He draws something from his pocket and throws it across to me. It is a
bullet. He shows me a large blister on his finger. “I was over-zealous
for that keepsake this morning,” he says, laughing, “and tried to
pick it up when it was red hot. There was a fight raging round my
little house before I left. Picture to yourself a patrol of Uhlans
breakfasting in the hotel-barn opposite. A company of French ride up
and demand if the enemy is within. The innkeeper answers, trembling,
‘No.’ ‘The truth!’ thunder the Frenchmen, covering him with revolvers.
He confesses. _Mon Dieu!_ What a scene! The French force the innkeeper
and his son to set fire to their own barn, and when at length the
Germans come out, one by one, stifled with smoke, they calmly pot
them off, as if they were so many rabbits. Stay! One Frenchman rushes
in before the fire has done its work. He dies a moment later, shot
through the heart. I found on him two letters, to his mother and his
sweetheart. Such letters!”
“The French are very brave,” I say.
“I tell you they fight—not like men but—_comme les démons_. They
don’t ride up as the Uhlans do. They just‘appear’ like lightning or
earthquake or any other phenomenon and then—phew—_le déluge_.”
“Every German who comes in here says that the Belgians have cut off the
ears and gouged out the eyes of their wounded before Liège,” I say. “We
on our side are horrified at the tale of German atrocities. Each time
a German enters this village we feel that the tragedy of Visé may be
enacted over again.”
The Tax-collector shrugs his shoulders as he fingers a cigarette.
“You must remember it is against the rules of warfare for
non-combatants to fire,” he murmurs.
“Have they?”
He flicks an infinitesimal spot of dust from the table-cloth, and does
not answer me.
Yet if one’s country be invaded who shall say that one may not avail
oneself of any means to oust the hated foe?
The nostalgia of war seizes me. I know a country where such things
could not be. Shall I ever see England, dear England again?
Involuntarily I breathe the words aloud. The Tax-collector leans across
to me and speaks firmly but very gently as one would address a tired
child, “You will never see England again, never, Mademoiselle. Make up
your mind to that.”
I scrape my chair back along the wooden boards and rise in a flurry
because “it is so hot, so hot”—and escape to my room to dream of what
might have been but never can be now——