Monsieur Segotin's Story
That business took place on the 20th and 21st of August. On the 22nd I was shown a poster that had been put up that morning all over Liége informing the town that Andenne had been reduced to ashes and that 110 people had been shot because the population, after receiving the Germans peacefully, had treacherously attacked them. This was a sort of delicate hint to Liége to behave itself, you understand. Yet one would have supposed that the Germans might have spared themselves this trouble, seeing that at Liége on that same night of the 20th, twenty-nine civilians had been murdered and fifty-five houses had been burned.
"The proclamation, my friend, is a leading feature of German occupation. If the town in which these people find themselves goes astray in any particular, it is surely not for lack of instruction. From the moment of the soldiers' entry into Saint Hilaire it snowed posters and notices, green, orange, red, blue and white. The walls of Saint Hilaire were the only gay things in the place. Perhaps you would like to know what sort of a regime it was which was thus instituted. Yes? Very good. Now listen, and remember always that in Saint Hilaire we had at first much less of which to complain than in many a hundred other towns. My story is a dull one, I know, void of spectacular incidents and sparing of thrills and sensations; but, believe me, all the horrors are not spectacular, and a simple iron heel ground steadily into one's neck for weeks and months and years can have as deplorable an effect in the end upon
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