V. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CALVARY--THE GREAT CHARGE…

V. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CALVARY--THE GREAT CHARGE

At ten o'clock the men of Captain Beaudoin's company were still lying in the cabbage field on the plateau of Algeria, whence they had not stirred since early morning. The cross fire from the batteries on the Hattoy hill and the peninsula of Iges was increasing in violence, and had again just killed a couple of soldiers; but still no orders came to advance. Were they going to remain there all day then, allowing themselves to be pounded like that, without making any attempt at fighting?

The men were no longer even able to relieve their feelings by firing their chassepots, for Captain Beaudoin had succeeded in putting a stop to that furious and useless fusillade, directed upon the little wood over yonder, where not a single Prussian seemed to have remained. The sun was now becoming most oppressive; the men fairly roasted as they lay there under the flaming sky.

Jean, on turning round, felt anxious on seeing that Maurice's head had sunk to the ground. The young fellow's eyes were closed, and his cheek was close pressed to the soil; he looked, too, extremely pale and did not stir. 'Hallo, what's up?' asked Jean.

Maurice, however, had simply fallen asleep. He had been overcome by waiting and weariness, although death was on the wing all around. When he suddenly awoke again there was a calm look in his widely opened eyes, but the scared, wavering expression of the battlefield immediately returned to them. He had no notion how long his slumber had lasted; it seemed to him as though he were emerging from delightful, infinite nihility.

'Ah! that's funny,' he muttered, 'I've been asleep--it has done me good.'

Indeed, he now felt less of that painful oppression, the bone-splitting clasp of fright upon his temples and his ribs; and he began to poke fun at Lapoulle, who had not merely been expressing anxiety about Chouteau and Loubet, ever since their disappearance, but had even talked of going to look for them. That was a fine idea; all he wanted, no doubt, was to shelter himself behind a tree and smoke a pipe there! Pache opined that the two men had been detained at the ambulance, where there was probably a lack of bearers. Ah! that business of picking up the wounded under the enemy's fire was by no means a pleasant one. Full of the superstitious notions of his native village, Pache added that it was very unlucky to touch a corpse--whoever did so would soon die.

'Thunder! will you just shut up?' cried Lieutenant Rochas, who had overheard this remark. 'Does anybody die?'

Colonel de Vineuil, erect on his big charger a few paces away, turned his head at this, and smiled for the first time that morning, Then he again subsided into his motionless attitude, still impassively waiting for orders, whilst the shells continued raining around him.

Maurice, who had now become interested in the bearers, watched them as they searched about in the various folds of the ground. A field ambulance was being installed behind a bank, at the edge of the hollow road near by, and the bearers attached to it were beginning to explore the plateau. A tent was promptly pitched whilst the necessary matériel was removed from a van waiting on the road. Instruments, apparatus, and linen were produced--the few things, in fact, that were requisite for summary dressings pending the despatch of the wounded to Sedan, whither they were sent as rapidly as could be managed. Vehicles, however, were already becoming scarce. There were only some assistant surgeons in charge of the ambulance, and it was more particularly the bearers who gave proof of a stubborn, inglorious courage. Clad in grey, with the red cross of Geneva on their caps and their arm-badges, they could be seen venturing slowly and quietly under the projectiles, as far as the spots where the soldiers had fallen. They often crawled along on hands and knees, and endeavoured to take advantage of the various ditches and hedges, of all the protection that the ground afforded, never evincing any braggardism in unnecessarily exposing themselves to peril. As soon as they found any men on the ground their laborious task began, for many of those who were lying there had simply fainted, and it was necessary to distinguish the wounded from the dead. Some men had remained face downwards, and were stifling with their mouths in pools of blood; others had their throats full of earth, as though they had bitten the ground; others, again, were lying in a heap, pell-mell, with their arms and legs contracted and their chests half crushed. The bearers carefully extricated and picked up those who were still breathing, stretching their limbs and raising their heads, which they cleaned as well as they could manage. Each bearer carried a can of water, in the use of which he was extremely sparing. And one or another of them would often be seen kneeling on the same spot for many minutes together, trying to revive some wounded man and waiting for him to open his eyes.

At fifty yards or so, on his left hand, Maurice noticed one bearer looking for the wound of a little soldier, from one of whose sleeves a streamlet of blood trickled continuously. This was a case of hæmorrhage, and the man with the red cross having at last found the wound managed to stop the flow of blood by compressing the artery. In this manner the bearers attended to all urgent cases. Whenever there was a fracture they were not only particularly careful how they moved the man, but they fixed and bandaged his damaged limb, so that his condition might not be aggravated by transport. The conveyance of the wounded to the ambulance was indeed the great affair; the bearers supported those who could still walk, and carried others either in their arms like babies or in pick-a-back fashion. At times also, according to the difficulties of the case, two, three, or four of them assembled and formed a seat with their joined hands, or carried the sufferer away in a horizontal position, by his legs and shoulders. To supplement the regulation stretchers, recourse was had to all sorts of ingenious devices; at times a stretcher would be formed by linking a couple of chassepots together with knapsack-straps. And all over the bare plateau which the shells were ploughing the bearers could be seen, now single, now in small parties, gliding along with their burdens, bending their heads, testing the ground with their feet, and displaying prudent but admirable heroism.

Whilst Maurice was watching one of them on his right hand, a thin, puny fellow, who, like some toilsome ant burdened with too large a grain of wheat, was staggering along with bended legs, carrying a heavy sergeant whose arms were entwined around his neck, he suddenly saw both men topple over and disappear amid the explosion of a shell. When the smoke had cleared off the sergeant again appeared to view, lying on his back and without any fresh wound, whereas the bearer was stretched beside him with his flank ripped open. And thereupon another bearer came up, another busy ant, who after turning his comrade over and finding him dead, again picked up the wounded sergeant and carried him away.

Maurice thereupon remarked to Lapoulle: 'Well, if you like their job better than ours, just go and lend them a hand.'

For a moment or so the batteries of St. Menges had been firing their utmost, and the hailstorm of projectiles was becoming more violent. Captain Beaudoin, who was still nervously walking up and down in front of his company, at last ventured to approach the colonel. It was pitiful, said he, that the spirits of the men should be worn out like that, by long hours of idle waiting.

'I have no orders,' stoically repeated the colonel.

Just then General Douay was again seen galloping past, followed by his staff. A few minutes previously he had met General de Wimpffen, who had hastened to this part of the field to beg him to hold out; and this he had thought he might promise to do, on the express condition, however, that the Calvary of Illy, on his right, should be defended. If the position of Illy were lost, he should be unable to answer for anything; for a retreat would then become unavoidable. General de Wimpffen declared that some troops of the First Corps were about to occupy the Calvary, and, in fact, almost immediately afterwards a regiment of Zouaves was seen to establish itself there; whereupon General Douay, feeling more at his ease, consented to send Dumont's division to the support of the Twelfth Corps, which was being hard pressed. A quarter of an hour afterwards, however, he was returning from an inspection of his left wing, which still presented a firm front, when, on raising his eyes, he gave vent to a cry of dismay, for the Calvary was bare: not a Zouave remained there. Under the terrific fire from the Fleigneux batteries the position was not tenable, and had consequently been abandoned. In despair, foreseeing the disaster that must overwhelm the army, General Douay was galloping off to rejoin his right wing, when he encountered Dumont's division falling back in disorder, panic-stricken, and mingled with some remnants of the First Corps. The latter, after its early retreat, had failed to reconquer the positions it had held at dawn, and, leaving Daigny in possession of the Saxons, and Givonne in that of the Prussian Guard, it had been obliged to proceed northwards through the wood of La Garenne, cannonaded by the batteries which the enemy planted upon every crest from one to the other end of the valley. The terrible circle of flame and iron was closing up. Whilst a portion of the Prussian Guard turned the heights and proceeded on its westward march towards Illy, the Fifth German Corps, screened by the Eleventh, which was in possession of St. Menges, still continued on its easterly course, already leaving Fleigneux behind it, and incessantly throwing its artillery forward with the most impudent temerity; its commanders being so convinced, indeed, of the ignorance and powerlessness of the French generals that they did not even wait for infantry to support their gunners. It was now midday, and the whole horizon was glowing and thundering, raining cross fires upon the Seventh and First French Corps.

And now, whilst the foe's artillery was in this wise preparing for the supreme attack on the Calvary, General Douay determined upon a last desperate effort to reconquer it. He despatched orders, threw himself in person among the fugitives of Dumont's division, and succeeded in forming a column which he hurled upon the plateau. It held out there for a few minutes, but the bullets rained so thickly, and such an avalanche of shells swept the bare, treeless fields, that a panic speedily broke out, and carried the men down the slopes again, whirling them away like bits of straw caught in a storm. The general was obstinate, however, and ordered up other regiments.

An estafette, galloping past, shouted some order to Colonel de Vineuil amid the fearful uproar. The colonel was already erect in his stirrups with his face aglow; and brandishing his sword and pointing to the Calvary, he cried: 'It's our turn at last, my boys! Forward, up yonder!'

Inspirited by the colonel's manner, the 106th set out. Beaudoin's men had been among the first to spring to their feet, jesting together, and remarking that they felt quite rusty, and had every joint clogged with earth. They had taken but a few steps, however, when so violent became the enemy's fire that they had to dive into a shelter-trench which they luckily came upon. They filed along it, bending double.

'Take care, youngster,' said Jean to Maurice; 'here's the rub. Don't show the tip of your nose even; if you do, it will surely be carried away. And get your bones well together if you don't want to drop any of them on the road. Those who come back from this affair will be lucky ones.'

Amid the buzzing, mob-like clamour that filled his head, Maurice could scarcely hear the corporal. He no longer knew whether he was afraid or not; he ran along, carried onward by the gallop of his comrades and destitute of any personal will, having but one desire, that of finishing the business at once. And so completely had he become a mere wave of this marching torrent, that he felt panic seize hold of him and was ready to take to flight as soon as a sudden recoil set in at the farther end of the trench, at view of the bare ground remaining to be climbed. The instinct of self-preservation broke loose within him; swayed by the impulses around him his muscles rebelled against his duty.

Some men were already turning back, when the colonel threw himself in their way. 'Come, my boys,' said he, 'you don't mean to grieve me like that; you are surely not going to behave like cowards! Remember, that the 106th has never recoiled; you would be the first to stain our colours!'

Urging on his horse he barred the way, expostulating in turn with each of the fugitives, and speaking of France in a voice that was tremulous with tears.

Lieutenant Rochas was so affected by the scene that he flew into a violent passion, and, raising his sword, began beating the men with it, as though it were a stick. 'You dirty curs!' he shouted, 'I'll kick you all the way up--that I will! Mind you obey orders, or I'll smash the jaw of the first man who turns tail.'

This violence, however, this idea of kicking soldiers into fighting, was not to the colonel's taste. 'No, no, lieutenant,' he said; 'they'll all follow me. Isn't that so, my boys? You won't let your old colonel face the Prussians all alone? Forward then, up yonder!'

Thereupon he set out, and they one and all followed him, feeling that he had talked to them like a father whom they could not abandon without showing themselves to be arrant cowards. And he quietly rode across the bare fields on his big charger, whilst his men scattered and spread themselves out like skirmishers, taking advantage of the slightest cover. The ground rose, and more than five hundred yards of stubble and beetroot fields had to be crossed before reaching the Calvary. Instead of the correct lines of the classical assault, such as is witnessed in sham-fighting, all that could be seen in a minute or two was the backs of the men as they bent double and glided along close to the ground, now singly, and now in little groups, now crawling on their knees, and now suddenly springing forward like insects, making their way to the summit, by dint of agility and cunning. The hostile batteries must have perceived them, for the soil was ploughed up by the shells which fell so frequently that there was no pause in the detonations. On the way five of the men were killed, and a lieutenant was cut clean in half.

Maurice and Jean were lucky enough to come upon a hedge, behind which they were able to run on without being seen. A bullet, however, here penetrated the temple of one of their comrades, who, in falling, almost tripped them up. They had to push him aside with their feet. They no longer paid any attention to the dead; there were too many of them. The horrors of the battlefield--a wounded man whom they perceived howling and holding in his entrails with both hands, a horse, which was still dragging itself along although its haunches were broken--all the frightful agonies displayed to view had ended by no longer affecting them. Their only sufferings were occasioned by the oppressive heat of the midday sun which was biting into their shoulders.

'How thirsty I am!' stammered Maurice; 'it seems as if my throat were full of soot. Can't you smell that horrible stench of burning wool?'

Jean nodded: 'It was the same at Solferino. Perhaps it's the smell of war. Wait a bit; I've still some brandy left, we'll drink a drop together.'

They quietly halted for a minute behind the hedge, but the brandy burnt their stomachs, instead of quenching their thirst. That burning taste in their mouths was quite exasperating. And, besides, they felt famished, and would willingly have devoured the half-loaf which Maurice still had in his knapsack. But was there any possibility of getting at it? Other men were each moment coming up behind them, and pushing them onward. At last, they too bounded over the last slope and found themselves upon the plateau, at the very foot of the Calvary, the old stone cross reared between two meagre lime-trees, and eaten away here and there by the wind and the rain.

'Ah, dash it! here we are at last!' Jean exclaimed; 'but the thing is to stop here.'

He was right. As Lapoulle, in a plaintive voice, remarked to the amusement of his comrades, the spot was hardly a pleasant one. And now, once again, they all stretched themselves among some stubble. Nevertheless three more men were speedily killed. A perfect hurricane was raging up there; the projectiles came from St. Menges, Fleigneux, and Givonne, in such numbers that vapour seemed to issue from the soil, as happens during a heavy storm of rain. Evidently enough, the position could not be long retained unless artillery promptly arrived to support the men who had been so daringly sent to the front. General Douay, it was said, had given orders to run up a couple of batteries of the reserve artillery; and the men looked round anxiously every moment, waiting for these guns which did not arrive.

'It's ridiculous, ridiculous!' repeated Captain Beaudoin, who had again resumed his jerky promenade. 'A regiment ought not to be sent to an exposed position like this without being at once supported.' Then, noticing a dip in the ground on his left, he called out to Rochas: 'I say, lieutenant, the company might lie down there.'

Rochas, erect and motionless, shrugged his shoulders: 'Oh! captain, here or there, it's all the same. The best is not to stir.'

Thereupon Beaudoin, who as a rule never swore, flew into a passion. 'But, d---- it, we shall all leave our carcases here,' said he; 'we can't allow ourselves to be destroyed in this fashion.'

And, getting obstinate, he determined to inspect the position which he had pointed out as a preferable one. He had not taken a dozen steps, however, when he disappeared in a sudden explosion. His right leg was smashed by a splinter of a shell, and he fell upon his back, raising a shrill cry, like a woman surprised.

'It was a dead certainty,' muttered Rochas; 'so much moving about does no good. Besides, there's no escape from fate.'

Some of the men raised themselves up on seeing their captain fall; and as he called for help, begging that they would carry him away, Jean at last ran to him, immediately followed by Maurice.

'In heaven's name, my friends, don't abandon me; carry me to the ambulance.'

'Well, sir, it won't be an easy job. However, we'll try.'

They were already concerting as to how they should lift him, when, sheltered behind the hedge which they had previously skirted, they noticed a couple of bearers who appeared to be waiting for employment. Jean and Maurice signed to them energetically and prevailed upon them to approach. If these men could only carry the captain to the ambulance without mishap, he might be saved. The road was a long one, however, and the storm of iron hail was increasing in violence.

As the bearers, after tightly bandaging the wounded limb, were carrying the captain away on their joined hands, one of his arms being passed round each of their necks, Colonel de Vineuil, who had been informed of the casualty, rode up, urging on his horse. He had a liking for the young officer, whom he had known ever since he had left St. Cyr, and he showed himself much affected. 'Keep up your courage, my poor fellow,' said he; 'it won't be anything serious. They'll save you.'

The captain made a gesture of relief, as though a great deal of courage had at last come to him. 'No, no,' he answered; 'it's all over, and I prefer it should be so. The exasperating thing is having to wait for what we cannot avoid.'

He was carried away, and the bearers were lucky enough to reach the hedge without any mishap. They swiftly skirted it with their burden, and when the colonel saw them disappear behind the clump of trees, where the ambulance was established, he gave a sigh of relief.

'But you yourself are wounded, sir,' Maurice suddenly exclaimed. He had just noticed that the colonel's left boot was covered with blood. The heel had been carried away, and a piece of leather had penetrated into the flesh of the leg.

M. de Vineuil quietly leant over his saddle and looked for a moment at his foot, which must have felt both burning hot and terribly heavy. 'Yes, yes,' he muttered, 'I caught that just now. But it's nothing, it doesn't prevent me from keeping in the saddle.' And as he rode off to take his place again at the head of his regiment, he added: 'A man can always get on when he's in the saddle and can stay there.'

The two batteries of the reserve artillery were now at last coming up, to the intense relief of the anxious soldiers, to whom it seemed as though these guns were bringing salvation, a rampart and thunder that would speedily silence the cannon of the foe over yonder. It was, moreover, a superb sight, so correctly were the batteries run up in order of battle, each gun followed by its caisson, the drivers astride the near-horses, and holding the off-horses by the bridle; the gunners seated on the boxes; and the corporals and sergeants galloping alongside in their respective places. It might have been thought they were parading, anxious to preserve the regulation distances as they dashed at full speed over the stubble, with a dull rumbling like that of a storm.

Maurice, who was again lying in a furrow, raised himself up, enraptured, and said to Jean: 'There, that is Honoré's battery on the left. I recognise the men.'

With a back-hander, Jean threw him to the ground again. 'Lie flat, and keep still,' he said.

With their cheeks resting on the soil, however, they both continued watching the battery, feeling greatly interested in the manœuvres that were being executed, and with their hearts beating quickly at sight of the calm, active bravery of the artillerymen from whom they yet expected victory.

