now listening to him, now watching us with curious eyes. And,
as he talked on, the landlord dimmed the oil lamps and made fast the
door; for this town, being in German hands, was under martial law and
must lock and bar itself in at eight o'clock each night. So we sat in a
half light and listened.

They lived, the two Putzeys, at a hamlet named Marchienne-au-Pont, to
the southward. The Germans had come into it the day before at sunup, and
finding the French there had opened fire. From the houses the French
had replied until driven out by heavy odds, and then they ran across the
fields, leaving many dead and wounded behind them. As for the
inhabitants they had, during the fighting, hidden in their cellars.

"When the French were gone the Germans drove us out," went on the
narrator; "and, of the men, they made several of us march ahead of them
down the road into the next village, we holding up our hands and loudly
begging those within the houses not to fire, for fear of killing us who
were their friends and neighbors. When this town surrendered the
Germans let us go, but first one of them gave me a cake of chocolate.

"Yet when I tried to go to aid a wounded Frenchman who lay in the
fields, another German, I thought, fired at me. I heard the bullet--it
buzzed like a hornet. So then I ran away and found my son here; and we
came across the country, following the canals and avoiding the roads,
which were filled with German troops. When we had gone a mile we looked
back and there was much thick smoke behind us--our houses were burning,
I suppose. So last night we slept in the woods and all day we walked,
and to-night reached here, bringing with us nothing except the clothes
on our backs.

"I have no wife--she has been dead for two years--but in Brussels I have
two daughters at school. Do you think I shall be permitted to enter
Brussels and seek for my two daughters? This morning they told me
Brussels was burning; but that I do not believe."

Then, also, he told us in quick, eager sentences, lowering his voice
while he spoke, that a priest, with his hands tied behind his back, had
been driven through a certain village ahead of the Germans, as a human
shield for them; and that, in still another village, two aged women had
been violated and murdered. Had he beheld these things with his own
eyes? No; he had been told of them.

Here I might add that this was our commonest experience in questioning
the refugees. Eve