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 Curé specially mentions the brightness of
the harvest moon.

Presently the Maire came back to the six, and said to one, Benoit
Decreys, "Adieu, my poor Benoit, we shall not see each other again
--they are going to shoot me." He took his crucifix, his purse
containing a sum of money, and some papers, out of his pocket, and asked
that they should be given to his family. Then pressing the hands held
out to him, he said good-bye to them all, and went back with a firm step
to the group of officers. Two soldiers were called up, and the Maire was
placed at ten paces' distance. The soldiers fired, and M. Odent fell
without a sound. He was hastily buried under barely a foot of earth, and
his six companions were left on the spot through the night expecting the
same fate, till the morning, when they were released. Five other
hostages, "gathered haphazard in the streets," were shot the same night
in the neighbourhood of Chamant.

Meanwhile the Curé, knowing nothing of what was happening to the Maire,
had been thinking for his parishioners and his church. When the
bombardment began he gathered together about a hundred and twenty of
them, who had apparently no cellars to take refuge in, and after