Monsieur Segotin's Story
their shoulders. Can you imagine the anxious care with which these lights were maintained by the inhabitants? For the extinction of so much as one of them might be the signal for a bullet through a window, behind which it might find a beloved bosom to pierce. And can you figure to yourself the security in which those families slept at night, with their front door open to the first comer and that, maybe, a drunken German? Yes, my friend, it looked festive, but it was otherwise, I do assure you.
"And remember that there was not one of us who did not expect at any moment a general massacre to begin. Though we had been spared that attention so far, we had no reason for anticipating the continuance of such a condition. Why, a door could not slam without our hearts leaping out of our mouths; a child could not begin crying without our believing that the end had come. Nervousness? Well, perhaps it was nervousness, but I doubt if nervousness ever had a better excuse. Our Germans were, for Germans, apparently of a not altogether abominable kind; but it is thus with those people, Monsieur. One never knows. I daresay the poor souls who died in many a score of Belgian and French villages imagined, up to within a few minutes of their death-agony, that 'their Germans' were not such bad examples of the breed, after all. There is to me something inconceivable about a people that can crack a joke with you one minute and blow out your brains the next simply because an order has
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