TWO:No excitementnow, I wonder"It is a pity, sir, that you did not arrive a day sooner, then you might have witnessed great barbarity of the Germans. If you walk on a little farther along the canal, you will see three persons hanging from a tree near Haccourt; one of these is a boy of fourteen. Nobody was allowed on the road, and as a patrol met these three persons, they concluded immediately that they were francs-tireurs, strung them up on the tree, without a trial of any sort, and in addition shot each a bullet through the head. To-day another patrol arrived and had the effrontery to tell the members of the Maastricht Red Cross that the boy had murdered a captain. And we are not allowed to remove the corpses. Horrible!... horrible!"
ONE:There was scarcely a sound to be heard till he had finished. People thrust forward, eager that no word should be missed. A sudden sneeze caused the whole court to start violently. It was a strange weird story, that only one listener believed in, and that was Hetty.In the end these stories of the soldiers convinced even the inhabitants that there had been francs-tireurs, but never in the place where they lived, always somewhere else. They could not believe that the Germans could be so cruel and wreck so much property if nothing at all had happened; and when at length the time came that they themselves were obliged to fly, many of them believed that their compatriots who elsewhere acted as francs-tireurs were to blame for all the dire calamities. But if they had had my opportunity to go "elsewhere" and gather information there, they would have been convinced of the untruth, and probably would have heard the name of their own village as90 the scene of the occurrence. That was how rumours and reports got about.
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