The battery had suddenly halted on a bare summit, on their left hand, and in a moment everything was ready; the gunners sprang from the boxes and unhooked the limbers, and the drivers, leaving the pieces in position, wheeled their horses and withdrew to a distance of some fifteen yards, where they remained motionless, facing the enemy. The six guns were already levelled, set wide apart, in three sections, commanded by lieutenants, and united under the orders of a captain whose slim, extremely tall figure rose up, unluckily for him, like some conspicuous landmark. And when he had rapidly made a calculation, he was heard to exclaim: 'Sight at 1,700 yards.'

The mark was to be a Prussian battery established behind some bushes on the left of Fleigneux, and whose terrible fire was rendering the plateau of Illy untenable.

'Do you see,' again began Maurice, who was quite unable to hold his tongue, 'Honoré's gun is in the central section. There he is, leaning forward with the gun-layer--little Louis--we drank a glass together at Vouziers, as you may remember. And that driver over there who sits so stiffly on his horse, a beautiful chestnut, is Louis' chum, Adolphe.'

The whole stream of men, horses and matériel, was disposed in a straight line about a hundred yards in depth. First was the gun with its six gunners and its quartermaster,[29] farther off the limber and its four horses and its pair of drivers; then the caisson with its six horses and its three drivers; further still the ammunition and forage waggons and the field smithy; whilst the spare caissons and spare men and horses, provided to fill up any gaps in the battery, waited at some distance on the right, so that they might not be unnecessarily exposed in the enfilade of the firing.

Honoré was now attending to the loading of his gun. Two of his men were already bringing the charge and the projectile from the caisson, over which the corporal and the artificer were watching; and two other gunners, after inserting the serge-covered charge by the muzzle, at once rammed it carefully into position and then slipped in the shell, the points of which grated as they slid along the grooves. Then the assistant gun-layer, after pricking the cartridge with the priming-wire, swiftly applied the match to the touch-hole. Honoré was desirous of aiming this first shot himself, and half-lying on the block-trail, he worked the regulating screw to obtain the correct range, indicating the proper direction by a gentle, continuous wave of the hand, whilst the gun-layer, holding the lever behind him, imperceptibly moved the piece more to the right or more to the left.

'That must be right,' said Honoré, rising up.

The captain, with his lofty figure bent double, inspected the sighting. At each piece the assistant gun-layer was in position, holding the lanyard in readiness to pull the saw-like blade that ignited the fulminate. And the command was then given slowly, and in due order: 'Number one, fire! Number two, fire!'

The six shells were hurled into space, the guns recoiled and were brought back into position, whilst the quartermasters noted that their fire had not nearly reached the required distance. They rectified it; the practice began afresh in the same orderly fashion as before; and it was this precise routine, this mechanical labour that needed to be calmly and deliberately accomplished, that sustained the men's firmness. That beloved creature, the gun, grouped a little family around her, whose members were closely united by the bonds of a common occupation. The gun was indeed the connecting link, the one object of concern; it was for her that they all existed, the caisson, the waggons, the horses, even the men themselves. And from all this sprang the great cohesion of the battery, a steadfastness and tranquillity such as prevail in happy families.

Some acclamations from the men of the 106th had greeted the first discharge. At last, then, they were going to stop the jabbering of those Prussian cannon. But a feeling of disappointment immediately followed when it was seen that the shells did not travel the distance, most of them bursting in the air before reaching the bushes among which the enemy's artillery was hidden.

'Honoré,' resumed Maurice, 'says that the other guns are mere nails by the side of his. In his estimation his one will never be matched! See how lovingly he looks at it, and how carefully he has it sponged so that the dear thing may not feel too warm.'

In this way he jested with Jean, both of them quite inspirited by the smart, calm bravery of the artillerymen. In three shots, however, the Prussian batteries had regulated their fire; their range had at first been too long, but their practice now became so wonderfully accurate that their shells fell upon the French guns, which, despite every effort to increase their range, still failed to carry the distance. One of Honoré's men, on the left, was killed. The corpse was pushed aside, and the firing continued, still with the same careful regularity, and without the slightest display of haste. Projectiles were coming from, and exploding on all sides, whilst around each piece the same methodical manœuvres were repeated, the gun was loaded with its charge and shell, the sighting was regulated, the shot was fired, and the piece, having recoiled, was run up again as though the work absorbed these men to such a degree that they could neither see nor hear anything else.

Maurice, however, was especially struck by the demeanour of the drivers, who, stiffly erect on their horses, confronted the enemy, fifteen yards or so in the rear of the guns. Adolphe was among them with his broad shoulders, bushy fair moustaches, and rubicund face; and a man needed to be brave, indeed, to stay there like that, without so much as blinking his eyes, whilst he watched the shells coming straight towards him, and without being able even to bite his nails by way of occupation, and in order to divert his thoughts. The gunners on their side were working; they had so much to attend to that they could not think of danger, whereas the motionless drivers saw but death before their eyes, and had full leisure to ponder upon it and await its coming. They were compelled to face the enemy, because, had they turned their backs upon him, an irresistible impulse to flee might have carried both men and horses away. A man can brave danger when he sees it. There is no more obscure and yet no greater heroism than this.

Another gunner had just had his head carried off; two horses, harnessed to a caisson, had fallen with their bellies ripped open; and the fire of the foe was proving so slaughterous that it was evident the entire battery would be dismounted, if they obstinately remained on this same spot. Despite all the inconvenience of a change of position, it was necessary to foil the enemy's terrible fire, and the captain no longer hesitated, but ordered up the fore-carriages.

The dangerous manœuvre was executed with lightning-like rapidity; the drivers wheeled round again, bringing back the limbers, to which the gunners at once hooked the carriage trails. Whilst this was being accomplished, however, a lengthy front was developed, at sight of which the enemy redoubled his fire. Three more men thereupon fell to the ground. Then the battery dashed off at a fast trot, describing an arc through the fields, and establishing itself some fifty yards farther away on the right, upon a little plateau on the other side of the position held by the 106th. The guns were unlimbered, the drivers again found themselves confronting the foe, and the fire began afresh, without a pause, and with so much commotion that the ground did not cease shaking.

All at once Maurice raised a cry. In three shots the Prussian batteries had again regulated their fire, and the third shell had fallen upon Honoré's gun. Honoré was seen to dart forward and feel the freshly made wound with a trembling hand; a large piece had been chipped off the bronze muzzle. The gun could still be worked, however, and as soon as the wheels had been cleared of the corpse of another gunner, whose blood had splashed the carriage, the practice was resumed.

'No, it isn't little Louis,' continued Maurice, venting his thoughts aloud. 'There he is aiming; he must be wounded, however, for he's only using his left arm. Ah! little Louis--he got on so well with Adolphe, on condition though that the gunner, the footman, should, in spite of his superior education, act as the humble servant of the driver, the mounted man----'

At this moment Jean, hitherto silent, interrupted Maurice with a cry of anguish: 'They can never stay there; we are done for!'

In less than five minutes, indeed, this new position had become as untenable as the previous one. The enemy's projectiles rained upon it with precisely the same accuracy. One shell smashed a gun and killed a lieutenant and two men. Every shot took effect, to such a degree, in fact, that if they obstinately lingered there neither a gun nor an artilleryman would soon remain. The enemy's fire was destruction incarnate; it swept everything away. And so, for the second time, the captain's voice rang out, ordering up the limbers.

Once more was the manœuvre executed, the drivers setting their horses at a gallop, and wheeling so that the gunners might again limber the pieces. This time, however, during the movement, a splinter gashed Louis' throat and tore away his jaw, and he fell across the block-trail which he had been raising. And just as Adolphe came up, at the moment when the enemy obtained a flank view of the line of teams, a furious volley swooped down. Adolphe fell, with his chest split open, and his arms outstretched, and in a last convulsion he caught hold of his comrade; and there they lay embracing, fiercely contorted, coupled together even in death.

But, despite the killing of many horses, despite the disorder which the slaughterous volley had wrought in the ranks, the entire battery was already ascending a slope, establishing itself in a more advanced position at a few yards from the spot where Maurice and Jean were lying. The guns were now unlimbered for the third time, the drivers again found themselves facing the enemy, whilst the gunners immediately reopened fire with the obstinacy of unconquerable heroism.

'This is the end of everything,' said Maurice, in a dying voice.

It seemed, indeed, as though earth and sky were mingled. The stones split asunder, dense smoke occasionally hid the sun. The horses stood with their heads low, dizzy, stupefied amid the fearful uproar. Wherever the captain appeared he seemed abnormally tall. At last he was cut in two--snapped, and fell like a flag-staff.

The effort was being tenaciously, deliberately prolonged, however, especially by Honoré and his men. He, himself, despite his stripes, now had to help work the gun, for only three gunners remained to him. He levelled and fired whilst the three men fetched the ammunition, loaded the piece, and handled the sponge and the rammer. Spare men and horses had been asked for to fill up the gaps that death had made, but they were a long time coming, and meanwhile it was necessary to do without them. The worry was that the gun still failed to carry the distance, almost all the projectiles bursting in the air, and doing but little harm to those terrible batteries of the foe whose fire was so efficacious. And all at once Honoré swore an oath which rang out above all the thunder of the cannonade: there was no end to their ill luck, the gun's right wheel had just been pounded to pieces. Thunder! So now the poor creature had a leg broken, and was thrown on her side, with her nose on the ground, crippled and useless! Honoré shed big tears at the sight, and clasped her neck with his twitching hands, as though he hoped to set her erect again by the mere warmth of his affection. To think of it!--the best gun of all, the only one that had managed to send a few shells over yonder! Then a mad resolution took possession of him, that of immediately replacing the shattered wheel under the enemy's fire. With the assistance of a gunner, he himself went to fetch a spare wheel from the ammunition waggon, and the work then began, the most dangerous that can be performed on the field of battle. Fortunately the spare men and horses had eventually arrived, and a couple of fresh gunners lent a helping hand.

But once again the battery was dismantled. This heroic madness could be carried no farther. Orders to fall back for good were on the point of being given.

'We must make haste, comrades!' shouted Honoré. 'We'll take her away at any rate; they sha'n't have her.'

'Twas his one idea, to save his gun, like others save the colours. And he was still speaking when he was annihilated, his right arm torn away and his left side ripped open. He fell upon the gun and remained there as though stretched upon a bed of honour, his head still erect, and his face unscathed, turned with a fine expression of anger towards the enemy yonder. A letter--Silvine's--had slipped through a rent in his uniform and was stained with drop after drop of his blood, as he grasped it with his twisted fingers.

The only lieutenant who had not been killed now shouted the command: 'Limber up!'

One of the caissons had already blown up with the commotion of fireworks, fusing and bursting. The horses of another caisson had to be taken to save a gun whose team was lying on the ground. And, this last time, when the drivers had wheeled, and the four remaining guns had again been limbered, the battery galloped off without stopping until it was some eleven hundred yards away, behind the fringing trees of the wood of La Garenne.

Maurice had seen everything, and with a faint shudder of horror he repeated in a mechanical fashion: 'Oh! the poor fellow, the poor fellow!'

It seemed as though his grief imparted increased intensity to the growing pain that was griping his stomach. The animal part of his nature was rebelling; his strength was exhausted; he was dying of hunger. His eyesight was becoming dim, he was no longer conscious even of the danger to which the regiment was exposed, now that the battery had been compelled to fall back. At any moment, indeed, the plateau might be attacked by the enemy in force.

'I say,' he remarked to Jean, 'I really must eat--I'd rather eat and be killed at once.'

Having opened his knapsack, he took the bread in his trembling hands and began to bite it voraciously. The bullets whistled by, a couple of shells exploded a few yards away, but nothing had any existence for him save his hunger, which must be satisfied.

'Will you have a bit, Jean?'

Stupefied, his eyes swollen, and his stomach rent by a similar craving, Jean looked at him and answered: 'Yes, all the same I'll have some; I feel too bad.'

They divided the bread and ate it gluttonously, without a thought of anything else so long as a mouthful of it remained. And it was only after they had finished that they again saw their colonel, on his big charger, with his bloody boot. The 106th was being overlapped on either side. Some companies must have already fled, and M. de Vineuil, compelled to give way to the torrent, raised his sword, and, with his eyes full of tears, exclaimed, 'God shield us, my lads, since He would not take us!' Bands of fugitives were surrounding him, and he disappeared from view in a depression of the ground.

Without knowing how they had got there, Jean and Maurice next found themselves with the remnants of their company behind the hedge which they had skirted in the morning. There remained at most some forty men under the command of Lieutenant Rochas. The colours were with them, and with a view of trying to save them, the sub-lieutenant, acting as ensign, had just rolled the silk around the staff. They all filed along to the end of the hedge, and then threw themselves among some little trees on a slope, where Rochas ordered them to open fire again. Sheltered and scattered in skirmishing order, the men were able to hold out here, the more especially as a mass of cavalry was being set in motion on their right, and regiments of infantry were again being brought into line to support it.

And now Maurice realised the slow, invincible encompassment which was on the point of being completed. Early in the morning he had seen the Prussians debouching from the defile of St. Albert, reaching first St. Menges, and then Fleigneux, and now he could not only hear the cannon of the Prussian Guard thundering behind the wood of La Garenne, but began to perceive some other German uniforms coming up by the heights of Givonne. But a few minutes more and the circle would close up, and the Guard would join hands with the Fifth German Corps, surrounding the French army with a living wall, an annihilating belt of artillery. It must have been with the desperate thought of making a last effort, of striving to break through this marching wall, that a division of the reserve cavalry, that commanded by General Margueritte, was now being massed behind a fold in the ground in readiness to charge. They, were, indeed, about to charge to death, without any possibility of effecting their object, but for the honour of France. And Maurice, thinking of Prosper, witnessed the terrible sight.

Since early morning Prosper had done nothing but urge on his horse, continually marching and counter-marching from one to the other end of the plateau of Illy. He and his comrades had been wakened one by one at dawn, without any trumpet call; and in order that they might make their coffee they had ingeniously contrived to screen each fire with a cloak so as not to set the Prussians on the alert. After that they had remained in ignorance of everything. They could certainly hear the guns, see the smoke, espy distant movements of infantry, but in the complete inaction in which they were left by the generals they knew nothing of the incidents of the battle, its importance and its results. Prosper, for his own part, was so sleepy that he could hardly keep up. Fatigue was the great suffering: bad nights, an accumulation of weariness, followed by invincible somnolence when the men rocked in the saddle. Prosper himself became a prey to hallucinations--fancied at times that he was on the ground, snoring on a mattress of pebbles; or dreamt that he was in a comfortable bed with clean white sheets. Sometimes he actually slept in the saddle for minutes together, becoming a mere moving thing, carried along according to the chances of the trot. In this way some of his comrades had occasionally fallen from their mounts. They were all so weary that the trumpet calls no longer awoke them; it was only by dint of kicking that they could be roused from oblivion and set upon their legs.

'What game are they having, what game are they having with us?' Prosper kept on saying, in the hope that by doing so he might shake off his irresistible torpor.

The cannon had been thundering since six o'clock. A couple of comrades had been killed by a shell beside him while they were ascending a hill, and, farther on, three others had fallen to the ground, riddled with bullets which had come no one knew whence. This useless, dangerous military promenade across the battlefield was altogether exasperating. At last, however, at about one o'clock, he realised that the commanders had decided to get them killed in a decent fashion, at any rate. The whole of General Margueritte's division, three regiments of Chasseurs d'Afrique, one of Chasseurs de France, and one of Hussars had just been assembled in a fold of the ground, on the left of the road, and slightly below the Calvary. The trumpets had sounded 'Dismount,' and the officers thereupon gave orders to tighten the girths and secure the kits.

Prosper dismounted, stretched himself, and fondled Zephyr with his hand. Poor Zephyr! he was as stultified as his master, quite worn out by the stupid life he was led. Besides, he carried such a multitude of things: First, there was the linen in the holsters, and the cloak rolled up above them; then the blouse, the overalls, and the haversack, with everything required for grooming, behind the saddle; and in addition there was the provision bag thrown across the horse's back, without mentioning the goat-skin, the water-can, and the mess-tin. The Chasseur's heart was flooded with tender compassion for his steed as he tightened the girth and made sure that all the paraphernalia on his back was properly secured.

It was a trying moment. Prosper, who was not more of a coward than his comrades, felt his mouth quite parched, and lighted a cigarette. When orders are given to charge, each man may fairly say: 'It's all up with me this time;' so few, indeed, are the chances in his favour.

Some five or six minutes went by, and the men told one another that General Margueritte had gone forward to reconnoitre the ground. Meantime, they waited. The five regiments had been assembled in three columns; each column was seven squadrons deep, so there would be plenty of food for the enemy's cannon.

All at once the trumpets sounded: 'To horse!' And almost immediately afterwards another command rang out: 'Draw swords!'

The colonel of each regiment had already galloped forward, taking up his regulation position--at seven-and-twenty yards in advance of the front. The captains were at their places at the head of their men. Then the spell of waiting began again, amid death-like silence. No longer a sound, not even the faintest breath was heard under the fierce sun. The men's hearts alone were beating. But another command, the last, and then this motionless mass would spring forward, and rush onward with the speed of a tempest.

At that moment, however, a mounted officer, wounded and supported by two men, appeared upon the hill-crest. At first he was not recognised; then a roar resounded, swelling into a furious clamour. It was General Margueritte, whose cheeks had been transpierced by a bullet, and who was destined to die of his wound. He was unable to speak, but he waved his arm towards the enemy.

The clamour was still increasing: 'Our general! Vengeance! vengeance!'

Thereupon the colonel of the first regiment raised his sabre in the air, and cried in a voice like thunder: 'Charge!'

