Old Milon
For the past month the great sun had been casting its broiling heat over the fields. Nature is unfolding radiantly beneath this shower of fire; as far as the eye can reach, the earth is green. To the ends of the horizon, the sky is blue. The Norman farms scattered over the plain look, from the distance, like little woods, enclosed in their girdle of slender beeches. From near at hand, when the worm-eaten gate is opened, it is as though one were looking at a giant garden, for all the aged apple trees, bony of limb like country folk, are in flower. The rows of black, crooked, twisted old trunks in the farmyard display their dazzling white and pink domes under the sky. The sweet perfume of their blossoming mingles with the rich stenches of the open cowshed and the steam of the fermenting dungheap overrun with hens.
It is noon. The family is at dinner in the shade of the pear-tree by the door: the father, the mother, the four children, the two servants, and the three hired men. There is little speech. The soup is eaten, then the cover is taken off the dish full of potatoes cooked in fat.
From time to time a maid rises and goes down to the cellar to refill the pitcher of cider.
The man, a big fellow of forty, gazes at a vine, still bare of leaves, which grows up the front of his house, and runs, writhing like a snake, under the shutters, the whole length of the wall.
“The old man’s vine is budding early this year,” he remarks at last. “Maybe it will bear.”
The woman also turns round and looks at it, without speaking.
The vine is planted on the exact spot where the old man was shot.
It was during the war of 1870. The Prussians were occupying the entire district. General Faidherbe, with the Northern army, was putting up a stout resistance.
The Prussian staff was quartered at this farm. The old peasant who owned it, old Milon, Pierre Milon, had taken them in and installed them as comfortably as he could.
For a month the German advance-guard had remained in the village, reconnoitring. The French remained immovable ten leagues away; yet every night Uhlans kept disappearing.
All the detachments of scouts, those who were sent out on picket duty, when only two or three men set out together, never returned.
They were found dead in the morning, in a field, beside a farmyard, or in a ditch. Their horses lay at the roadside, with their throats cut with a sabre.
These murders all appeared to be committed by the same men, who could not be discovered.
The whole district was under a reign of terror. Peasants were shot on mere denunciation, and women imprisoned; an attempt was made to frighten the children into revealing the truth. Nothing was discovered.
But one morning old Milon was seen lying in his stable, with a slash cut across his face.
Two disembowelled Uhlans were found three kilometres from the farm. One still held his bloodstained weapon in his hand. He had fought, had defended himself.
A council of war was immediately established in the open, in front of the farm, and the old man was brought in.
He was sixty-eight. He was small, thin, and slightly crooked, with big hands like the claws of a crab. His faded, thin hair, light as a duckling’s down, concealed none of the flesh on his skull. The brown, creased skin on his neck showed veins which were lost under the jaws and reappeared at the temples. He was known throughout the neighbourhood as a miser and a hard man in business.
He was made to stand, between four soldiers, in front of the kitchen table, which had been carried out of doors. Five officers and the colonel sat facing him.
The colonel began speaking, in French:
“Father Milon, since we have been here, we have had nothing but praise for you. You have always been obliging, and even zealous, in our service. But today a terrible charge rests upon you, and the matter must be cleared up. How did you get the wound in your face?”
The peasant did not reply.
“Your silence condemns you, Milon,” continued the colonel. “But I will have an answer from you, do you hear? Do you know who killed the Uhlans who were found this morning near the Calvary?”
“It was me,” said the old man in a clear voice.
Amazed, the colonel remained silent for a second, staring fixedly at the prisoner. Old Milon remained impassive, with his besotted peasant expression, his eyes lowered as though he were talking to his priest. One thing only revealed his inner distress; again and again he kept swallowing his saliva, with a visible effort, as though his throat were tightly constricted.
The man’s family, his son Jean, his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, stood ten paces back, in frightened consternation.
“Do you also know who killed all the scouts in our army corps, who have been found every morning, in the district, for the past month?” went on the colonel.
“It was me,” replied the old man, with the same brutish impassivity.
“You killed all of them?”
“Yes, all of them; it was me.”
“You alone?”
“Me alone.”
“Tell me how you set about it.”
This time the man seemed affected; the necessity of speaking at some length visibly embarrassed him.
“How do I know?” he stammered. “I just did it like it happened.”
“I warn you that you will have to tell me everything,” said the colonel. “So you will do well to make up your mind to it at once. How did you begin?”
The man flung an uneasy glance to his anxious family behind him. He hesitated for another instant, then suddenly made up his mind.
“I was coming home one night, maybe ten o’clock, the day after you got here. You and your men, you’d taken more than fifty crowns’ worth of my forage, with a cow and two sheep. I said to myself: ‘So many times as they take twenty crowns’ worth of stuff, so many times I’ll pay them out for it.’ And I’d other things on my mind, too; I’ll tell you about them later. And then I saw one of your troopers smoking his pipe in my ditch, behind my barn. I went and got down my scythe, and came up very softly behind him; he never heard a sound. And I cut off his head with one blow, with a single blow, like an ear of corn; he never so much as said ‘Oh!’ You’ve only to look in the pond: you’ll find him there in a coal sack, with a stone off the wall.
