This is written in a garden of smooth turf, under a copper
beech, beside a glassy mill-stream, where soldiers of Alpine
regiments are writing letters home, while the guns shout up
and down the narrow valleys.
A great wolf-hound, who considers himself in charge of the
old-fashioned farmhouse, cannot understand why his master,
aged six, should be sitting on the knees of the Marechal des
Logis, the iron man who drives the big car.
"But you _are_ French, little one?" says the giant, with a
yearning arm round the child.
"Yes," very slowly mouthing the French words; "I--can't
--speak--French--but--I--am--French."
The small face disappears in the big beard.
Somehow, I can't imagine the Marechal des Logis killing
babies--even if his superior officer, now sketching the scene,
were to order him!
. . . . . . .
The great building must once have been a monastery. Twilight
softened its gaunt wings, in an angle of which were collected
fifty prisoners, picked up among the hills behind the mists.
They stood in some sort of military formation preparatory to
being marched off. They were dressed in khaki, the colour of
gassed grass, that might have belonged to any army. Two wore
spectacles, and I counted eight faces of the fifty which were
asymmetrical--out of drawing on one side.
"Some of their later drafts give us that type," said the
Interpreter. One of them had been wounded in the head and
roughly bandaged. The others seemed all sound. Most of them
looked at nothing, but several were vividly alive with terror
that cannot keep the eyelids still, and a few wavered on the
grey edge of collapse.
They were the breed which, at the word of command, had stolen
out to drown women and children; had raped women in the
streets at the word of command; and, always at the word of
command, had sprayed petrol, or squirted flame; or defiled the
property and persons of their captives. They stood there
outside all humanity. Yet they were made in the likeness of
humanity. One realized it with a shock when the bandaged
creature began to shiver, and they shuffled off in response to
the orders of civilized men.
V