The trumpets sounded and the mass started off, first of all at a trot. Prosper was in the front rank, but almost at the end of the right wing. The greatest danger is in the centre, upon which the enemy instinctively directs his more violent fire. When they had reached the crest of the Calvary and were beginning to descend the other slope, in the direction of the broad plain, Prosper could distinctly see, a thousand yards ahead of him, the Prussian squares against which they were being hurled. He trotted along, however, as though he were in a dream, swaying like a man asleep, feeling light and buoyant, and with his brain so empty that he had no idea of anything. He had become a mere machine worked by an irresistible power. Orders were repeated for the men to keep as close together as possible, knee to knee, so that they might acquire the resistive strength of granite. And as the trot became swifter and changed into a desperate gallop, the Chasseurs d'Afrique in Arab fashion began raising savage yells which maddened their horses. It soon became a diabolical race, at hellish speed, and as an accompaniment to the furious gallop and the ferocious howls there resounded the crackling of the fusillade, the bullets striking the cans and pans of the advancing squadrons, the brass on the uniforms of the men and on the harness of the horses, with the loud pit-a-pat of hail. And through this hail swept the shells--the hurricane of wind and thunder which shook the ground and impregnated the sunlight with a stench akin to that of burning wool and sweating beasts.

At five hundred yards from the foe a furious eddy, sweeping everything away, threw Prosper from his horse. He caught Zephyr by the mane, however, and managed to get into the saddle again. Riddled and broken by the fusillade, the centre had just given way, and the two wings were whirling round, falling back to re-form and rush forward once more. This was the fatal, foreseen annihilation of the first squadron. The fallen horses barred the ground; some had been struck dead on the spot; others were struggling in violent throes; and dismounted soldiers could be seen running hither and thither at the full speed of their little legs in search of other horses. The dead were already strewing the plain, and many riderless chargers continued galloping, coming back to the ranks of their own accord so that they might return at a mad pace to the fight, as though the powder fascinated them. The charge was resumed; the second squadron swept on with growing fury, the men bending low over their horses' necks, with their sabres on a level with the knee, ready to strike. Another couple of hundred yards were covered amid a deafening, tempestuous clamour. Yet again did the bullets make a gap in the centre, men and horses fell, arresting the onslaught with the inextricable obstruction of their corpses. And thus, in its turn, was the second squadron mowed down, annihilated, leaving the front place to those that followed behind it.

When, with heroic obstinacy, the third charge was made, Prosper found himself mixed up with some Hussars and Chasseurs de France. The regiments were mingling; there was now only a huge wave of horsemen which incessantly broke and re-formed, carrying whatever it met along with it. Prosper no longer had any idea of anything; he had surrendered himself to his horse, brave Zephyr, whom he was so fond of, and who seemed maddened by a wound in the ear. At present he was in the centre; other horses reared and fell around him; some men were thrown to the ground as by a hurricane, whilst others, though shot dead, remained in the saddle, and continued charging, showing but the whites of their eyes. And, this time, again, another two hundred yards having been covered, the stubble in the rear of the squadrons was littered with dead and dying. There were some whose heads had sunk deep into the soil. Others, who had fallen on their backs, gazed at the great round sun with terrified eyes starting from their sockets. Then there was a big black horse, an officer's charger, whose belly had been ripped open, and who vainly strove to rise with the hoofs of both forelegs caught in his entrails. Whilst the foe redoubled his fire, the wings whirled once again, and fell back, to return, however, to the charge with desperate fury.

It was, indeed, only the fourth squadron, at the fourth onslaught, that reached the Prussian lines. Prosper, with his sabre uplifted, smote the helmets and the dark uniforms that he saw through the smoky mist. Blood flowed, and on noticing that Zephyr's mouth was ensanguined, he imagined that it was through having bitten the foe. So frightful was the clamour becoming, that he could no longer hear himself shout, and yet his throat was being almost torn away by the yells that issued from it. Behind the first Prussian line, however, there was yet another one, then another, and then another. Heroism remained of no avail; those deep masses of men were like lofty herbage amid which horses and horsemen disappeared. Mow them down as you might, there were always thousands left standing. The firing continued with such intensity, the muzzles of the needle guns were so close, that uniforms were set on fire. All foundered, sank down among the bayonets; chests were transpierced, and skulls were split. Two-thirds of those regiments of horsemen were to remain on the field, and of that famous charge there would abide but the memory of the glorious madness of having attempted it. And, all at once, Zephyr, in his turn, was struck by a bullet full in the chest, and fell to the ground, crushing under him Prosper's right thigh, the pain of which was so acute that the Chasseur fainted.

Maurice and Jean, who had been watching the heroic gallop of the squadrons, gave vent to a cry of rage: 'Thunder! Bravery's not a bit of good.'

And then they continued discharging their chassepots, on their haunches behind the bushes of the little hillock, where they and their comrades were scattered in skirmishing order. Rochas himself had picked up a gun and joined in the firing. This time, however, the plateau of Illy was well lost, the Prussian troops were invading it from all sides. It must now have been about two o'clock, the junction of the hostile forces was at last being effected, the Fifth Corps and the Prussian Guard were meeting and buckling the belt.

All at once Jean was thrown to the ground. 'I'm done for,' he stammered.

A heavy blow, like that of a hammer, had struck him on the crown of the head, and his cap, torn and carried off, was lying behind him. He at first thought that his skull was split, that his brain was bare, and for a few seconds he dared not raise his hand to the spot, feeling certain he should find a hole there. Then, having ventured to do so, he drew away his hands and found them red with a thick flow of blood. And the pain was so great that he fainted.

At that same moment Rochas gave orders to fall back. A Prussian company was now no more than two or three hundred yards distant. If they remained they would be caught. 'Don't hurry, though,' said he, 'turn on the way and fire another shot. We will rally behind that low wall.'

Maurice, however, was in despair. 'We are surely not going to leave our corporal here, sir?'

'But what can be done if his account's settled?'

'No, no; he still breathes. Let's carry him.'

Rochas shrugged his shoulders as though to say that they could not encumber themselves with every man who fell. Then Maurice turned supplicatingly to Pache and Lapoulle: 'Come,' said he, 'lend me a hand. I'm not strong enough by myself.'

But they did not listen to him, did not hear him; the instinct of self-preservation was so absorbing that neither had thought for any but himself. They were already gliding along on their knees, disappearing at a gallop in the direction of the low wall. And now the Prussians were only a hundred yards away.

Shedding tears of rage, Maurice, who had remained alone with Jean, took him in his arms and endeavoured to carry him off. But he was indeed too weak, too puny, exhausted moreover by fatigue and anguish. Almost at the first step he staggered and fell with his burden. If he could only have seen a bearer! He looked about him wildly, fancied he could distinguish some bearers among the fugitive soldiers, and waved his arm to them. But nobody came. Then, collecting all his remaining strength, he again took up Jean, and succeeded in carrying him some thirty paces, when a shell having exploded near them, he fancied it was all over, and that he also was about to die on his comrade's body.

He slowly picked himself up, felt himself, found himself unscathed, without a scratch. Why did he not flee? There was still time; he could reach the wall in a few bounds, and that would mean salvation. Fear was coming back again, distracting him, and he was on the point of rushing away, when bonds, stronger even than death, held him back. No! it was impossible; he could not abandon Jean. It would have made him bleed from every pore; the fraternity that had sprung up between that peasant and himself extended to the depths of his being, to the very roots of life. Its origin might have been traced back, perhaps, to the first days of the world; for it was as though there had been but two men left in all creation, one of whom could not part from the other without parting from himself.

If Maurice had not eaten that crust of bread amid the shells, an hour previously, he would never have found the strength to do that which he now did. Later on, moreover, he was unable to recollect how he had accomplished it. He must have lifted Jean on to his shoulders, have dragged himself along, have halted and set out afresh a score of times amid the stubble and the bushes, stumbling over each stone he encountered, but still and ever setting himself upon his legs again. He was sustained by an unconquerable will, a resistive power that would have enabled him to carry a mountain. When he at last got behind the wall, he there again found Rochas and the few remaining men of the company, who were still firing, defending the colours which the sub-lieutenant was carrying under his arm.

No line of retreat had been indicated to the different army corps for adoption in the event of a defeat. This lack of foresight and the prevailing confusion left each general free to act as he pleased, and now they all found themselves thrown back on Sedan, within the formidable embrace of the victorious German armies. The Seventh Corps' Second Division was retiring in fairly good order, but the remnants of its other divisions, mingled with the remnants of the First Corps, were already rolling towards the town in a fearful mob--a torrent of rage and fright, in which men and horses were swept along.

Just then, however, Maurice was delighted to see Jean opening his eyes. He wished to wash his face for him, and as he was hastening to a rill near by, he was greatly astonished when, on his right hand, in the depths of a secluded valley, sheltered by rugged slopes, he again espied the same peasant whom he had seen in the morning, and who was still leisurely turning up the sod, guiding his plough drawn by a big white horse. Why should a day be lost? Corn would not cease growing, nor would the human race cease living simply because it pleased some men to fight.

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VI. THE WHITE FLAG--THE HORRORS OF AN AMBULANCE

At last, up above on the lofty terrace, whither he had climbed to obtain some idea of the situation, Delaherche again became excited by impatience to know what was happening. He saw very well that the shells were passing over the town, and realised that the three or four, which had burst through some of the surrounding roofs, could merely be infrequent replies to the fire of the Palatinate fort, so slack and inefficacious. But he distinguished nothing of the battle, and experienced a pressing desire for information which was quickened by the dread that he might lose both fortune and life in the catastrophe. So he went down, leaving the telescope up there, levelled upon the German batteries.

Once below, however, the sight which the central garden of the factory presented momentarily arrested his steps. It was nearly one o'clock, and the wounded were crowding into the ambulance. There was already a deficiency of the regulation conveyances, both of the two and the four wheelers; and ammunition and forage waggons, vans for the transport of matériel, in fact, whatever vehicles it had been possible to requisition on the battlefield, now made their appearance. Eventually there even came tilted and other carts belonging to cultivators, taken from farms, and to which stray horses had been harnessed. And heaped together in all these vehicles were the men who had been picked up and summarily attended to by the field ambulance. Frightful was the unloading of these poor fellows, some greenly pallid, and others violet from congestion. Many of them had fainted, and others were raising shrill plaints. Some, who were struck with stupor, surrendered themselves to the attendants with a look of terror, whilst a few expired as soon as touched, unable to endure the slightest shaking. To such a degree was the ambulance being invaded that in another moment there would not remain a single unoccupied mattress in the spacious drying-hall, and Surgeon-Major Bouroche was accordingly ordering the attendants to utilise the large litter of straw which he had spread at one end of the structure. As yet, however, he and his assistants sufficed for the requisite operations. He had merely asked that a second table, with a mattress and some oilcloth, might be placed in the shed where he operated. Here an assistant swiftly applied a napkin dipped in chloroform to the patient's nose, the narrow steel blades flashed before the eyes; the saws gave out a faint rasping sound, and the blood flowed in sudden spurts, instantly arrested. The wounded were brought in and carried away amid a rapid coming-and-going, time being scarcely allowed for wiping the oilcloth with a sponge. And at the farther end of the lawn, behind a clump of laburnums, it had been necessary to form a kind of charnel-place where the attendants disembarrassed themselves of the dead, and whither they also went to throw the amputated legs and arms, all the remnants of flesh and bones remaining on the tables.

Old Madame Delaherche and Gilberte, seated under one of the lofty trees, could no longer roll bands enough, and Bouroche, who passed by with his face flaming and his apron already crimson with blood, threw a packet of linen to Delaherche, exclaiming: 'Here! do something, make yourself useful.'

'Excuse me,' protested the manufacturer, 'but I must go out for news; we no longer know whether we are alive.' And then, lightly touching his wife's hair with his lips, 'My poor Gilberte,' he added, 'to think that a shell might set everything on fire here. It's frightful!'

She was very pale, and raising her head, glanced around her with a shudder. But that involuntary, invincible smile of hers speedily came back to her lips: 'Yes, frightful!' she said, 'all those men whom they are cutting up. It's a wonder that I can stay here without fainting.'

Old Madame Delaherche had looked at her son as he kissed his wife's hair, and had made a gesture as though to push him aside, for she thought of that other man by whom that same hair must also have been kissed. Her old hands trembled, however, and she let them fall, murmuring: 'How much suffering, good Lord! One forgets one's own.'

Delaherche then went off, explaining that he should speedily return with positive information. As soon as he was in the Rue Maqua he was surprised at the number of soldiers who were already returning from the field without their weapons, and with their uniforms in shreds, soiled with dust. He could not, however, obtain any precise details from those whom he endeavoured to question. Some, who were quite stupefied, replied that they didn't know; whilst others had such a deal to relate, and gesticulated so furiously, and talked so extravagantly, that they resembled madmen. He thereupon directed his steps once more towards the Sub-Prefecture, thinking to himself that all the news must flow thither. As he was crossing the Place du Collège, a couple of guns, doubtless the only remaining pieces of some battery, came up at a gallop, and stranded beside the footway. On reaching the High Street he had to acknowledge that the town was becoming quite crowded with fugitives. Three dismounted Hussars were sitting in a doorway, dividing a loaf of bread; two others were slowly leading their horses by the bridle, at a loss for a stable where they might tether them; officers, too, were running wildly hither and thither, looking as if they did not know where they were going. On the Place Turenne a sub-lieutenant advised Delaherche not to linger there, for the shells were falling very frequently, a splinter of one of them having just broken the railing around the statue of the great captain, the victor of the Palatinate. And, as Delaherche was swiftly gliding along the Rue de la Sous-Préfecture, he saw a couple of projectiles explode, with a frightful crash, on the bridge spanning the Meuse.

Reaching the Sub-Prefecture, he was standing in front of the porter's lodge, seeking a pretext to ask for one of the aides-de-camp and question him, when a youthful voice called him by name: 'Monsieur Delaherche! come in quick; it's anything but pleasant outside.'

The speaker was Rose, his work-girl, whom he had not thought of. Thanks to her, however, every door would be opened to him. He entered the lodge and accepted a seat.

'Just fancy,' began Rose, 'all this business has made mother quite ill; she's in bed and can't get up. So there's only me, you see, for father is at the citadel, being a National Guard. A little while ago the Emperor again wanted to show his bravery, for he went out again and was able to get to the end of the street, as far as the bridge. But then a shell fell in front of him, and the horse of one of his equerries was killed. And so he came back again--not surprising, is it? What would you have him do?'

'Then you know how we are situated--what do the officers say?'

She gave him a look of astonishment. Amid all these abominations, but little of which she understood, she bustled about assiduously, retaining her gay freshness, with her fine hair and her clear eyes, the eyes of the child she was. 'No, I know nothing,' she said; 'at twelve o'clock I took up a letter for Marshal MacMahon. The Emperor was with him. They remained shut up together for nearly an hour, the marshal in bed, and the Emperor on a chair close to the mattress. I know that, because I saw them when the door was opened.'

'What were they saying?'

She again looked at him, and could not help laughing.

'Why, I don't know,' she answered. 'How could I know? Nobody in the world knows what they said to one another.'[30]

That was true, and Delaherche made a gesture as though to apologise for his foolish question. Still the idea of that supreme conversation worried him; how interesting it must have been! What decision could they have come to?

'And now,' added Rose, 'the Emperor has gone back into his private room, where he's conferring with two generals who arrived just now from the battlefield.' She paused and glanced towards the house-steps: 'Look! here comes one of the generals--and look! here's the other.'

Delaherche hastily stepped out of the lodge and recognised Generals Douay and Ducrot, whose horses were waiting. He watched them get into the saddle again and gallop off. After the abandonment of the plateau of Illy, each, on his own side, had hastened into the town to warn the Emperor that the battle was lost. They furnished him with precise details of the situation; the army and Sedan were now completely enveloped, and the disaster would prove frightful.

For a few minutes the Emperor walked up and down his room in silence, with the wavering step of a sick man. The only person there besides himself was an aide-de-camp, standing erect and silent near a door. And, with a disfigured face which was now twitching with a nervous tic, Napoleon kept pacing to and fro between the chimney-piece and the window. His back appeared to have become more bent, as though a world had fallen upon it; and his dim eyes, veiled by their heavy lids, bespoke the resignation of the fatalist who has played and lost his final game with Destiny. Each time, however, that he reached the window, set ajar, he gave a start which, for a second, made him pause; and during one of those brief halts he raised a trembling hand and muttered: 'Oh! those guns, those guns! one has heard them ever since the morning.'

From that spot, indeed, the roaring of the batteries of the Marfée and Frénois hills reached the ear with extraordinary violence--it was a rolling thunder, which not merely rattled the window panes, but shook the very walls, a stubborn, incessant, exasperating uproar. And the Emperor must have reflected that the struggle was henceforth a hopeless one, that all resistance was becoming a crime. What could it avail, why should more blood be spilt, more limbs be shattered, more heads be carried off, more and more dead be ever and ever added to those already scattered across the country-side? Since they, the French, were vanquished, since it was all over, why continue the massacre any longer? Sufficient abomination and suffering already cried out aloud under the sun.

Once more did the Emperor reach the window, and again he began to tremble, with his hands raised: 'Oh! those guns, those guns! Will they never stop?'

Perhaps the terrible thought of his responsibility was arising within him, with a vision of the thousands of bleeding corpses stretched upon the ground over yonder, through his fault. Perhaps, though, it was but the melting of his heart--the pitiful heart of a dreamer, of a man in reality good-natured and haunted by humanitarian notions. And albeit Fate had dealt him this frightful blow--which was crushing and sweeping away his fortune as though it were but a bit of straw--he yet found tears for others, was distracted that this useless butchery should still continue, and lacked the strength to endure it any longer. That villainous cannonade was now rending his breast, at each moment increasing his agony.

