He turns away and calls to the inhabitants of the little cottage before
which he stands to come out. The old lady is alone there and I would
bet my life she is hiding under the bed at this moment. So I run into
the street and the sunshine and, quite beside myself, almost implore
the officer not to do this thing.
Disregarding my entreaties he stands with uplifted revolver before the
cottage door.
“Come out,” he says again.
No answer.
Before I can move, he lifts his weapon once more. With the gestures of
a chef d’orchestre in the opening bars of his favourite orchestra, he
strikes the glass panes of the door this way and that with the cold
steel. The glass shatters in a thousand fragments on the square stone
step. There is something so cruel and calculating in the expression of
his hard face. With a smile of satisfaction the officer fires once,
twice, thrice into the recesses of the room. One would think a mouse
could not escape.
He throws something which must be a hand grenade into the midst of the
mysterious still gloom. In an instant smoke and flames seem to rise
from the very ground before my horrified eyes. Then he calmly shoots
once—twice again into the seething darkness to make sure that he has
missed nothing. He turns away to look for the next victim.