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.