'Oh! those guns, those guns! Make them stop firing at once--at once.'

And then this Emperor, who, having confided his powers to the Empress-Regent, no longer had any throne; this generalissimo, who, since he had surrendered the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine, no longer commanded, awoke once more to the exercise of his power--to the irresistible needment of being the master for the last time. Since his stay at Châlons he had kept in the background, had not given an order; content, in his resignation, to become nothing more than a nameless and cumbersome inutility, a troublesome parcel carried along among the baggage train of the troops. And it was only in the hour of defeat that the emperor again awoke within him; the first, the only order that he was yet to give, in the scared compassion of his heart, was to hoist the white flag upon the citadel to beg a truce.

'Oh! those guns, those guns! Take a sheet, a table-cloth, no matter what! Run quickly, tell them to stop those guns!'

The aide-de-camp hastily left the room, and the Emperor continued his wavering march from the chimney-piece to the window, whilst the batteries kept on thundering, shaking the house from top to bottom.

Delaherche was still talking with Rose when a sergeant, on duty at the Sub-Prefecture, ran into the lodge: 'Mademoiselle,' said he, 'we can't find anything. I can't see a servant anywhere. Do you happen to have any linen--a piece of white linen?'

'Will a napkin do?'

'No, no; that wouldn't be large enough. Half a sheet would do.'

Rose, ever obliging, had already darted to the wardrobe. 'I haven't any half-sheets,' said she. 'A large piece of white linen--no, I don't see anything that would suit you--Oh! would you like a table-cloth?'

'A table-cloth? Nothing could be better; that's exactly what we want.' And as he turned to go he added: 'We are going to make a white flag of it, and hoist it on the citadel, to ask for peace. Much obliged, mademoiselle.'

Delaherche gave a start of involuntary delight. At last, then, they were going to have quietness. It occurred to him, however, that his joy was unpatriotic, and he restrained it. Nevertheless his lightened heart beat quickly, and he eagerly watched a colonel and a captain, who, followed by the sergeant, were now coming out of the Sub-Prefecture with hasty steps. The colonel was carrying the table-cloth, rolled up, under his arm. It occurred to Delaherche to follow them, and he took leave of Rose, who was quite proud of having provided that cloth. Just then it struck two o'clock.

In front of the town-hall Delaherche was hustled by a stream of haggard soldiers coming from the Faubourg of La Cassine. He lost sight of the colonel, and thereupon renounced his intention of going to see the hoisting of the white flag. He would certainly not be allowed to enter the keep; and besides, on hearing some people say that shells were falling on the college, he was once more filled with anxiety. Perhaps his factory had caught fire during his absence. Thereupon he darted off again, possessed by a feverish desire to be on the move, which he endeavoured to satisfy by running through the streets. Groups of people barred his way, however; at each crossing there were fresh obstacles. It was only on reaching the Rue Maqua that he gave a sigh of relief, on finding that the monumental front of his house was intact, that neither a puff of smoke nor a spark of fire was to be seen. He went in and called out to his mother and his wife: 'Things are going all right; they are hoisting the white flag, so the firing will soon be over.'

Then he stopped short, for the scene which the ambulance presented was really terrible. Not only was every mattress occupied in the spacious drying-room, the door of which was open, but there no longer remained any space even on the litter of straw spread out at one end of the building. More straw was now being laid between the beds: the wounded were being closely packed, one beside the other. There were already more than a couple of hundred of them, and others were still arriving. A white light streamed from the broad windows upon all this accumulation of human suffering. At times there arose some involuntary cry occasioned by too sudden a movement; and now and again the rattle of the death pangs was wafted through the moist atmosphere. From one end of the room there long resounded a continuous, gentle, almost musical wail. Then the silence became deeper, like a kind of resigned stupor, like the oppressive mournfulness of a death room, broken only by the steps and whispers of the attendants. The wounds, most of which had been hastily dressed on the battlefield, though some had remained bare, untended, were displayed in all their distressful horror, amid shreds of torn capotes and trousers. Feet were stretched out, still booted, but crushed and bleeding. Inert limbs dangled from knees and elbows which had been smashed as though by blows of a hammer. There were broken hands and hanging fingers, too, sustained by mere strips of skin. Most numerous, apparently, were the fractured legs and arms, stiffened by pain and as heavy as lead; but the disquieting wounds were especially those that had opened up the stomach, the chest, or the head. Blood was flowing from flanks that had been frightfully lacerated; bowels had become knotted under upraised skin; some men, through their loins being gashed and hacked, were twisted into frightfully distorted postures. Some lungs had been perforated through and through with so small a hole that no blood flowed; others had a gaping aperture whence life was ebbing in a red stream; and there were men, too, who suddenly became delirious and black, killed all at once by internal hæmorrhage. The heads had suffered yet more severely than the bodies; jaws had been smashed, teeth and tongue formed but a bloody mixture; eyes had been driven half out of their torn sockets; skulls had been split open, and cerebral substance was visible. All those whose brains or marrow had been touched by the projectiles lay like corpses, in the prostration of coma; whilst others, the fractured, the feverish ones, moved restlessly and begged for water in low, supplicating voices.

And in the shed close by, where the operations were performed, there were yet more horrors. In this first scramble, only the more urgent operations were proceeded with, those necessitated by the desperate condition of the wounded. Whenever there was any danger of hæmorrhage Bouroche immediately began to amputate. And, in the same way, when the projectiles were lodged in any dangerous part, the base of the neck, the region of the axilla, the origin of the thigh, the bend of the elbow, or the knee joint, he did not spend time in feeling for them and removing them. The wounds which he preferred to leave under observation, were simply dressed by the attendants in accordance with his instructions. For his own part he had already performed four amputations, spacing them out, resting himself, as it were, between these more serious operations by extracting a few bullets. And he was now beginning to feel tired. There were only two tables, his own and another, at which one of his assistants operated. A sheet had just been hung up between them, so that the men operated upon might not see one another. And, despite all the washing with sponges, the tables remained blood-red, whilst the pails, which were emptied a few paces off over a bed of China asters, those pails, whose clear water a glassful of blood sufficed to dye, seemed to be pails of pure blood--blood flung in a splashing, drenching shower over the flowers of the lawn. And, although the air freely circulated in the open shed, a nauseous stench now arose from the tables, linen and instruments there, mingling with a vague smell of chloroform.

Pitiful at heart, Delaherche was shuddering with compassion, when he felt interested at sight of a landau entering the porch. This carriage, the only vehicle, no doubt, that the men of the field ambulance had been able to find, was packed full of wounded. There were eight of them inside it, one atop of another; and when, in the last man who was lifted out, the manufacturer recognised Captain Beaudoin, he raised a cry of mingled terror and surprise: 'Oh! my poor friend! Wait a moment, I will call my mother and my wife.'

They hastened to the spot, leaving a couple of servant-girls to continue making the linen-rollers. The attendants, who had taken the captain out of the carriage, carried him into the drying-room, and were about to lay him on some straw there, when, upon one of the mattresses, Delaherche perceived a soldier with ashy face and open eyes, who no longer stirred.

'I say, that fellow's dead!' the manufacturer exclaimed.

'So he is,' muttered an attendant. 'We'll get rid of him and make room for that officer.' Thereupon he and a comrade took up the corpse and carried it to the charnel-place behind the laburnums. There were already a dozen dead men lying there, stiffened in the last rattle, some with their feet stretched out as though distended by suffering, others all awry, twisted into atrocious postures. There were some showing only the whites of their eyes, and sneering, with their lips turned outwardly and displaying their white teeth; whilst several, upon whose drawn, elongated faces there lingered a fearfully mournful expression, were yet shedding big tears. One skinny, youthful little fellow, whose head had been split open, was convulsively pressing a woman's portrait--a common, faded, blood-smeared photograph--to his heart. And, pell-mell, at the feet of the corpses, were piled the amputated legs and arms, everything that was cut away, hewn off on the operating tables--the parings of flesh and bone of a butcher's shop, swept, as it were, into a corner.

Gilberte had shuddered at sight of Captain Beaudoin. Good God! how pale he was, lying on that mattress there, his face quite white under the filth that soiled it. And she was frozen with appalment, remembering that but a few hours previously he had been full of life. She fell upon her knees: 'What a misfortune, my friend! But it's nothing dangerous, is it?'

She had pulled out her handkerchief in a mechanical fashion, and wiped his face with it, unable to tolerate him in that dirty state, grimed with earth, gunpowder, and sweat. It seemed to her also that by cleansing him a little, she gave him some relief: 'It is not dangerous, is it? It's only your leg.'

Emerging from a kind of somnolence the captain painfully opened his eyes, and, recognising his friends, he tried to smile at them: 'Yes, only my leg; I did not even feel the blow, I thought I had slipped and was falling.' He had to pause, for he could only speak with difficulty: 'Oh! I'm so thirsty,' he added, 'so thirsty.'

Thereupon, old Madame Delaherche, who was leaning over him on the other side of the mattress, went off in all haste to fetch a glass and a decanter of water with which a small quantity of cognac had been mixed. And when the captain had eagerly drained the glass, she had to divide what remained in the decanter among the wounded near by; every hand was outstretched, and ardent voices supplicated her. A Zouave, for whom there was none left, began to sob.

Delaherche, meantime, was seeking an opportunity to speak to the major, in order that the captain might receive prompt attention. Bouroche had just come in with his bloody apron, his broad perspiring face and flaming leonine mane; and, as he passed along, the men raised themselves up and tried to stop him, each burning with a desire to secure the next turn, anxious to be succoured and to learn his fate.

'Me, monsieur le major, me!' they called. Faltering, prayerful voices pursued him, and fumbling fingers clutched at his clothes. Without listening to anyone, however, quite absorbed, breathing hard with fatigue, he decided how he would proceed with his work. He talked aloud, counted the men with his finger, numbered and classified them: this one, that one, and that other one; numbers one, two, and three; a jaw, an arm, and a thigh. Meantime, an assistant surgeon who accompanied him listened attentively, so that he might remember which men were to be brought, and in what order, into the operating shed.

'Major,' said Delaherche, 'there's a captain here, Captain Beaudoin----'

'What! Beaudoin here!' interrupted Bouroche; 'poor devil!'

He posted himself in front of the wounded officer, and no doubt realised the gravity of the case at a glance, for without even stooping to examine the damaged leg he immediately added: 'All right! he shall be brought to me at once, as soon as I've performed the operation which is being prepared.'

Thereupon he went back into the outhouse, followed by Delaherche, who did not want to lose sight of him for fear lest he should forget his promise.

The disarticulation of a shoulder-joint in accordance with Lisfranc's[31] method was this time in question, a pretty operation as surgeons say, something elegant and prompt, lasting barely forty seconds from first to last. The patient was already being chloroformed, whilst an assistant caught hold of his shoulder with both hands; the fingers under the arm-pit, the thumbs up above. Thereupon Bouroche, who was armed with a large, long knife, called out, 'Set him up,' grasped the deltoid, transfixed the arm and severed the muscle; then stepping back, he detached the articulation at one stroke, and the arm fell, amputated in three movements. The assistant had immediately stopped the axillary artery with his thumbs. 'Lay him down again,' said Bouroche, laughing involuntarily as he proceeded with the ligation, for the operation had only taken him five-and-thirty seconds. All that now remained was to press the shreds of flesh down upon the wound like a shoulder strap. Altogether it was a pretty piece of work, notably on account of the danger, for, by the axillary artery, a man may lose all his blood in three minutes; besides which, the life of a patient under the influence of chloroform is invariably imperilled when he is raised from a recumbent to a sitting posture.

Frozen with horror. Delaherche had turned to go, but before he could do so the arm was already lying on the table. The man who had been amputated, a sturdy young peasant, emerged from his torpor and saw an attendant carrying his arm away, to throw it behind the laburnums. He hastily glanced at his shoulder, and, on seeing the bleeding stump, flew into a violent rage: 'Good heavens! that's a nice thing you've done!'

Bouroche, who was terribly tired, did not at first reply; but at last in a good-natured way he said: 'I did it for the best, I didn't want you to kick the bucket, my boy. Besides, I asked you beforehand if you'd have it off, and you said "yes."'

'I said "yes"? I said "yes"? Did I know what you meant?' Then, as his anger fell, he began shedding bitter tears, and gasped: 'What shall I ever be able to do with myself now?'

He was carried back to the litter of straw; the oilcloth and the table were violently washed; and the pailfuls of red water which were again flung across the lawn made the white bed of China asters quite bloody.

Delaherche, however, felt astonished at still hearing the cannonade. Why did it not stop? Rose's table-cloth must now be hoisted over the citadel. And yet it seemed as if the fire of the Prussian batteries were increasing in intensity. Such was the uproar, that one could no longer hear oneself; the commotion shook the least nervous from head to foot, amid growing anguish. These shocks which tore away the heart were suited neither to amputators nor amputated. They upset, fevered the entire ambulance to the point of exasperation.

'But it was all finished; so why do they keep on firing?' exclaimed Delaherche, listening anxiously, and imagining every second that the shot he heard would be the last.

Then, as he turned to remind Bouroche of the captain, he was astonished to find the surgeon lying on his stomach atop of a truss of straw, with both arms bared to the shoulders and plunged in a couple of pails full of icy water. In this fashion was the major refreshing himself, for he was both physically and morally worn out, crushed, overwhelmed by immense sadness and distress, experiencing one of those momentary agonies of the practitioner who realises his powerlessness. Bouroche, albeit, was a sturdy fellow, hard-skinned and stout-hearted. But the thought 'what avails it?' had flashed across his mind, and filled him with sorrow. He had been suddenly paralysed by the consciousness that he would never be able to accomplish everything; that it was not given to him to do so. So of what use was it all, since Death was bound to prove the stronger?

Two attendants came up, with Captain Beaudoin on a stretcher. 'Here's the captain, major,' Delaherche ventured to say.

Bouroche opened his eyes, took his arms out of the pails, shook them, and wiped them in the straw. Then, raising himself on his knees: 'Yes, dash it!' said he; 'come, come, the day is by no means over.'

He was already getting up, shaking his lion-like head and tawny hair; set erect again by habit and imperious discipline. Gilberte and Madame Delaherche had followed the stretcher, and when the captain had been laid on the oilcloth-covered mattress, they still lingered there, standing just a few paces away.

'Good! it's above the right ankle,' said Bouroche, who talked a good deal by way of occupying the minds of his patients. 'That's not so bad. Wounds there can be cured--I'll examine it.'

It was evident, however, that Beaudoin's state of torpor preoccupied him. On looking at the provisional dressing--a simple band tightened and secured to the trousers by a bayonet sheath--he began growling between his teeth, asking what fool was responsible for that. Suddenly, however, he became silent again. The truth had just dawned upon him. During the transport, no doubt--in the landau packed full of wounded--the bandage had loosened and slipped, ceasing to compress the wound, so that an abundant loss of blood had ensued.

Guessing this, Bouroche--by way of venting his feelings--flew into a violent rage with an attendant who was helping him. 'You ---- dawdler; make haste with that cutting,' he shouted.

The captain's trousers and drawers, shoe and sock were thereupon cut open. First the leg, then the foot appeared; their wan nudity stained with blood. And above the ankle there was a frightful hole, into which a splinter of a shell had driven a shred of red cloth. A swelling of lacerated flesh, a protuberance of the muscle emerged in a pulpous state from the wound.

Gilberte had to lean against one of the posts supporting the roof of the shed. Ah! that flesh, that flesh so soft and white, now bleeding and mangled! Despite her horror, she could not turn her eyes away from it.

'The devil!' said Bouroche, 'they've put you in a nice state!'

He felt the foot and found it cold; no beat of the pulse could be detected. His face had become very grave, and his lips were drawn down, as always happened when he found himself confronted by a disquieting case. 'The devil!' he repeated, 'that foot's bad.'

Roused from his somnolence by anxiety, the captain looked at him, waiting; and ended by saying: 'Do you think so, major?'

Although amputation might be a matter of necessity, Bouroche's system was never to ask a wounded man point-blank for the customary authorisation. He preferred that the sufferer should, of his own accord, resign himself to the operation. 'A bad foot,' he muttered, as if he were thinking aloud; 'we can't save it.'

'Come, major, to the point,' resumed Beaudoin, nervously; 'what do you think of it?'

'I think you are a brave man, captain, and that you are going to let me do what must be done.'

Beaudoin's paling eyes were dimmed by a kind of ruddy smoke. He had understood. However, despite the insupportable fear that was throttling him, he replied simply, like a gallant man: 'Do it, major.'

The preparations did not take long. The assistant, who had already dipped the napkin in chloroform, immediately applied it to the patient's nose. Then, at the moment when the slight agitation preceding anæsthesia manifested itself, two attendants slid the captain along the mattress so that his legs might project beyond it; and, whilst one of them held up the left leg, an assistant-surgeon, seizing hold of the right one, grasped it tightly with both hands, at the origin of the thigh, for the purpose of compressing the artery.

On seeing Bouroche approach with his narrow blade, Gilberte felt she could endure no more: 'No, no, it's too dreadful!'

She felt faint, and leant upon the arm which Madame Delaherche held out to prevent her from falling.

'Why do you stop, then?'

However, they both remained there; averting their heads, it is true, not wishing to see any more, and standing motionless and trembling, pressed close to one another, despite the little affection there was between them.

