"Indignant! Really? Indignant, quotha! Here's a young bounder who tries to take your wife from you and who is let off with a few days' solitary confinement! Here's one of the leaders of those highwaymen who go about committing murder and pillage; and he goes home free to start pillaging and murdering again! Why, it's absurd! Just think: all those scoundrels who wanted war--emperors and princes and emperors' and princes'
wives--know nothing of war but its pomp and its tragic beauty and absolutely nothing of the agony that falls upon humbler people! They suffer morally in the dread of the punishment that awaits them, but not physically, in their flesh and in the flesh of their flesh. The others die. They go on living. And, when I have this unparalleled opportunity of getting hold of one of them, when I might take revenge on him and his confederates and shoot him in cold blood, as they shoot our sisters and our wives, you think it out of the way that I should put the fear of death into him for just ten minutes! Why, if I had listened to sound human and logical justice, I ought to have visited him with some trifling torture which he would never have forgotten, such as cutting off one of the ears or the tip of his nose!"
"You're perfectly right," said Paul.
"There, you see, you agree with me! I should have cut off the tip of his nose! What a fool I was not to do it, instead of resting content with giving him a wretched lesson which he will have forgotten by to-morrow!
What an ass I am! However, my one consolation is that I have taken a photograph which will constitute a priceless document: the face of a Hohenzollern in the presence of death. Oh, I ask you, did you see his face? . . ."
The car was passing through Ornequin village. It was deserted. The Huns had burnt down every house and taken away all the inhabitants, driving them before them like troops of slaves.
But they saw, seated amid the ruins, a man in rags. He was an old man.
He stared at them foolishly, with a madman's eyes. Beside him a child was holding forth its arms, poor little arms from which the hands were gone. . . .
THE END