  The girl was able to climb over the hedge into the neighbour’s garden, where she hid among the cabbages like a frightened kitten.  But the old people could not go so fast, and as they tried to climb the hedge they were shot down by flying bullets.  The cure of the village crept out into the darkness to find the bodies of those ladies, who had been his friends.  With both hands he scooped up the scattered brains of Mile.  Mennehard, the poor old dame of eighty-one, and afterwards brought her body back into her house, where he wept at this death and destruction which had made a hell of his little village in which peace had reigned so long.

And while he wept merry music played, and its lively notes rattled out into the quiet night from an open window quite close to where dead bodies lay.  The German soldiers enjoyed themselves that night in Triaucourt.  Like so many Neros on a smaller scale, they played and sang while flames leapt up on either side of them.  Thirty-five houses in this village were burnt to cinders after their old timbers had blazed fiercely with flying sparks which sparkled above the helmets of drunken soldiery.  An old man of seventy named Jean Lecourtier, and a baby who had been only two months in this strange world of ours were roasted to death in the furnace of the village.  A farmer named Igier, hearing the stampede of his cattle, tried to save these poor beasts, but he had to run the gauntlet of soldiers who shot at him as he stumbled through the smoke, missing him only by a hair’s-breadth, so that he escaped as by a miracle, with five holes in his clothes.  The village priest, Pere Viller, leaving the body of his old friend, went with the courage of despair to the Duke of Wurtemberg, who had his lodging near by, and complained to him passionately of all these outrages.  The Duke of Wurtemberg shrugged his shoulders.  “Que voulez-vous?” he said.  “We have bad soldiers, like you have!”

9

At Montmirail a man named Francois Fontaine lived with his widowed daughter, Mme. Naude, and his little grandchild Juliette.  A German noncommissioned officer demanded lodging at the house, and on the night of September 5, when all was quiet, he came undressed into the young widow’s room and, seizing her roughly, tried to drag her into his own chamber.  She cried and struggled so that her father came running to her, trembling with fear and rage.  The Unter-qffizier seems to have given some signal, perhaps by the blowing