At no other time that day did the cannon thunder so loudly as it thundered now. It was three o'clock, and Delaherche, disappointed, exasperated, declared the uproar to be incomprehensible. Far from ceasing their fire, the German batteries were redoubling it. Why? What could be taking place? It was a hellish bombardment; the ground shook, the very atmosphere seemed on fire. The belt of artillery encircling Sedan, the eight hundred guns of the German armies, were firing simultaneously, ravaging all the surrounding fields with continuous thunderbolts; and a couple of hours of this converging fire directed centreward from all the encompassing heights would suffice to burn and pulverise the town. The situation was serious, for shells were again beginning to fall on the houses. The detonations were heard more and more frequently. One shell burst in the Rue des Voyards. Another chipped a corner off the high factory chimney, and some fragments of brick and cement fell just outside the operating-shed.

Bouroche raised his eyes, and growled: 'Do they want to finish off our wounded? That row is insupportable.'

In the meantime an attendant had caught hold of the captain's wounded leg by the foot, and by a rapid circular incision the major now cut the skin below the knee, at a couple of inches from the point where he contemplated sawing the bone. Then, with the same narrow knife, which he did not exchange for another, since he wished to accomplish the operation as speedily as possible, he detached the skin, raising it up all round, much in the fashion in which one peels an orange. Just as he was about to sever the muscles, however, an attendant approached him and whispered in his ear: 'Number two has dropped off.'

So frightful was the din that the major could not hear. 'Speak louder, will you? My ears are tingling with that cursed cannonade.'

'Number two has dropped off.'

'Who's number two?'

'The arm.'

'Oh! all right! Well, you'll bring me number three--the jaw.'

Then, with extraordinary skill, he at one stroke severed the muscles to the bone. He bared the tibia and the fibula, and, as a support, passed the three-tail compress between them. Then, with a single kerf of the saw, he lopped them off, the foot remaining in the hands of the attendant who was holding it.

But little blood flowed, thanks to the pressure which the assistant was maintaining higher up, around the thigh; and the ligation of the three arteries was swiftly accomplished. Nevertheless, the major shook his head; and when his assistant had taken his hands away, he examined his work, and, certain that his patient could not as yet hear him, muttered: 'It's a nuisance; no blood comes from the little arteries.'

Then, with a wave of the hand, he completed his diagnosis. Another poor devil done for! Again upon his perspiring face appeared that expression of immense fatigue and sadness, that despair summed up in the words: 'Of what use is it?' And, indeed, what did his labour avail since he did not succeed in saving four out of ten? However, he wiped his forehead, and having turned down the flesh of the captain's stump, he began to sew the three sutures.

Gilberte had just turned round, Delaherche having told her that it was finished, and that she could look. However, she caught sight of the captain's foot as the attendant carried it off into the garden. The charnel-place was now becoming more and more crowded; two more corpses were lying there, one with the mouth wide open and black, looking as though it were still howling; the other shrunk by an abominable agony, reduced to the size of a puny, deformed child. The annoyance was that the pile of remnants was now stretching into the path near by. The attendant hesitated for a moment as to where he might fitly deposit the captain's foot, but at last he made up his mind to throw it on the heap.

'Well, it's all finished,' said the major to Beaudoin, who was being roused; 'you're out of danger.'

The captain's, however, was not that gladsome awakening which follows upon successful operations. He slightly raised himself, but fell back stammering in a feeble voice: 'Thanks, major. I would rather it were all over.'

However, he could feel the smart of the spirit dressing. And just as the stretcher was being brought near, so that he might be carried back to his mattress, a terrible detonation shook the entire factory; a shell had burst behind the shed, in the little yard where the pump was. Several window-panes were smashed to pieces, and thick smoke poured into the ambulance. In the drying-room, panic raised the wounded up on their straw pallets, and all cried out in terror, and all were eager to flee.

Delaherche rushed off in distraction to ascertain the extent of the damage. Were they now going to demolish his house, set it on fire? What could be happening? Why did they keep on firing when the Emperor wanted them to stop?

'D----n! bestir yourselves!' shouted Bouroche to his attendants, whom terror rooted to the spot. 'Wash the table; go and fetch me number three!'

The table was washed, and once again the pailfuls of red water were flung across the lawn. The bed of China asters had become a bloody hash--the chopped stalks and flowers were swimming in blood. And now, by way of relaxation, the major, having had number three brought to him, began searching for a bullet which, after shattering the inferior maxilla, must have lodged itself under the tongue. A deal of blood was flowing, and made his fingers quite sticky.

Captain Beaudoin was again lying on his mattress in the drying-room. Gilberte and her mother-in-law had followed the stretcher, and Delaherche himself came to chat for a moment, despite his agitation. 'Keep quiet and rest yourself, captain,' said he; 'we will have a room got ready, you shall stay with us.'

Amid his prostration, however, the captain awoke to a short interval of lucidity. 'No,' said he, 'I really think I am going to die.' And he gazed at the three of them, with dilated eyes full of the fear of death.

'Oh! what are you saying, captain?' murmured Gilberte, forcing herself to smile, though she felt quite frozen. 'You will be up again in a month's time.'

He shook his head, however; and now he looked at her alone, with immense regret for life in his eyes, quailing at the thought that he must go off like that, before his time, and without having exhausted the delights of existence.

'I'm going to die, I'm going to die. Ah! it's awful.'

Then all at once his glance fell on his soiled, torn uniform and black hands, and it made him uncomfortable to find himself in such a horrid state in the presence of ladies. He felt ashamed, too, of his self-abandonment; and the thought that he was wanting in smartness restored to him a deal of bravery. 'Well,' he managed to resume, in a gay voice, 'if I am to die, I should at least like to die with my hands clean. Would you have the kindness, madame, to dip a towel in some water and give it me?'

Gilberte darted off, and on returning with the towel, insisted upon cleaning his hands for him. From that moment he displayed very great courage, desirous as he was that his end might be that of a well-bred man. Delaherche encouraged him, and assisted his wife in arranging him in a becoming manner. And in presence of this dying man, on seeing husband and wife so assiduous in their attentions, old Madame Delaherche felt her rancour pass away. Once more would she keep silent, she who knew and had sworn to tell her son everything. But why plunge the house in affliction, since death was carrying away the sin?

The end came almost immediately. Captain Beaudoin, growing weaker and weaker, again fell into a state of prostration. An icy sweat streamed from his forehead and his neck. For a moment he reopened his eyes, and fumbled as though he were seeking a blanket, and drawing it up close to his chin, with a gentle, stubborn pull of his twisted hands: 'Oh! I am so cold, so very cold.'

And he passed away, expired without a sob, his calm, wasted face retaining an expression of infinite sadness.

Delaherche did not allow the corpse to be carried to the charnel-place, but saw to its being deposited in a coach-house; and he then tried to induce Gilberte, who was sobbing, quite upset, to go back into the house. She declared, however, that she should feel too frightened if she remained alone, and that she preferred staying with her mother-in-law amid the bustle of the ambulance, which diverted her thoughts. She was already running off to give some water to a Chasseur d'Afrique delirious with fever, and to help dress the hand of a little Linesman, a recruit of twenty, who had come on foot from the battlefield. One of his thumbs had been carried away; and as he was a good-looking, comical fellow, who jested about his wound with the heedless air of a Parisian wag, she ended by getting quite lively in his company.

The cannonade seemed to have become still more violent whilst the captain was dying; a second shell had fallen in the garden, cutting down one of the centenarian trees. Moreover, a conflagration of considerable magnitude had broken out in the Faubourg of La Cassine, and some terror-stricken people cried out that all Sedan was burning. It would be the end of everything if this bombardment were to continue for any length of time with such fearful violence.

'It's incomprehensible. I'm going back!' exclaimed Delaherche, at last, quite beside himself.

'Where to?' asked Bouroche.

'Why, to the Sub-Prefecture, to ascertain whether the Emperor's playing the fool with us when he talks of hoisting the white flag.'

For a few seconds the major remained dumbfounded by this idea of the white flag, defeat, and capitulation, which broke upon him amid his powerlessness to save the poor mangled fellows who were being brought to him in such numbers. He made a gesture of furious despair. 'Well, go to the devil!' he shouted; 'we are none the less done for.'

Once outside, Delaherche experienced far greater difficulty than before in making his way through the groups of people, which were now much larger. The streets were every minute filling with the stream of disbanded soldiers. He questioned several of the officers he met, but none of them had seen the white flag upon the citadel. At last, however, a colonel declared that he had espied it there for an instant; it had been taken down almost as soon as hoisted. That seemed to explain everything; either the Germans had not perceived it, or else, seeing it appear and disappear, they had realised that the last agony was at hand, and had thereupon redoubled their fire. Indeed, a story was already circulating of a general who, at sight of the flag, had flown into a mad rage, had rushed upon it, and torn it down with his own hands, breaking the staff and trampling the linen under foot. And thus the Prussian batteries were still firing; the projectiles rained upon the roofs and the streets, houses were burning, and a woman had just had her head smashed, at the corner of the Place Turenne.

On reaching the Sub-Prefecture, Delaherche did not find Rose in the lodge. Every door of the house was now open; the rout was beginning. He entered and went upstairs, meeting only a few scared people, none of whom inquired his business. Whilst he was hesitating on the first-floor landing, he came upon the young girl.

'Oh, Monsieur Delaherche, matters are getting much worse,' said she. 'There, make haste and look if you want to see the Emperor.'

A door on the left hand stood ajar, and, through the opening, one could perceive Napoleon III. who had resumed his wavering march from the chimney-piece to the window. He tramped up and down without a pause, despite his intolerable sufferings.

An aide-de-camp had just entered the room--it was he who had carelessly left the door ajar--and the Emperor was heard asking in a voice enervated by wretchedness: 'But why are they still firing, monsieur, when I have had the white flag hoisted?'

Still did he experience the same unbearable torment at sound of that cannonade which never ceased, but on the contrary increased in violence every minute. It struck him in the heart each time that he drew near to the window. Still more blood, still more human lives destroyed through his fault! Each minute added more corpses to the pile, to no purpose whatever. And, commiserative dreamer that he was, his whole being revolted at the thought of this slaughter; and a dozen times already he had put the same despairing question to those who entered the room: 'But why are they still firing when I have had the white flag hoisted?'

Delaherche did not manage to catch the muttered answer of the aide-de-camp. Besides, the Emperor had not paused in his walk. Faint though he felt each time that he reached the window, he yielded to the needment of returning thither. His pallor had increased, his long-drawn, mournful face, but imperfectly cleansed of the paint with which it had been brightened that morning, plainly told his agony.

At that moment a vivacious little man, in a dusty uniform, whom Delaherche recognised as General Lebrun, crossed the landing and pushed the door open, without waiting to be announced. And the Emperor's anxious voice could immediately be distinguished, once more asking: 'But why, general, why are they still firing when I have had the white flag hoisted?'

The aide-de-camp came out of the room and shut the door behind him, so that Delaherche could not even hear the general's answer. All was blank again.

'Ah!' repeated Rose, 'things are getting bad, I can tell it by the gentlemen's faces. It's like my table-cloth, which I shall never see again; some say it has been torn up. After all, it's the Emperor whom I pity the most, for he's in a worse state even than the marshal. He would be far better in his bed than in that room, where he's wearing himself out with walking.'

She was quite affected, and her pretty, fair face expressed sincere compassion; for which very reason Delaherche, whose Bonapartist fervour had been sensibly cooling during the last two days, considered her rather foolish. He lingered with her downstairs, however, whilst watching for General Lebrun's departure. And when the general came down he followed him.

General Lebrun had explained to the Emperor that if he desired to ask for an armistice, a letter signed by the commander-in-chief of the French forces must be transmitted to the commander-in-chief of the German armies. He had then offered to write the letter in question and to start in search of General de Wimpffen, by whom it should be signed. And now he was carrying this letter away, and his only fear was that he might be unable to find Wimpffen, for he did not know on what part of the field he was. The crush by this time had become so great that he was compelled to walk his horse through Sedan, thus enabling Delaherche to follow him as far as the Ménil gate.

Once on the highway, however, General Lebrun put his horse at a gallop, and as he was approaching Balan, he was lucky enough to perceive General de Wimpffen. A few minutes previously the latter had written to the Emperor: 'Sire, come and place yourself at the head of your troops; they will esteem it an honour to open you a passage through the enemy's lines.' Accordingly, at the first word of a truce he flew into a furious passion. No, no! he would sign nothing; he meant to fight. It was then half-past three o'clock, and shortly afterwards came the last onslaught, that heroic, despairing attempt to pierce through the Bavarians by marching yet once more upon Bazeilles. To restore the spirits of the soldiers, lies were circulated along the streets of Sedan and across the surrounding fields. 'Bazaine is coming up! Bazaine is coming up!' was the cry. It was a dream that many had indulged in since the morning, thinking, each time that the Germans unmasked a fresh battery, that the guns they heard were those of the army of Metz.

Some twelve hundred men were got together, disbanded soldiers of all arms, from every corps; and along the road, swept by the enemy's projectiles, the little column dashed with glorious gallantry, at the double-quick. It was superb at first; the men who fell did not arrest the dash of the others, and some five hundred yards were covered with a perfect fury of courage. But the ranks were speedily thinned, and the bravest at last fell back. What could be done indeed against such overwhelming numbers? This effort was but the mad temerity of a commander who refused to be beaten. And at last General de Wimpffen found himself alone with General Lebrun, on that road to Balan and Bazeilles, which they finally had to abandon. No course now remained but to retreat under the walls of Sedan.

As soon as he had lost sight of the general, Delaherche returned in all haste to the factory, possessed by one idea, that of again climbing to his observatory, and thence watching the course of events. He was delayed for a moment, however, as he reached the house, for in the porch he came upon Colonel de Vineuil, who, lying in a half-fainting state on some hay, in a market-gardener's tilted cart, was just then arriving with his bloody boot. The colonel had stubbornly persisted in trying to rally the remnants of his regiment until the moment when he had fallen from his horse. He was at once carried to a room on the first floor, and Bouroche, hastening to him, and finding he had only a split in the ankle, contented himself with dressing the wound, after extracting the pieces of boot-leather that had lodged in it. Then, over tasked and exasperated, he rushed downstairs again, shouting that he would rather cut off one of his legs than continue working in that dirty fashion, without the proper supplies or the necessary assistants. And indeed the ambulance people no longer knew where to place the wounded; they had been obliged to lay some of them in the grass on the lawn. There were two rows of them there already, waiting and wailing in the open air, under the shells which continued raining upon Sedan. Since noon more than four hundred men had been brought to this one ambulance, and in vain had Bouroche asked for surgeons--the only person sent to him was a young doctor of the town. It was impossible for him to suffice for everything; he probed, cut, sawed, and sewed, quite beside himself, sorely distressed to find that far more work kept on arriving than he could possibly cope with. Gilberte, intoxicated with horror, sickened by the sight of so much blood and so many tears, now remained upstairs with her uncle, the colonel, whilst old Madame Delaherche stayed below, bringing water to the feverish ones, and wiping the clammy faces of those who were in the throes of death.

On reaching the terrace up above, Delaherche had at once endeavoured to form some idea of the situation. The town had suffered less than he had thought; there was only one conflagration, throwing up a column of dense black smoke in the Faubourg of La Cassine. At present the Palatinate fort had ceased firing, for want, no doubt, of ammunition; and only the guns of the Paris gate continued discharging a few shots, at long intervals. What, however, immediately interested him, was to find that the white flag had again been hoisted on the keep; but, probably, it could not be seen from the battlefield, for the firing continued, as intense as ever. Some neighbouring roofs prevented him from seeing the Balan road, so that he could not watch the movements of the troops there. However, on applying his eye to the telescope, which had remained in position, he again perceived the German staff on the same spot where he had noticed it at noon. The master--the tiny tin soldier, no taller than half of one's little finger, in whom he fancied he could recognise the King of Prussia--was still standing in his dark uniform in advance of the other officers, most of whom, scintillating with embroidery, were lying upon the grass. Among them were foreign officers, aides-de-camp, generals, court marshals, princes and princelets, all provided with field-glasses, with which, since early morning, they had been surveying the agony of the French army, as though they were at a theatre. And now the formidable drama was drawing to a close.

From that wooded height of La Marfée King William had just beheld the junction of his troops. It was accomplished; the Third Army, under the orders of the Crown Prince, his son, which had proceeded by way of St. Menges and Fleigneux, was taking possession of the plateau of Illy, whilst the Fourth Army, commanded by the Crown Prince of Saxony, reached the meeting place by way of Daigny and Givonne, after turning the wood of La Garenne. Thus the Eleventh and Fifth German Corps joined hands with the Twelfth Corps and the Prussian Guard. And the supreme effort made to break the circle at the very moment when it was closing up, that useless but glorious charge of General Margueritte's division, had wrung an admiring exclamation from the King: 'Ah! the brave fellows!' Now the mathematical, inexorable encompassment was completed, the vice-chops had met; and at a glance the King could survey the immense wall of men and guns enveloping the vanquished army. On the north the grasp pressed closer and closer home, throwing the fugitives back into Sedan under the redoubling fire of the batteries which fringed the horizon all around in an unbroken line. On the south Bazeilles, conquered, empty, and mournful, was burning away, throwing up whirling clouds of spark-laden smoke; whilst the Bavarians, now masters of Balan, were levelling their guns at three hundred yards from the gates of Sedan itself. And the other batteries, those on the left bank at Pont-Maugis, Noyers, Frénois, and Wadelincourt, which for nearly twelve hours had been firing without a pause, were now thundering yet more loudly, completing the impassable belt of flames, even under the King's feet.

