What had happened? The common cry of men so sharply foiled went up. "Nous sommes trahis!" The German troops in Vareddes, foreseeing immediate withdrawal, and surrounded by their own dead and dying, must somehow avenge themselves, on some one. "Hostages! The village has played us false! The Curé has been signalling from the church. We are in a nest of spies!"
So on the evening of the 7th, the old Curé, who had spent his day in the church, doing what he could for the wounded, and was worn out, had just gone to bed when there was loud knocking at his door. He was dragged out of bed, and told that he was charged with making signals to the French Army from his church tower, and so causing the defeat of the Germans.
He pointed out that he was physically incapable of climbing the tower, that any wounded German of whom the church was full could have seen him doing it, had the absurd charge been true. He reminded them that he had spent his whole time in nursing their men. No use! He is struck, hustled, spat upon, and dragged off to the Mairie. There he passed the night sitting on a hamper, and in the morning some one remembers to have seen him there, his rosary in his hand.
In one of the local accounts there is a touching photograph, taken, of course, before the war, of the Curé among the boys of the village. A mild reserved face, with something of the child in it; the face of a man who had had a gentle experience of life, and might surely hope for a gentle death.
Altogether some fourteen hostages, all but two over sixty years of age, and several over seventy, were taken during the evening and night. They ask why. The answer is, "The Germans have been betrayed!" One man is arrested because he had said to a German who was boasting that the German Army would be in Paris in two days--"All right!--but you're not there yet!" Another, because he had been seen going backwards and forwards to a wood, in which it appeared he had hidden two horses whom he had been trying to feed. One old man of seventy-nine could only walk to the yard in which the others were gathered by the help of his wife's arm. When they arrived there a soldier separated them so roughly that the wife fell.
Imagine the horror of the September night!--the terror of the women who, in the general exodus of the young and strong, had stayed behind with their husbands, the old men who could not be persuaded to leave the farms and fields in which they had spent their lives. "What harm can they do to us--old people?" No doubt that had been the instinctive feeling among those who had remained to face the invasion.