Monsieur Segotin's Story
living over a mine which at any moment might be touched off and send us all to eternity together. It was worse. For a mine is a merciful business compared with the punishment which the German soldiers can deal out to a town which has offended them or which, for their own purposes, they have decided shall be presumed to have offended them. I have said that they did not treat us with any open violence. Indeed, many of them used towards us a certain barbarous geniality. I really believe that these men imagined that we ought to be very glad that the German Eagle had spread its protecting wing over Belgium. They announced their victories to us with more than an evident expectation that we would share their pleasure and they seemed amazed when we did not break out into hearty cheering. But that is Germany. She is so wholly convinced of her mission to set the rest of the world to rights that she cannot conceive how it should happen that everyone else is not of the same opinion.
"Yet though, for the moment, they were not openly outrageous, we knew that if it should suit their book they would embark upon a course of loot and murder and outrage without the smallest remorse or hesitation. Bullocks might feel as we did, were they endowed with human intelligence, when their farmer walks among them. Until their market is ready they may browse in peace, safe from every injury; but let the buyer give the word and write his cheque and the poleaxe is their portion.
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