Somewhat tired, however, King William laid his field-glass aside for a moment, and continued examining the scene without its help. The sun was descending obliquely towards the woods, sinking to rest in a sky of unspotted purity; it gilded the whole vast stretch of country, bathed it in so limpid a light that the smallest objects acquired remarkable distinctness. The King could distinguish the houses of Sedan, with their little, black window bars, the ramparts and the fortress, all the complicated defensive works, clearly and sharply outlined. Then all around, scattered amid the fields, were the villages, fresh-coloured and shiny as with varnish, like the farmhouses one finds in boxes of toys. On the left was Donchery, at the edge of the level plain; on the right were Douzy and Carignan in the meadows. It seemed as though one could count the trees of the Forest of the Ardennes, whose sea of verdure stretched away to the frontier. In the crisp light, the lazily winding Meuse looked like a river of pure gold, and the fearful blood-smeared battle, seen from this height, under the sun's farewell rays, became as it were a delicate piece of painting. Some corpses of cavalry soldiers, and dead horses with their bellies ripped open, scattered bright touches over the plateau of Floing. Towards the right, in the direction of Givonne the eye was amused by the scrambles of the retreat, the vortex of running, falling black specks; whilst on the peninsula of Iges, on the left, a Bavarian battery, whose guns looked no bigger than lucifer matches, was served with such clock-work regularity, that it seemed like some piece of mechanism, carefully put together. And all this was victory--victory surpassing hope, overwhelming; and the King felt no remorse whatever as he looked down upon all those tiny corpses, those thousands of men occupying less space than the dust of the roads, that immense valley where neither the conflagrations of Bazeilles, the massacres of Illy nor the anguish of Sedan could prevent impassive nature from remaining beauteous in this, the serene close of a lovely day.

All at once, however, Delaherche perceived a French general, clad in a blue tunic and mounted on a black horse, who was ascending the slopes of La Marfée preceded by a Hussar carrying a flag of truce. It was General Reille, charged by the Emperor to deliver this letter to the King of Prussia:--

'Sir, my Brother,--Not having been able to die in the midst of my troops, it only remains for me to place my sword in your Majesty's hands.--I am your Majesty's good Brother,

'Napoleon.'

In his eagerness to stop the slaughter, since he was no longer the master, the Emperor delivered himself up, hoping that he might thereby soften the victor. And Delaherche saw General Reille, who was unarmed and carried merely a riding-whip, rein in his horse at ten paces from the King, alight, and then step forward and deliver the letter. The sun was sinking in a far-spreading, roseate glow; the King seated himself on a chair, rested his arm on the back of another one held by a secretary, and replied that he accepted the sword, pending the despatch of an officer, empowered to treat for the capitulation.

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VII. THROUGH THE ROUT--THE FIGHT AT THE HERMITAGE

From all the lost positions around Sedan, from Floing, from the plateau of Illy, the wood of La Garenne, the valley of the Givonne, and the road to Bazeilles, a stream of men, horses, and cannon was now flowing back in terror, rolling along towards the town. This stronghold, which the commanders of the army had so disastrously selected as their base, was proving a balefully tempting spot, an inviting refuge for the runaways, a place of seeming safety whither the bravest allowed themselves to be allured, in the demoralisation and panic overtaking all. They imagined that behind those ramparts yonder, they would at last escape from that terrible artillery which had been growling for nearly twelve hours; and there was no discriminative capacity, no reasoning faculty left among them; the animal carried away the man, it was the madness of instinct, galloping off and seeking its hole, to hide underground and sleep.

When Maurice, whilst bathing Jean's face with cool water, at the foot of the little wall, at last saw him open his eyes again, he raised an exclamation of delight: 'Ah! my poor fellow, I thought you were done for! And I don't say it to reproach you, but you are that heavy!'

Jean, still dazed, seemed to be awaking from a dream. Then he must have understood and have remembered everything, for two big tears rolled down his cheeks. So that weak fellow Maurice, whom he loved and tended like a child, had, in the enthusiasm of his friendship, found arms strong enough to carry him thither.

'Let me just look at your nob,' said Maurice.

The wound proved to be scarcely anything, a mere scratch of the scalp, but it had bled profusely. The hair, glued together by the blood, now served the purpose of a pledget, and Maurice took good care not to damp it, for fear of reopening the sore.

'There, you are clean now,' he added, 'you look like a human being again. Wait a bit, here's a cap.'

Thereupon, picking up the képi of a dead soldier which was lying beside him, he placed it carefully on Jean's head: 'It's just your size,' said he. 'Now if you can walk we shall be proper.'

Jean rose up and shook his head to make sure that it was firm. He only felt a slight heaviness, and that he could very well endure. Then, carried away by emotion, like the man of simple heart he was, he caught Maurice in his arms, and, almost smothering him, pressed him to his breast. 'Oh, my dear little fellow, my dear little fellow,' he repeated; it was all that he could say.

The Prussians were coming up, however, and they ought not to dawdle behind that wall. Lieutenant Rochas was already beating a retreat with his few men, protecting the colours, which the sub-lieutenant still carried, rolled around their shaft. Lapoulle, being very tall, was able to rise on tip-toe and fire a few more shots over the coping of the wall; but Pache carried his chassepot slung over his shoulder, opining, no doubt, that he had done quite enough work that day, and ought now to have something to eat and go to bed. Bending double, Jean and Maurice made haste to join the others. There was no lack either of guns or cartridges; one merely had to stoop to pick them up. So they again armed themselves, their knapsacks, rifles, and pouches having been abandoned over yonder, when Maurice had been obliged to hoist Jean upon his shoulders.

The wall stretched as far as the wood of La Garenne, and the little band, fancying itself saved, promptly threw itself behind a farmhouse, whence it reached the trees. 'Ah!' said Rochas, who retained all his fine, unshakable confidence, 'we'll just draw breath here for a moment, before resuming the offensive.'

At the first steps they took, however, they all felt that they were entering a hellish place; still, they could not fall back--whatever the danger, they must needs cross that wood, through which lay their only line of retreat. And it had become a most fearful wood, a wood of despair and death. Realising that some of the French troops must be retiring through it, the Prussians were riddling it with bullets, and covering it with shells. Lashed, as it were, by a tempest, it shook and howled amid the shattering of its branches. The shells cut down the trees, the bullets brought down the leaves in showers, plaintive voices seemed to issue from the split trunks, and sobs fell with the sap-laden boughs. It was like the awful agony of a chained multitude, the terror and wailing of thousands of beings rooted to the soil and unable to flee from the storm of lead and iron. Never was plaint of anguish more intense than in that bombarded forest.

Maurice and Jean, who had joined their comrades, at once felt frightened. They were making their way through full-grown trees and there was space to run, but the bullets whizzed past them every second, wildly ricocheting hither and thither, so that, as they glided from trunk to trunk, they could not tell from which side danger might come. Two men were killed, struck both in front and behind. A venerable oak, whose trunk was smashed by a shell, fell across Maurice's path with the tragic majesty of a hero, crushing all around it. And just as the young fellow was springing back, a colossal beech tree, which another shell had discrowned, snapped and sank to the ground, like some lofty cathedral pillar. Whither could they flee? On which side direct their steps? There were but toppling branches all around them; it seemed as though they were in some vast edifice that threatened ruin, and the ceilings of whose halls, following one upon another, were for ever and ever falling. And when they had sprung into a plantation to escape being crushed by the big trees, Jean narrowly missed being cut in half by a shell, which fortunately failed to explode. They were now unable to make way amid the inextricable multitude of shrubs and saplings. The slender stems detained them by the shoulders, the long grass twined around their ankles, sudden walls of brambles brought them to a standstill; whilst all around them flew the foliage detached by the giant scythe which was mowing down the wood. Another man, killed beside them by a bullet which penetrated his forehead, remained erect, caught between two young birches; and a score of times, whilst imprisoned in this plantation, they felt death brush them as it passed.

'Curse it!' said Maurice, 'we shall never get out of it.'

He was livid, shuddering again; and even Jean, the brave fellow, who in the morning had inspirited him, was now paling and feeling icy cold. It was fear--horrible, contagious, irresistible fear. Again did they feel an ardent thirst burning them, an unbearable dryness of the mouth and a contraction of the throat, of painful, strangulating violence. They experienced, too, a most uncomfortable sensation, with nausea in the pit of the stomach, whilst innumerable pins seemed to be pricking their legs. And amid these purely physical symptoms of fear, with the grasp of fright pressing tightly on their brows, they saw thousands of black specks flit past them, as though they were indeed able to distinguish the flying cloud of bullets.

'Ah! what cursed luck!' stammered Jean. 'It's horribly vexing to be here, getting our skulls cracked for others, when they are somewhere else, quietly smoking their pipes.'

'Yes, why should it be I rather than another?' added Maurice, distracted and haggard. This was the rebellion of self, the egotistical rage of the individual unwilling to sacrifice himself and die for the sake of the species.

'And besides,' resumed Jean, 'if one only knew the reason of it, if it were at all likely to be of any use.' And then raising his eyes and looking at the sky, he added: 'That horrid sun, too, won't make up its mind to skedaddle! When it has set and night comes there will perhaps be an end of the fighting.'

Unable to tell what o'clock it was, having in fact lost all consciousness of time, he had for a long while already been watching the slow decline of the orb, whose course seemed almost to have been stayed, for it was still and ever hanging over yonder, above the woods on the left bank. And this longing for the sunset was not cowardice, but rather an imperious, growing needment to cease hearing the shells and the bullets, to go off elsewhere, bury oneself in the ground, and plunge into oblivion. Were it not for fear of the world, for the vain glory of distinguishing oneself in presence of one's comrades, a man would ofttimes lose his head, and despite himself hurry away at a gallop.

However, Maurice and Jean were now again growing accustomed to their peril; and amidst their utter distraction there came to them a kind of unconsciousness and intoxication which was bravery. They ended by no longer trying to hasten through that accursed wood. Horrors had yet increased among that people of bombarded trees, now falling upon all sides like giant sentries killed at their posts. In the delicious, subdued, greeny light under the foliage, in the depths of all the mysterious shelter-places carpeted with moss, the brutal blast of death was ever blowing. The lonely springs were violated; the dying moaned even in the hidden nooks where only lovers hitherto had strayed. One man, whose chest was perforated by a bullet, had just time enough to cry 'Hit!' as he fell dying, face downward, on the sward. Another, both of whose legs had been broken by a shell, continued laughing, unconscious of his wound, thinking, in fact, that he had merely stumbled against a tree root. Others, with their limbs pitted, mortally stricken, continued speaking and running for several yards before they fell to the ground in a sudden convulsion. At the first moment the deepest wounds were scarcely felt, and it was only afterwards that the frightful sufferings began, bursting forth with lamentation and tears.

Ah! the traitorous wood, the massacred forest, which, amid all the sobbing of the dying trees, filled, little by little, with the howling anguish of the wounded. At the foot of an oak tree, Maurice and Jean perceived a Zouave, who, with his intestines escaping from a ghastly wound, was raising a continuous roar, like a dying wild beast. Farther on, there was another one--on fire; his blue sash was burning, the flame was rising and singeing his beard, whilst he shed big tears, unable to move because his spine was broken. Then there was a captain whose left arm was torn off, and whose right side was laid open to the thigh, and who, stretched on his stomach, dragged himself along upon an elbow, begging all those who passed, in a shrill, horribly supplicating voice, to have the compassion to despatch him. And there were others and others still, all suffering abominably, strewing the grassy paths in such numbers that it was necessary to be careful lest one should tread upon them in passing. The dead, the wounded, no longer counted, however. The comrade who fell was abandoned, forgotten. Not a glance even was given behind. 'Twas fate. Another's turn next; perhaps, indeed, one's own!

All at once, as they were at last reaching the verge of the wood, a call resounded: 'Help!' The sub-lieutenant carrying the colours had just been struck by a bullet in the left lung. He had fallen, spitting forth the blood that had gushed into his mouth; and seeing that nobody stopped, he found strength to call 'Help!' again, and to add, 'The colours!'

Rochas, darting back, seized hold of the flag, the shaft of which was broken, and bounded away with it; whilst the sub-lieutenant, his speech thickened by the bloody froth filling his mouth, muttered: 'I'm done for, but no matter--save the colours!'

And he remained alone, writhing on the moss in that delicious sylvan nook, tearing up the grass with his convulsive hands, whilst his chest heaved with a frightful rattle which lasted for long hours.

At last they were out of that fearful wood. Besides Jean and Maurice, the only remaining men of the little band were Lieutenant Rochas, Pache, and Lapoulle. Bugler Gaude, who had been lost to view, suddenly sprang out of a thicket, however, and with his bugle dangling from his shoulder, ran on to join his comrades. And the survivors were immensely relieved to find themselves again in the open country where they could breathe at their ease. The whistling of the bullets had ceased, and no shells fell on this side of the valley.

Immediately afterwards they heard some one swearing violently, and ahead of them, in front of a farm gate, they perceived an angry general, mounted on a horse steaming with sweat. It was Bourgain-Desfeuilles, the commander of their brigade, who like themselves was covered with dust and appeared overcome with fatigue. That red, fat face of his--the face of a jolly companion--expressed the exasperation he felt at the disaster which he looked upon as a personal mischance. His men had not seen him since the morning. He had doubtless lost himself on the battlefield, galloping hither and thither in search of the remnants of his brigade, quite capable by the way of getting himself killed in his rage against those Prussian batteries which were sweeping away not only the Empire, but also his own fortune, high in favour as he was at the Tuileries.

'Thunder!' he shouted. 'Isn't there anyone left, then? Can't a man even get any information in this cursed place?'

The farmer and his family must have fled into the depths of the Ardennes. At last, however, an aged woman appeared at the gate, some old servant whose legs, almost past service, had kept her there.

'Eh, mother, here!' shouted the general. 'Where's Belgium?'

She looked at him with an expression of stupor, as though she did not understand him. Then, casting all restraint aside, and forgetting he was talking to a peasant woman, he shouted that for his own part he didn't intend to be caught like a rat in a trap by returning to Sedan, but meant to sling his hook across the frontier at the double-quick. Some soldiers had drawn near to him and were listening.

'But it's no longer possible to get through, general,' said a sergeant. 'There are Prussians all around. This morning was the time to slope.'

Stories were, indeed, already circulating of companies, separated from their regiments, which, without intending it, had got across the frontier, and of others too which, later on, had even succeeded in piercing the enemy's lines before the junction of the German armies was complete.

Quite beside himself, the general shrugged his shoulders. 'Come!' said he, 'can't one cut through anything with dare-devils like you? I'll find another fifty brave fellows willing to risk their skins.' And again turning towards the old peasant woman: 'Eh! thunder!' he cried, 'just answer, will you, where's Belgium?'

This time she understood him, and pointed towards the forests with her shrivelled hand: 'Over there, over there!'

'Eh? What do you say? Those houses at the end of the fields?'

'Oh, much farther than that, much farther away! Over yonder, right over yonder!'

The general was stifling with rage. ''Pon my word, this wretched place is disgusting! A man can never tell where he is! Belgium was quite close by, and we were afraid of tumbling into it unawares, and now that we want to get there, it's gone to the devil! No, no, this is altogether too much, they can take me, and do what they like with me for all I care. I'm off to bed.' And, urging on his horse, leaping in the saddle like a wine-skin inflated by a blast of anger, he galloped off in the direction of Sedan.

The road turned, and they descended into the Fond de Givonne,[32] a suburb of the town, shut in by hills, where the road in climbing towards the woods was skirted by little houses and gardens. Such a stream of fugitives now crowded it that Lieutenant Rochas soon found himself blockaded with Pache, Lapoulle, and Gaude, under the walls of a tavern, at the corner of a crossway. Jean and Maurice had some trouble in joining them. And greatly were they surprised on hearing a drunkard's husky voice suddenly calling to them: 'Hallo! here's a meeting! Eh, you fellows! What a meeting to be sure!'

On looking round they recognised Chouteau, who was leaning out of one of the ground-floor windows of the tavern. He was very drunk, and between a couple of hiccoughs he continued: 'Don't stand on ceremony if you are thirsty. There's still a drop left for friends.' And then, waving his hand over his shoulder, he called some one from the other end of the room: 'Make haste, you lazybones. Give these gentlemen something to drink.'

Thereupon Loubet made his appearance, grinning, and waving a bottle of wine in either hand. He was less intoxicated than his comrade, and, with the nasal twang of the 'coco'[33] vendors perambulating the streets on a public holiday, he cried, like the Parisian wag he was: 'Nice and cool! nice and cool! who'll have a drink!'

He and Chouteau had not been seen by their comrades since they had gone off under the pretence of carrying Sergeant Sapin to the ambulance. They had no doubt wandered and lounged about, carefully avoiding the spots where the shells were falling, till they had finally stranded in that tavern and helped to pillage it. Lieutenant Rochas was quite indignant: 'Wait a bit, you bandits!' he shouted, 'I'll teach you to guzzle while we others are risking our skins!'

Chouteau, however, would have none of his reprimand. 'Just remember, you old lunatic,' said he, 'that there are no lieutenants left now; we are all free men! Haven't the Prussians licked you enough--do you want another dose, eh?'

Rochas had to be held back, such was his eagerness to smash Chouteau's head. Loubet, with the bottles under his arms, endeavoured to make peace: 'Nonsense!' said he, 'we mustn't eat one another, we are all brothers.' And catching sight of his comrades, Lapoulle and Pache, he added: 'Don't be idiots, you fellows, come in and rinse your throats.'

Lapoulle hesitated for a moment, dimly conscious that it was wrong to go and make merry whilst so many poor devils had only their tongues to swallow. But then he was so thoroughly tired out, so exhausted too with hunger and thirst. All at once he made up his mind, and without a word sprang into the tavern, pushing Pache, also silent and sorely tempted, before him. Pache yielded, and neither of them reappeared.

'The brigands!' repeated Rochas; 'they all ought to be shot.'

