It was only after wandering through the splendid old
cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripped of everything worth stealing, and
going from street to street (we paused a long time in the one where
Calvin was born, a disagreeable, but I suppose useful, man!) that we
began to realize the slow torture inflicted by the Germans. Of course,
"lessons" had to be taught. Rebellious persons had to be "punished."
Nothing but justice had been done upon the unjust by their just
conquerors. And oh, how thorough and painstaking they were in its
execution!
As they'd destroyed all surrounding cities and villages, they had to put
the "evacuated" inhabitants somewhere (those they couldn't use as slaves
to work in Germany), so they herded the people by the thousand into
Noyon. That place had to be spared for the Germans themselves to live
in, being bigger and more comfortable than others in the neighbourhood;
so it was well to have as many of the conquered as possible interned
under their own sharp eyes. Noyon was "home" to six thousand souls
before the war. After the Germans marched in, it had to hold ten
thousand. But a little more room in the houses was thriftily obtained by
annexing all the furniture, even beds. Tables and chairs they took, too,
and stoves, and cooking utensils, which left the houses conveniently
empty, to be shared by families from Roye, and Nesle, and Ham, and
Chauny--oh, so many other towns and hamlets, that one loses count in
trying to remember!
How the people lived, they hardly know now, in looking back, some of
them told us, as we walked about with a French officer who was our
guide.
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