Hearing her husband's shout of rage, the soldier turned,
seized his rifle, and clubbed the man into an adjoining room, where
he stayed with the two little children who had fled there, trying to
soothe them in their fright and listening, with madness in his brain, to
his wife's agony through the open door a yard away. The husband
was a coward, it seems. But supposing he had flung himself upon the
soldier and strangled him, or cut his throat? We know what would
have happened in the Village of Coulommiers.
7
On September 7 ten German horsemen rode into the farm of
Lamermont, in the commune of Lisle-en-Barrois. They were in good
humour, and having drunk plenty of fresh milk, left the farmhouse in a
friendly way. Shortly after their departure, when Farmer Elly and his
friend, the sieur Javelot, breathed more easily and thanked God
because the danger had passed, some rifle-shots rang out.
Somewhere or other a dreadful thing was happening. A new danger
came to the farm at Lamermont, with thirty men of a different patrol,
who did not ask for milk but blood. They accused the farm people of
having killed a German soldier, and in spite of the protests of the two
men, who had been sitting quietly in the kitchen, they were shot in the
yard.
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