The Germans even established order, issuing the command—the village street to be cleaned on Saturday nights.
Nobody murmured, and the street was swept.
Then came misfortune.
Early one morning, before the cattle were driven to the watering place, gendarmes and soldiers with badges on their chests went along the clean street, knocking on windowpanes.
"Come out!"
Peasants began running out of their gates, barefoot, buttoning their clothes, and were handed an official notice: so much grain, wool, lard and eggs from the farmsteads named, to be handed over to the German authorities for a given sum in Reichsmarks.
A train of army carts was already standing in the square, in front of the church.
The German lodgers, helmets on their heads, rifles in their hands, stood at the gates of the huts where they were billeted, smiling.
The peasants scratched their heads.
Some declared they had nothing, others flung their caps on the ground.
"God knows we have no grain! We have none!
Cut us to pieces—we have nothing!"
And now the bailiff came in sight on the road, driving a gig.
It was not so much the soldiers or the gendarmes the peasants feared, as those gold-rimmed glasses, for Grigori Karlovich knew all, saw all.
He reined in his horse.
The police captain came up to the gig.
The two men conversed.
The police officer barked an order to the gendarmes, who entered the nearest yard and immediately found grain at the bottom of the dung heap.
Grigori Karlovich's glasses flashed when he heard the cries of the owner.
Alexei was walking up and down his yard in a state of confusion pitiable to see.
Matryona, her kerchief over her eyes, was crying in the porch.
"What do I want with their money, their marks?" cried Alexei, picking up now a fragment of wood, now a bit of a wheel, and chucking them into the nettles growing beside the fence.
Catching sight of a cock he stamped his foot and swore at it.
He shook the padlock on the door of the barn. "What will we have to eat?
Those marks of theirs?
It means they've decided to make beggars of us altogether!
To ruin us utterly!
To drive us back to the yoke!"
Semyon, who was sitting next to Matryona, said:
"It'll get worse.... They'll take your gelding."
"Oh, no they won't!
I'll use my axe, if they try that!"
"Too late, too late!"
"Oh-oh-oh!" wailed Matryona. "I'll tear their throats with my teeth!"
Someone rammed on the gate with the butt of a rifle.
The lodger came in, the fat German, serene, jolly, thoroughly at home.
He was followed by six gendarmes and a civilian with a trident (the hetman's cockade) on his official cap, and a register under his arm.
"There's plenty here," said the German, nodding towards the barn, "lard, Brot...."
Alexei cast a wild glance at him, stepped back and flung the great rusty key with all his strength at the feet of the hetman's clerk.
"Take care, you swine!" cried the latter.
"D'you want the rod, you son-of-a-bitch?''
Semyon thrust Matryona back with his elbow and rushed out of the porch but was instantly met by the broad blade of a bayonet at his chest.
"Halt!" shouted the German in harsh, imperious tones.
"Back, Russian!"
The military carts were being loaded all day, and only departed late in the night.
The village was thoroughly cleaned out.
No lamps were lit, nobody sat down to supper.
The women were wailing in the darkness of the huts, paper marks crumpled in their fists.
What would be the good of a man and his wife going to the town with those marks? They would find all the stalls empty: not so much as a nail, not a yard of stuff, not a scrap of leather.
The factories at a standstill.