He now only had Jean, Maurice, and Gaude with him, and despite their efforts to resist the impetus, they were all four gradually drifting along with the torrent of fugitives, which stretched across the full breadth of the road. They already found themselves far away from the tavern. It was the rout rolling towards the ditches of Sedan in a muddy stream, like a heap of soil and stones which a storm, in sweeping the hillsides, drags down into the valleys. From all the surrounding plateaux, by every slope and every fold, by the Floing road, by way of Pierremont, by way of the cemetery, by way of the Champ de Mars, as well as by the Fond de Givonne, the same mob was pouring along with an ever-accelerated gallop of panic. And how could one reproach these wretched men, who, for twelve hours, had been waiting motionless under the death-dealing artillery of an invisible foe, against which they could do nothing? Now, moreover, the batteries assailed them in front, in flank, and in the rear, the fires converged more and more as the army retreated upon the town; the men were struck down in heaps, cut into a mass of mincemeat in the traitorous hole whither they were swept. A few regiments of the Seventh Corps, notably on the side of Floing, were falling back in fairly good order. But there were no longer ranks or leaders in the Fond de Givonne; the men scrambled and hustled one another distractedly; among them were remnants of every arm, Zouaves, Turcos, Chasseurs, Linesmen, mostly unarmed, and all with torn, soiled uniforms, black hands, black faces, bloodshot eyes starting from their sockets, and swollen mouths, tumefied through having yelled so many oaths. Now and again a riderless charger rushed along at a gallop, throwing men to the ground and penetrating the mob with a long eddy of fright. Then guns passed by at breakneck speed--disbanded batteries whose artillerymen, carried away as it were by intoxication, raised no warning shout, but pursued their course crushing everything in their way. And yet the flock-like tramping did not cease; it was a compact defiling, shoulder to shoulder; a flight en masse, every break in which was immediately filled up, in the universal, instinctive eagerness to arrive yonder and secure a shelter behind a wall.

Again did Jean raise his head and turn towards the west. The sunrays were still burning the men's perspiring faces through the thick dust which was raised by their tramping feet. It was a lovely day, the sky was divinely blue. 'What a beastly nuisance!' repeated Jean; 'that horrid sun won't sling its hook.'

All at once, in a young woman standing close to a house and on the point of being crushed against it by the torrent, Maurice, to his stupefaction, recognised his sister, Henriette. For nearly a minute he remained gaping at her. And it was she who, without appearing surprised, spoke the first words: 'They shot him at Bazeilles--yes, I was there--and then, as I want to recover his body, I had an idea----'

She named neither the Prussians nor Weiss. Everybody was bound to understand her, and Maurice understood. He fondly loved his sister, and, with a sob, exclaimed, 'My poor darling!'

When Henriette had recovered her senses, at about two o'clock, she had found herself at Balan, weeping in the kitchen of some people whom she did not know, with her head lying on a table. But her tears soon ceased to flow. The heroine was already awakening in that slight, delicate, silent woman She feared nothing, she had a proud, unconquerable soul. And, in her grief, she no longer had but one idea, that of recovering her husband's body to bury it. Her first plan was simply to return to Bazeilles. But everybody deterred her from attempting this, showed her that it was absolutely impossible for her to succeed. So she at last declared that she would seek some one, a man willing either to accompany her or to take the necessary steps. And her choice fell upon a cousin of hers, who had been the assistant-manager of the refinery at Le Chêne, at the time when Weiss was employed there. He had been much attached to her husband and would surely not refuse his help. For a couple of years past, thanks to his wife having inherited some property from her parents, he had retired and taken up his abode at a charming place called the Hermitage, whose tiers of terraces rose up near Sedan, on the farther side of the Fond de Givonne. And thither she was now making her way through all the many obstacles, forced at each moment to halt, and in constant danger of being thrown down, trodden under foot, and killed.

She briefly explained her plan to Maurice, who approved of it. 'Cousin Dubreuil,' said he, 'has always been a good friend to us. He will help you.'

Then another idea came into his head. Lieutenant Rochas was anxious to save the regimental colours. It had already been suggested that the flag should be cut up, and that each man should carry a strip of the silk under his shirt; or it might be buried at the foot of a tree, and disinterred later on, if the situation of the spot were carefully noted. But the idea of lacerating that banner or burying it like a corpse affected them too painfully, and they would have preferred some other expedient. Accordingly, when Maurice proposed that they should confide the colours to some safe person, who would hide them, and if need wore, defend them until he could restore them intact, they all approved of the suggestion. 'Well, then,' resumed the young fellow, addressing his sister, 'we will go with you to see if Dubreuil is at the Hermitage Besides, I'm determined not to leave you.'

It was not easy to get out of the crowd, but they succeeded in doing so, and turned into a hollow road climbing on the left. Then they fell into a perfect labyrinth of lanes and paths, a suburb of market and flower gardens, villas and other country places all jumbled and entangled together; and these paths and lanes wound round between stone walls, or turned sharply, and ended at times in blind alleys. There was here, indeed, a marvellous entrenched camp for an ambuscade kind of warfare, full of nooks which ten men might have defended against a regiment for hours. Shots were already crackling here and there, for the suburb overlooked Sedan, and the Prussian Guard was coming up from the other side of the valley.

When Maurice and Henriette, followed by the others, had turned first to the left and then to the right between two interminable walls, they suddenly came out in front of the large open gateway of the Hermitage, whose grounds rose up in three broad terraces, upon one of which stood the house, a large rectangular building, approached by an avenue of venerable elms. On the verge of a wood, in front, beyond a narrow, deeply banked valley, were some other country residences.

Henriette felt anxious on seeing the gate wide open. 'They are no longer there--they must have gone away,' said she.

Her surmise was correct. Foreseeing the impending disaster, Dubreuil had, on the previous day, resigned himself to taking his wife and children to Bouillon. Still, the house was not empty. On glancing at it from a distance through the trees, it became evident that it was the scene of commotion. The young woman at last ventured to step into the avenue, but recoiled on beholding the corpse of a Prussian soldier.

'Hallo!' exclaimed Rochas, 'has there been a tussle here already?'

They were all eager to know what had happened, and hurried towards the house, where the sight they beheld enlightened them. Plainly enough the doors and windows of the ground floor had been broken open with the butts of guns, and through all the gaping apertures could be seen the pillaged rooms; whilst numerous articles of furniture which had been thrown outside were lying on the gravel of the terrace, below the steps. There was notably a sky-blue drawing-room suite, a sofa and twelve arm-chairs, ranged anyhow, pell-mell, round a large stand, the white marble top of which was split in halves. And several Zouaves, Chasseurs, Linesmen, and men of the Marine Infantry were running about behind the buildings and along the paths, firing at the little wood beyond the dingle in front of them.

'We found some of those filthy Prussians here, sir,' a Zouave explained to Rochas. 'They were sacking the place. But you can see that we settled their hash for them. Only the brutes are now coming back, ten to one, and it won't be an easy job.'

The corpses of three other Prussian soldiers were stretched here and there upon the terrace. And while Henriette was fixedly looking at them--doubtless thinking of her husband who, in a like way, was sleeping the last sleep, lying disfigured amid dust and blood over yonder--a bullet whizzed past her head and struck a tree behind her. Jean darted forward: 'Don't stay there--quick, quick! go and hide yourself in the house!'

Since he had met her again, looking so changed, so distracted by wretchedness, he had been gazing at her with a melting heart, picturing her as she had appeared to him on the previous day with her good housewife's smile. At first he could think of nothing to say to her, not knowing even if she would recognise him. But he would gladly have devoted himself to her could he have given her back any tranquillity and happiness. 'Wait for us in the house,' said he. 'As soon as there is any danger we'll contrive to get you off up there.'

'What use is it?' she replied, with a gesture of indifference. However, her brother was also pushing her towards the house, and she had to climb the steps, and for a moment enter the hall, whence she could survey the avenue from end to end. From that moment she became a spectatress of the fight.

Maurice and Jean were posted behind one of the first elms. Each of those ancient trunks, of giant proportions, furnished ample shelter for a couple of men. Farther on, Bugler Gaude had joined Lieutenant Rochas, who obstinately kept the flag with him since there was no one to whom he could confide it. Whilst he was firing he stood it against the tree, beside him. Each trunk had its little garrison, the Zouaves, Chasseurs, and Marines concealing themselves behind the elms, from one to the other end of the avenue, and only peering forth at the moment when they fired.

The number of Prussians in the little wood across the dingle was no doubt steadily increasing, for the hostile fusillade became more and more lively. No one was to be seen--you barely espied a flitting profile, darting every now and then from one tree to another. Some of the enemy's skirmishers occupied a country house with green shutters standing on the verge of the wood, and were firing from the partially opened windows of the ground floor. It was now about four o'clock, the cannonade was slackening, dying away; but in this sequestered hollow, whence the white flag hoisted on the keep of Sedan could not be seen, these men, French and Germans, were yet killing one another as though they had some personal quarrel together. And in this direction indeed, in spite of the truce, many hole-and-corner encounters were stubbornly prolonged until black night fell. Both through the suburb of the Fond de Givonne, and across the gardens of the Petit-Pont, the fusillade rattled persistently.

Prussians and Frenchmen continued for a long while riddling one another with bullets across that narrow valley, beyond the Hermitage. From time to time, whenever a man was imprudent enough to show himself, he fell with a bullet in his chest. Three more corpses were already lying in the avenue, and a wounded man, stretched upon his face there, was giving vent to a frightful rattle, without anyone thinking of going to turn him over, so as to lessen his agony.

All at once, as Jean raised his eyes, he saw Henriette slipping a knapsack as a pillow under the unfortunate fellow's head, after laying him upon his back. She had stolen out of the house without being perceived. The corporal ran up to her and dragged her behind the tree which screened Maurice and himself. 'Do you want to get killed?' he asked her.

She did not seem conscious of her rash temerity: 'No--but I was frightened, all alone in that vestibule,' she answered: 'I would much rather stay out here.'

And thenceforth she remained with them. They set her down at their feet close against the trunk of the elm, whilst they continued firing their last cartridges in such mad desperation that both weariness and fear flew away. Indeed, complete unconsciousness was coming over them, their actions were growing quite mechanical, their heads had become so empty that they had lost even the instinct of self-preservation.

'Just look, Maurice!' Henriette suddenly exclaimed; 'isn't that a man of the Prussian Guard--that dead fellow lying in front of us?'

For a moment or so she had been scrutinising one of the enemy's dead, a thick-set man with big moustaches, who was lying on his side on the gravel of the terrace. His spiked helmet had rolled a few steps away, with its strap broken. And the uniform was indeed that of the Prussian Guard: dark grey trousers, blue tunic with white galloons and great-coat rolled up and worn in bandolier fashion.

'I assure you it is the Guards' uniform,' continued Henriette. 'I've an engraving at home. And, besides, there's the photograph which Cousin Gunther sent us.' She paused, and then in her tranquil way rose and stepped up to the corpse before she could be prevented. She stooped over the body and at once exclaimed: 'The shoulder-strap is red! Ah! I felt certain of it.' And then back she came, never heeding the bullets which whistled past her ears. 'Yes, the shoulder-strap's red--it was fated--Cousin Gunther's regiment.'

From that moment neither Maurice nor Jean could prevail on her to remain still, under cover of the tree. She moved about, and protruded her head, insisting, despite everything, upon looking in the direction of the little wood, as though harassed by some absorbing thought. Her brother and the corporal still continued firing, pushing her back with their knees whenever she exposed herself too much. The Prussians, no doubt, were beginning to consider themselves in sufficient force for an attack, for they were now boldly showing themselves; quite a stream of them was gathering and pouring forth from among the trees. This led to their sustaining heavy losses, for every French bullet took effect, bringing a man to the ground.

'There! perhaps that's your cousin!' suddenly said Jean, 'that officer who has just come out of the house with the green shutters.'

A captain, recognisable by the gold-laced collar of his tunic and the gilded eagle which, in the oblique sunlight, was flaming on his helmet, could now be seen just outside the little house. Sword in hand, he was calling out an order in a sharp voice, and the distance was so short--barely two hundred yards--that one could plainly distinguish his slim figure and his stern face of a pinkish hue with little fair moustaches. Henriette closely scrutinised him with her sharp eyes, and without any sign of astonishment replied: 'It is certainly he. I recognise him perfectly.'

Maurice made a wild gesture and took aim. 'Cousin Gunther? Ah! thunder! he shall pay for Weiss!'

But Henriette sprang up quivering, and dealt his chassepot a blow, so that the bullet flew skyward: 'No, no,' said she, 'not relatives; not people we know. It is abominable!'

Her womanly instincts were again aroused within her, and she dropped to the ground behind the tree, weeping and sobbing violently. Horror was overwhelming her; she was now all fear and grief.

Rochas, however, was triumphant. The fire of his few soldiers, whom he excited with his thunderous voice, had acquired such intensity at sight of the Prussians that the latter were falling back, again seeking the cover of the little wood. 'Keep firm, my lads!' shouted the lieutenant; 'don't give way. Ah! the capons, they are turning tail, we'll settle their hash for them!'

He was quite joyful: he seemed to have recovered all his amazing confidence. There had been no defeats! Those few men in front of him, yonder, were the German armies, which he was about to overthrow at one easy stroke. All his tall, lean frame, his long, bony face, with its hooked nose curving over a passionate, good-natured mouth, was merry with a braggart delight, the joy of the trooper who has conquered the world between courting his sweetheart and tippling a bottle of good wine!

'Parbleu! my lads, what are we here for if not to give them a licking! It would be something new for us to be beaten, eh? Beaten! is it possible? Another effort, my lads, and they'll scamper away like hares!'

He yelled and gesticulated, withal such a capital fellow amid his ignorant illusions, that the men readily joined in his gaiety. All at once he shouted: 'We'll kick them back to the frontier, yes, kick them back to the frontier! Victory! Victory!'

At that same moment, however, while the enemy on the other side of the dingle seemed to be falling back, a terrible fusillade broke out on the left. It was the everlasting turning movement--a large detachment of the Guard had made its way round by the Fond de Givonne. From that moment it was no longer possible to hold the Hermitage. The dozen men or so who were still defending its terraces found themselves between two fires, in danger, too, of being cut off from Sedan. Some of them fell, and for a moment there was extreme confusion. The Prussians were already climbing over the walls of the grounds, rushing up along the pathways in such numbers that a bayonet fight immediately began. One Zouave, a tall handsome, black-bearded man, whose head was bare, and who had doffed his jacket, especially distinguished himself by his fearful exploits, transpiercing cracking chests and yielding bellies, wiping his bayonet, red with one man's blood, in the flesh of another's flank; and the weapon having broken he took to splitting skulls with the butt of his gun, till at last a stumble altogether disarmed him, when he sprang with such force at the throat of a burly Prussian that, locked in a mortal embrace, they both rolled over the gravel as far as the gaping kitchen doorway. And here and there, amid the trees and at the edges of the lawns, there were other slaughterous encounters which swelled the number of dead. But it was in front of the house-steps, around the sky-blue sofa and arm-chairs that the struggle proved most desperate--a mad scramble of men firing for a moment at such close range that they burned one another's faces, and then closing and tearing with tooth and nail, for lack of a handy knife to plunge into each other's throats.

And then it was that Gaude the bugler, whose pained expression of face always spoke of sorrows which he never mentioned to his comrades, was seized with a fit of heroic lunacy. Amid this last defeat, although he knew well enough that the company was annihilated, that not a man could answer his summons, he caught hold of his bugle, raised it to his lips and sounded the rally with such a tempestuous blast that it seemed as though he wanted to arouse the dead. The Prussians were coming up, yet he did not stir, but blew louder and louder, sounding a full flourish until a volley threw him to the ground, when his last breath escaped in a bugle note, quivering skywards through the air.

Rochas standing there, unable to comprehend what was passing, had made no attempt at flight. He waited and stammered: 'Eh, what is it? what, what?' The idea that this was again defeat did not enter his brain. Everything was being changed, even the rules of fighting. Ought not those fellows to have waited across the dingle until the French went thither to beat them? It was impossible to kill enough of them; fresh ones were ever popping up. What could it all mean, this cursed war, in which ten men collected together to kill a single antagonist, when the enemy only showed himself of an evening, after routing you throughout the day by a prudent cannonade? Aghast, distracted, having understood nothing of the campaign from first to last, Rochas felt himself enveloped, carried off, as it were, by some superior force which he no longer resisted, albeit he mechanically repeated in his obstinate way: 'Courage, my lads, victory is yonder!'

All the same, he had with a swift movement again taken up the colours. 'Twas his last thought--to hide them so that they might not be captured by the Prussians. However, although the shaft was broken, it somehow caught in his legs, and almost tripped him up. Bullets were whistling past him, he felt that death was near, and stripping the silk from the staff, he tore and tried to annihilate it. And, at that same moment, he was struck in the neck, in the chest, and in the legs, and sank upon the ground, swathed in those tricolour shreds. For another minute he remained alive, with dilated eyes, espying perhaps on the horizon a vision of what War really was--an atrocious, vital struggle which man should accept only with a grave and resigned heart, as he would some fatal law. Then a little sob escaped him, and he passed away in his childish bewilderment, like some poor being of limited understanding, some joyous insect crushed beneath the necessity of gigantic and impassive nature. And, with him, died a legend.

As soon as the Prussians were seen arriving, Jean and Maurice had beaten a retreat from tree to tree, screening Henriette as far as was practicable. They did not cease firing, but every now and again discharged a shot and then sought a fresh shelter-place. Maurice knew of a little door in the wall, in the upper part of the grounds, and they luckily found it open. Without a moment's hesitation, they all three darted outside, bounding into a narrow by-way which wound along between high walls. Just as they were reaching the end of it some shots compelled them to spring to the left into what unfortunately proved to be a blind alley. They thereupon had to gallop back and turn to the right under a hail of bullets. Later on, indeed, they were never able to remember the road they had taken. Men were still firing at one another from well-nigh every corner of that inextricable network of paths and lanes. Some lingered battling, till the last moment, beside the cart-gates of market gardeners' premises; the slightest obstacles were being defended and carried by assault with terrible desperation. Then, all at once, Maurice, his sister, and the corporal found themselves once more on the road of the Fond de Givonne, near Sedan.

