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. I can’t help the tears running down my cheeks, but I say again: “Indeed, indeed we have never fired. If you search the village through you will find we have nothing to fire with.” “I heard them,” he says sternly. In the distance a woman is scuttling along, trying to reach a neighbour’s house in safety. She is so terror-stricken, her progress is like the gait of a sick fowl. A living example is to hand. I point towards her. “Look at that,” I say. “The poor women are so frightened they cry all day long. Besides the women there are only old men and boys. Their one wish is to get the harvest in in peace. Is that a crime?” A conference takes place between the soldiers I gather that our fate is in the balance. We must be born under a lucky star. We are saved again. The officer remounts his horse. He and his troop ride off briskly in the direction of Grand-Mesnil. They are scarcely round the corner before the entire population of the village has rushed out carrying every bucket and jug they can lay their hands on. The old lady, not dead as I expected, but considerably stupefied by smoke, is saved from the burning house and set under the hedge to recover. The rest of us form a line and pass bucket after bucket of water from the pump, in the best workmanlike, fireman style. The flames have got a good hold and the smoke is stifling, but we all work with a will and soon subdue them.