A deep quiet, an atmosphere of silent, terrified foreboding hung over the city. Many of its inhabitants, fat and flabby businessmen waiting anxiously for the conquerors to come, trembled with fear lest the roasting spits and long kitchen knives of their comfortable homes be taken for weapons. Life seemed to have ground to a halt. Shops were closed and streets deserted. From time to time a stealthy figure slithered by, frightened by the silence, and keeping close to the shadows of the walls.

The strain of waiting made everyone long for the enemy to arrive.

On the afternoon following the departure of the French troops, a few Uhlans5 appeared out of the blue and galloped through the town. A short while later, a dark mass of troops swept down the hill of Sainte-Catherine as two further waves of invasion flooded the approaches from Darnetal and Boisguillaume. The advance guard of the three corps, arriving simultaneously, linked up on the Place de I’Hôtel de Ville. Along all the neighbouring streets, German troops poured, making the cobblestones ring with the heavy, measured stamp of their battalions.

Orders shouted in a foreign, gutteral tongue echoed between the walls of the houses, which appeared dead and deserted. Behind closed shutters many eyes watched the victors. The latter, according to the rules of war, were now masters both of the city and of the lives and fortunes of its denizens. These, in their darkened rooms, had fallen victim to the panic engendered by natural disasters, those devastating upheavals of the earth against which neither wisdom nor strength is of any avail. For the same feeling re-emerges each time the established order of things is upset, when security is destroyed and when everything protected by the laws of man or of nature finds itself at the mercy of some brutal, unreasoning force. The earthquake which crushes an entire population under the rubble of its houses; the river in swollen spate sweeping away the corpses of drowned peasants along with the bodies of their cattle and the rafters torn from their roofs; the glorious army which slaughters all who resist, takes others prisoner, pillaging by right of the sword, praising God to the roar of cannon; all of these are so many terrifying scourges which destroy our belief in eternal justice and any trust we may have been taught to place in divine protection or the power of human reason.