ask why. The answer is, "The Germans have been betrayed!" One man is
arrested because he had said to a German who was boasting that the
German Army would be in Paris in two days--"All right!--but you're not
there yet!" Another, because he had been seen going backwards and
forwards to a wood, in which it appeared he had hidden two horses whom
he had been trying to feed. One old man of seventy-nine could only walk
to the yard in which the others were gathered by the help of his wife's
arm. When they arrived there a soldier separated them so roughly that
the wife fell.

Imagine the horror of the September night!--the terror of the women who,
in the general exodus of the young and strong, had stayed behind with
their husbands, the old men who could not be persuaded to leave the
farms and fields in which they had spent their lives. "What harm can
they do to us--old people?" No doubt that had been the instinctive
feeling among those who had remained to face the invasion.

But the Germans were not content without wreaking the instinct--which is
the savage instinct--to break and crush and ill-treat something which
has thwarted you, on the women of Vareddes also. They gathered them out
of the farmyard to which they had come, in the hopes of being allowed to
stay with the men, and shut them up in a room of the farm. And there,
with fixed bayonets, the soldiers amused themselves with terrifying
these trembling creatures during a great part of the night. They made
them all kneel down, facing a file of soldiers, and the women thought
their last hour had come. One was seventy-seven years old, three
sixty-seven, the two others just under sixty. The eldest, Madame
Barthélemy, said to the others--"We are going to die. Make your
'contrition' if you can." (The Town Librarian of Meaux, from whose
account I take these facts, heard these details from the lips of poor