“I had my scheme. I took all his things, from boots to cap, and hid them in the cement-kiln in Martin wood, behind the yard.”
The old man was silent. The astounded officers gazed at one another. The questioning went on again; and this is what they learnt:
Once the murder had been done, the man had lived this idea: “Kill Prussians!” He hated them with the cunning, desperate hatred of a peasant at once avaricious and patriotic. He had his scheme, as he said. He waited for a few days.
He was left free to come and go, enter and depart at his will, so humble, submissive, and obliging had he shown himself to the conquerors. Every night he saw the vedettes go out; and he went out himself, one night, having heard the name of the village for which the troopers were bound, and having learnt, thanks to the constant presence of the soldiers, the few words of German he needed.
He walked out of his own farmyard, slipped into the wood, reached the cement-kiln, walked to the far end of the long gallery, and, finding the dead man’s clothes on the ground, he put them on.
Then he went prowling through the fields, crawling along, following the embankments so as to conceal himself, stopping to listen at the faintest sound, restless as a poacher.
When he judged that the time had come, he went near the road and hid in a hedge. He waited again. At last, at about midnight, he heard a horse’s hoof ring out on the hard road. He set his ear to the ground, to make sure that only one horseman was approaching; then made ready.
The Uhlan came up at a fast trot, carrying dispatches. His eyes were on the lookout, and his ears alert. When he was no more than ten paces distant, old Milon crawled across the road, groaning: “Hilfe! Hilfe! Help, help!” The horseman stopped, recognised a dismounted German, imagined that he was wounded, got off his horse, and went up to him, without suspecting anything. As he bent over the stranger, he received the long curved blade of the sabre clean through the stomach. He fell, without a death struggle, only quivering with a few final tremors.
Then the Norman, radiant with an old peasant’s silent pleasure, rose and, to please himself, cut the throat of the corpse. Then he dragged it to the ditch and threw it in.
The horse was quietly waiting for its master. Old Milon got into the saddle and galloped off across the plain.
An hour later he perceived two more Uhlans side by side, returning to their camp. He went straight towards them, again shouting: “Hilfe! Hilfe!” The Prussians let him come on, recognising the uniform, without any distrust. And the old man dashed between them like a cannonball, felling both, one with his sabre, the other with a revolver.
Then he cut the throats of the horses, German horses! Then he went quietly back to the cement-kiln and hid a horse at the end of the dark gallery. He took off his uniform, put on his mean clothes again, and, getting into bed, slept till morning.
For the next four days he did not go out, as he was waiting for the end of the inquiry which had been opened; but on the fifth day he went out again and killed two more soldiers by the same stratagem.
Thenceforward he never stopped. Every night he wandered away, prowling about at random, killing Prussians first in one place, then elsewhere, galloping over the deserted fields, in the moonlight, a lost Uhlan, a hunter of men. Then, his task over, leaving the bodies lying in the roads behind him, the old horseman returned to hide his horse and uniform in the cement-kiln.
At about midday he would go out, with an unconcerned air, to take oats and water to his mount, which remained in the underground passage. He fed the beast without stint, for he demanded a great deal of work from it.
But, on the previous night, one of the men he had attacked had been on his guard, and had slashed the old peasant’s face with his sabre.
Even so, he had killed both men! He had once more returned, hidden his horse, and put on his humble clothes again; but while walking home, he had been overtaken by faintness and had crawled to the stable, unable to reach the house.
He was found there, bleeding, in the straw.
When he had ended his tale, he suddenly raised his head and stared proudly at the Prussian officers.
“Have you nothing more to say?” asked the colonel, pulling his moustache.
“No, nothing more; the score is paid: I’ve killed sixteen of them, not one more and not one less.”
“You know that you are going to die?”
“I never asked you for mercy.”
“Have you been in the army?”
“Yes. I’ve been to the wars, in my time. And besides, it was you that killed my father, who was a soldier under the first Emperor. Not counting that you killed my youngest son, François, last month, near Evreux. I owed you for that, and I’ve paid. We’re quits.”
The officers looked at one another.
The old man continued:
“Eight for my father, eight for my son, we’re quits. I never sought a quarrel with you! I don’t know you! I don’t even know where you come from. And here you are at my house, ordering people about as though you were at home. I had my revenge on the others. I don’t regret it.”
And, drawing up his crippled body, the old man folded his arms in the attitude of a humble hero.
For a long time the Prussians whispered together. A captain, who had also lost his son, the month before, defended the greathearted old peasant.
Then the colonel rose and went up to old Milon, saying, in a low voice:
“Listen, gaffer, there may be a way of saving your life, if you …”
But the man was not listening. His eyes were fixed upon the conquering officer, and, while the wind stirred the wisps of hair on his head, he made a frightful grimace which distorted his thin face, all seamed as it was by the sabre-gash, and, swelling his chest, he spat, with all his might, full in the Prussian’s face.
The furious colonel raised his hand, and for a second time the peasant spat in his face.
All the officers had risen and were shouting orders at the same time.
In less than a minute the old man, still quite impassive, was put against the wall and shot, smiling to Jean, his eldest son, his daughter-in-law, and the two little children, who stood watching, distracted with horror.