They showed me into a little room, where were Winter, Chevreux, Dubourg, and the gendarme Fiegel; so that we didn't hear anything before being called. On the wall at the right it was written in large letters that any witness who did not tell the truth, should be delivered to the council, and suffer the same penalty as the accused. This made one consider, and I resolved at once to conceal nothing, as was right and sensible. The gendarme also informed us that we were forbidden to speak to each other. After a quarter of an hour Winter was summoned, and then, at intervals of ten minutes, Chevreux, Dubourg, and myself. When I went into the court-room, the judges were all in their places; the major had laid his hat on the desk before him; the recorder was mending his pen. Burguet looked at me calmly. Without they were stamping, and the major said to the brigadier: "Inform the public that if this noise continues, I shall have the mayoralty cleared." The brigadier went out at once, and the major said to me: "National guard Moses, make your deposition. What do you know?" I told it all simply. The deserter at the left, between two gendarmes, seemed more dead than alive. I would gladly have acquitted him of everything; but when a man fears for himself, when old officers in full dress are scowling at you as if they could see through you, the simplest and best way is not to lie. A father's first thought should be for his children! In short, I told everything that I had seen, nothing more or less, and at last the major said to me: "That is enough; you may go." But seeing that the others, Winter, Chevreux, Dubourg, remained sitting on a bench at the left, I did the same. Almost immediately five or six good-for-nothings began to stamp and murmur, "Shoot him! shoot him!" The president ordered the brigadier to arrest them, and in spite of their resistance they were all led to prison. Silence was then established in the court-room, but the stampings without continued. "Judge-advocate, it is your turn to speak," said the major. This judge-advocate, who seems now before my eyes, and whom I can almost hear speak, was a man of fifty, short and thick, with a short neck, long, thick, straight nose, very wide forehead, shining black hair, thin mustaches, and bright eyes. While he was listening, his head turned right and left as if on a pivot; you could see his long nose and the corner of his eye, but his elbows did not stir from the table. He looked like one of those large crows which seem to be sleeping in the fields at the close of autumn, and yet see everything that is going on around them.