Monsieur Segotin's Story
there what we wanted to know. As for the common soldiers, they were, I suppose, the only people in Saint Hilaire upon whom those notices produced any impression at all.
"There was another curious placard. It seems that they credited us with a desire to leave Saint Hilaire, and that they feared lest their threats of shooting might not prove a sufficient deterrent. Already, no doubt, they foresaw the moment when every able-bodied Belgian would have a value in their eyes other than as a mark for rifle practice; I mean, the thought of the slavery to come was even then in their minds. At any rate, to discourage us from escaping into France—though how we could have done so I leave you to imagine, if you please—they set up a notice which informed us that the cholera was raging on the other side of the battle lines. Yet there was no cholera there whatever. It was just a lie. But if it should serve its purpose it was justified, one supposes, in their sight. Or would they think it necessary to justify such a small thing as a lie? For, after all, what are truth and falsehood and such things to a people who have invented a morality for themselves; whose only touchstone is whether any given thing does or does not serve the immediate purposes of Germany?
"Of course we were all numbered and ticketed and registered and pigeon-holed and docketed and vised and put on the file till we hardly knew whether we were human beings or abstract numerals or pieces of paper. To carry papers of identification is not
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