And now for the last time Jean raised his head and looked towards the west, whence a great rosy glow was rising; and he heaved a sigh of immense relief: 'Ah! that horrid sun is setting at last.'

Meanwhile, they were all three galloping, galloping along without drawing breath. Around them, the fag end of the stream of fugitives was still pouring down the road with the ever-increasing speed of an overflowing torrent. When they reached the Balan gate they had to wait amid a ferocious crush and scramble. The drawbridge chains had broken, and as the ditch could only be crossed by the narrow foot-bridge, neither guns nor horses were, on this side, able to enter the town. The crush was said to be still more frightful at the Château postern and the Cassine gate. It was a wild engulfment, all the remnants of the army rolling down the slopes, throwing themselves upon the town and tumbling into it with a sluicy uproar as though into the depths of some sewer. The baleful fascination of those walls had ended by perverting even the bravest.

Maurice had taken Henriette in his arms, and quivering with impatience he exclaimed: 'I hope for God's sake they won't close the gate till everyone has got in.'

His fear was that of the throng. Meantime, however, soldiers were already camping upon the slopes, both on right and left, whilst batteries of artillery, guns, caissons, and horses were stranding, pell-mell, in the ditch. Then repeated bugle calls rang out, followed by the clear notes of the 'retreat' summoning the belated soldiers. Several more men thereupon came up at the double-quick, and although isolated shots still resounded through the suburbs, the reports now became less and less frequent. Detachments were posted on the inner banquette of the parapet to defend the approaches, and the gate was at last closed. The Prussians were now no more than a hundred yards away. They could be seen coming and going across the Balan road, quietly occupying the houses and gardens there.

Maurice and Jean--pushing Henriette before them so as to protect her from the jostling of their comrades--had been among the last to enter Sedan. Six o'clock was striking. The cannonade had now ceased for nearly an hour, and little by little there came an end even to the isolated rifle shots. And then of all the deafening uproar, the hateful thunder that had growled since sunrise, nothing whatever remained; it had passed into death-like nihility. Night came, falling amid a lugubrious, an awful silence.

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VIII. TRUCE AND SURRENDER

At about half-past five, before the gates were closed, Delaherche, anxious with regard to the consequences, now that he knew the battle to be lost, again returned to the Sub-Prefecture. He remained there during nearly three hours, pacing across the paved courtyard, watching and questioning the officers who passed; and it was thus that he became acquainted with the rapid march of events:--General de Wimpffen's resignation tendered, then withdrawn, full powers conferred upon him by the Emperor to repair to the Prussian headquarters and obtain the least grievous conditions possible for the vanquished army, and finally, the assembling of a council of war, to decide whether they might try to continue the struggle by defending the fortress. During the sitting of this council, which was composed of some twenty commanding officers, and seemed to last an eternity, the manufacturer climbed the house-steps more than a score of times. And all at once, at a quarter past eight, he saw General de Wimpffen come down them, very red and with swollen eyes. He was followed by a colonel and two other generals, and they all leaped into the saddle and went off by the bridge over the Meuse. So capitulation had been resolved upon, had become inevitable!

Tranquillised by this, Delaherche reflected that he was very hungry, and resolved to return home. As soon as he was out of the courtyard, however, he hesitated at sight of the frightful obstruction that had meantime been reaching a climax. The streets, the squares were gorged, crammed, filled with men, horses, and guns to such a point that it seemed as though the compact mass had been forcibly driven into the town by means of some gigantic ram. Whilst the regiments which had fallen back in good order were bivouacking on the ramparts, the scattered remnants of all the various corps, the fugitives of every arm, the whole swarming herd had fairly submerged Sedan, and such was now the accumulation, so dense had this motionless crowd become, that in its midst one could no longer move either arm or leg. The wheels of the guns, of the caissons and other innumerable vehicles were locked together, the horses which had been lashed and urged in every direction, had room neither to advance nor to step back, and the men, deaf to every threat, were invading the houses, devouring whatever they found, lying down wherever they could, both in the rooms and in the cellars. Many too had fallen on the doorsteps, blocking up the vestibules; whilst others, lacking the strength to go any farther, were stretched upon the footways, sound asleep there, not even rising when their limbs were trampled upon, preferring as it were to lie there and be crushed rather than take the trouble of going elsewhere.

Delaherche then understood the necessity of surrender. At some crossways artillery caissons stood so close together, that if a single German shell had fallen upon anyone of them, all would have exploded, and Sedan would then have flared from rampart to rampart. And, besides, what could be done with such a heap of wretches, overwhelmed with hunger and weariness, without cartridges and without food? An entire day would have been needed merely to clear the streets. Then, too, the fortress itself was not armed, the town was not provisioned. All this had been pointed out at the council of war, by those who were of sensible mind, those who retained an accurate perception of the situation in the midst of their deep, patriotic grief; and the boldest officers, those who quivered and exclaimed that it was impossible for an army to surrender in this fashion, had been obliged to bow their heads, unable to devise any practical means of renewing the struggle on the morrow.

Delaherche managed with great difficulty to make his way through the mob on the Place Turenne and the Place du Rivage. As he passed in front of the Golden Cross Hotel he caught sight of its mournful dining-room, where some general officers sat in silence at the bare table. There was nothing left--not even any bread. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who could be heard roaring in the kitchen, must, however, have managed to discover a few scraps, for he suddenly became silent, and darted upstairs embarrassed with something wrapped in a greasy paper. There was such a crowd outside, looking through the windows at that lugubrious table d'hôte, swept bare by sudden famine, that Delaherche, stuck fast in its midst, had to use his elbows vigorously, and even then, such was the pushing, that he occasionally lost all the ground he had managed to gain. In the High Street the block appeared so impassable that for a moment he despaired of ever getting home again. All the guns of a battery seemed to have been thrown there, pell-mell, one atop of another. Eventually he made up his mind to climb on to the carriages, whence striding over the pieces he jumped from wheel to wheel, at the risk of breaking his legs. Then the horses barred his way, and he had to stoop, glide between the legs and under the bellies of these wretched animals who were dying of inanition. The obstacles became more and more formidable, and so frightened him at last, that when, after a quarter of an hour of repeated efforts, he had got as far as the Rue St. Michel, he resolved to turn into that street and work his way round by the Rue des Laboureurs, hoping that these out-of-the-way thoroughfares would be less obstructed than the High Street. Unluckily, however, there happened to be there a house of evil repute, which a band of drunken soldiers was besieging; and fearing that he might get some nasty blow in the brawl, he retraced his steps. Thenceforth he became obstinate, and pushed on to the end of the High Street, at times balancing himself on the shafts of vehicles and at others climbing over vans. On the Place du Collège he was passed along on men's shoulders for some thirty steps; then, falling, he narrowly missed having his ribs broken, and only saved himself by catching hold of the iron bars of a railing. And more than an hour had elapsed since his departure from the Sub-Prefecture when he at last reached the Rue Maqua, sweating, in tatters, and quite exhausted. Yet, as a rule, he could walk from one place to the other in less than five minutes.

Desirous of preventing the ambulance and the garden from being invaded, Major Bouroche had taken the precaution to have two sentries placed at the entrance of the premises. This was a great relief to Delaherche, to whom the idea had suddenly occurred that his house was perhaps being pillaged. On reaching the garden the sight of the ambulance, faintly lighted up by a few lanterns, and exhaling the foul breath of fever, again sent a shiver to his heart. Then, on stumbling against a soldier who was lying on the paving-stones, he suddenly remembered the Seventh Corps' treasury-chest which this man had been guarding since the morning, forgotten, no doubt, by his officers, and at last so overcome by fatigue that he had stretched himself there to sleep.

The house itself seemed to be empty, all was black on the ground floor, where the doors were wide open. The servants must have remained in the ambulance, for he found nobody in the kitchen, where a dim little lamp was smoking. Having lighted a candle, he went as softly as he could up the stairs in order not to wake his mother and his wife. Before returning to the Sub-Prefecture he had begged that they would go to bed early, after so laborious a day, fraught with such terrible emotions.

On entering his private room, however, he had a surprise. A soldier was lying upon the sofa where Captain Beaudoin had slept for a few hours the day before, and it was only when he recognised him to be Henriette's brother, Maurice, that he understood his presence there, the more so as, on turning round, he had perceived another soldier--that fellow Jean whom he had seen prior to the battle, and who, wrapped in a blanket, was now lying on a rug. Utterly overcome with weariness, they both looked like dead men. Delaherche did not tarry, but went to his wife's room close by. A lamp, standing on the corner of a table, was burning there amid a quivering silence. Gilberte had simply thrown herself across the bed, in fear, no doubt, of some catastrophe. She was sleeping very calmly, however, whilst Henriette, seated near her on a chair, with merely her head resting on the edge of the mattress, was also slumbering; but her sleep was disturbed by nightmares, and big tears were welling under her eyelids. Delaherche looked at them both for a moment, and was tempted to rouse Henriette to inquire what she had done. Had she been to Bazeilles? Perhaps, if he questioned her, she would be able to give him some news of his dyeworks. However, he took pity on her, and was on the point of leaving the room when his mother appeared on the threshold, and, without a word, signed to him to follow her.

As they crossed the dining-room he gave vent to his astonishment: 'What, haven't you gone to bed?'

She shook her head; and then, in an undertone, she said: 'I cannot sleep. I have been sitting in an armchair near the colonel. He's in a burning fever, and wakes up every moment and questions me. I don't know what to answer him. Come in and see him.'

M. de Vineuil had already fallen asleep again. His long, red face--which his moustaches streaked with wavy snow--could scarcely be distinguished on the pillow, for Madame Delaherche had placed a newspaper before the lamp, so that the head of the bed was obscured. The bright light fell upon herself as she sat rigidly in the armchair, with her hands inertly resting in her lap, and her eyes gazing afar, in a tragic reverie.

'Wait a moment,' she murmured. 'I think he heard you come in. Yes, he is waking again.'

The colonel was, indeed, opening his eyes and fixing them on Delaherche without moving his head. He recognised the manufacturer, and in a voice which trembled with fever, he inquired: 'It's all over, isn't it? They are capitulating?'

Espying a glance which his mother gave him, Delaherche was on the point of telling an untruth. But what would be the good of it? And so, with a gesture of discouragement, he replied: 'What would you have them do? If you could only see the streets of the town. General de Wimpffen has just started for the German headquarters to discuss the conditions.'

M. de Vineuil's eyes had closed again, and a long shudder convulsed him, whilst from his lips escaped a hollow lamentation: 'Ah! my God! my God!' And without opening his eyes he continued in a spasmodical voice: 'Ah! it was yesterday that what I wanted ought to have been done. Yes, I know the district. I told the general what I feared; but they wouldn't even listen to him--all the heights up there, up above St. Menges, as far as Fleigneux, occupied by our men--the army commanding Sedan, and holding the defile of St. Albert. We wait there, our positions are impregnable, the road to Mézières remains open----'

Then his speech became embarrassed, and he could only stammer a few unintelligible words, whilst the fever-born vision of the battle slowly faded away, carried off by sleep. He slumbered, possibly still dreaming of victory.

'Does the major answer for him?' Delaherche asked, in a low voice. The old lady nodded affirmatively. 'All the same those wounds in the foot are terrible,' he resumed. 'He will be laid up for a long while, I suppose?'

This time she made no reply; she herself was absorbed in the great grief of the defeat. She belonged to another age, to those old, rough frontier-burgesses of bygone times, so ardent in defending their cities. The bright lamp-light fell upon her stern face, which with its sharp nose and thin lips bespoke all her anger and suffering, all the feeling of revolt that prevented her from sleeping.

Then Delaherche felt isolated and frightfully wretched. His hunger was returning, becoming quite intolerable, and he thought it was weakness alone that thus deprived him of all courage. So he left the room on tip-toe and went down into the kitchen again with the candlestick. But here everything was still more dreary: with the fire out, the sideboard empty, and the dishcloths flung about in disorder, it seemed as though the blast of the disaster had swept even through this room and carried away all the substantial gaiety of creature comforts. He thought at first that he should not be able to find even a crust, the bread having been taken for the soupe at the ambulance. In the depths of a cupboard, however, he at last came upon some haricot beans, left from the previous day, and forgotten there. And he ate them as they were, cold, without butter and without bread, standing at the table there, for he did not like to go upstairs to partake of such a meal as this, though on the other hand he made all haste to get out of that dismal kitchen, where the little vacillating lamp was infecting the atmosphere with a horrible stench of petroleum.

It was now scarcely more than ten o'clock, and Delaherche remained with nothing to do pending the time when he should know whether the capitulation was really to be signed or not. He still experienced a feeling of anxiety, a fear lest the struggle should be resumed, a dreadful terror of what might then happen, which he did not speak of, but which weighed covertly upon his heart. When he had again returned to his private room, where neither Maurice nor Jean had stirred, he tried to lie back in an arm-chair and get to sleep there; but sleep would not come to him, a noise of exploding shells made him start to his feet each time that he was on the point of losing consciousness. It was the uproar of the frightful cannonade of the daytime still lingering in his ears; and whenever he was roused by it he would listen for a moment, quite scared, and tremble at the deep silence which surrounded him. Being unable to sleep, he preferred to remain on his legs, and began wandering about the dark rooms, carefully avoiding the chamber where his mother was watching over the colonel, for the fixed stare with which she gazed at him made him feel quite uncomfortable. However, he twice went to see if Henriette had awakened, and paused at sight of his wife's calm, peaceful face. Not knowing what to do with himself, he kept on going up and down, moving hither and thither, until two o'clock in the morning.

He could then bear it no longer, and resolved upon again returning to the Sub-Prefecture, fully realising that until he knew what to expect it would be impossible for him to obtain any repose. Down below, however, at sight of the obstructed street, he was seized with despair, feeling that he would never have the strength to go and return through all those obstacles, the mere recollection of which made his limbs ache. And he stood there hesitating, when he saw Major Bouroche approach, panting and swearing: 'Thunder! I thought I should have left my legs behind me.'

The major had been obliged to repair to the town-hall to beg the mayor to requisition some chloroform, and send it to him at daybreak, for his own supply was exhausted. He still had several urgent operations to perform, and feared, so he put it, that he might be obliged to chop the poor devils up without anæsthetising them.

'Well?' asked Delaherche.

'Well, they don't even know whether the chemists have any left!'

But the manufacturer did not care a rap about the chloroform. 'No, no,' said he, 'is it finished over there? Have they signed with the Prussians?'

The major waved his arm violently. 'Nothing's done!' he cried. 'Wimpffen has just come back. Those beggars, it seems, are that exacting they deserve to have their ears boxed! Well, well, let us begin again and kick the bucket all of us; that's the best thing to do!'

Delaherche turned pale as he listened. 'But is what you tell me quite certain?'

'I had it from those people of the Municipal Council who are sitting over there en permanence. An officer came from the Sub-Prefecture to inform them of everything.'

Then he gave some details. The interview between General de Wimpffen, General von Moltke, and Bismarck had taken place at the château of Bellevue, near Donchery. A terrible man that General von Moltke, stern and hard, with the glabrous face of a mathematical chemist; a man who won battles by working out algebraical calculations in his study! He had immediately been desirous of showing that he was fully acquainted with the hopeless situation of the French army: it had no provisions and no ammunition, said he, it was a prey to demoralisation and disorder, and there was no possibility whatever of its breaking the iron circle that shut it in; whilst the German armies occupied by far the stronger positions, and could burn down the town in a couple of hours. Then he coldly dictated his will, which was the surrender of the entire French army, with arms and baggage.

On his side, Bismarck simply supported Moltke with the air of a good-natured bloodhound. And, thereupon, General de Wimpffen exhausted himself in combating these conditions, the most harsh that were ever imposed upon a beaten army. He spoke of his ill-luck, the heroism of the soldiers, and the danger of exasperating a proud people beyond endurance; he threatened, begged, talked during three hours with despairing, superb eloquence, asking that the vanquished army might simply be interned in some far-off region of France, or, if preferred, in Algeria; but, after all, the only concession made by the victor was that those of the officers who would give an engagement in writing, and pledge their honour not to serve again during the war, might return to their homes. Finally, the truce was prolonged until ten o'clock on the following morning, and if at that hour the conditions had not been accepted, the Prussian batteries would again open fire and burn down the town.

'But it's idiotic!' exclaimed Delaherche; 'you don't burn down a town that has done nothing to deserve it.'

The major, however, put the finishing touch to his alarm by adding that he had just seen some officers at the Hôtel de l'Europe who were talking of a sortie en masse before daybreak. Since the German exactions had become known, extreme excitement was being manifested, and the most extravagant plans were broached. Nobody was deterred by the idea that it would not be loyal to break the truce without a word of warning, under cover of the darkness, and all sorts of mad plans were indulged in:--A midnight march on Carignan through the ranks of the Bavarians, the recapture of the plateau of Illy, by means of a surprise, and the opening up of the road to Mézières; or else an irresistible rush, which at one bound would land them in Belgium. Others, it is true, said nothing, but realised the fatality of the disaster, and would have accepted and signed anything with a glad cry of relief, so as to have done at once with the whole business.

'Well, good night,' added Bouroche. 'I must try to sleep for a couple of hours. I need it.'

Thereupon he went off, leaving Delaherche suffocating. What? It was true, then; they were going to begin fighting again; they were going to burn and raze Sedan to the ground! It was becoming inevitable; this frightful thing would assuredly take place as soon as the sun had risen high enough above the hills to illumine the horror of the massacre. In a mechanical way he once more climbed the steep garret-stairs, and found himself again among the chimney stacks at the edge of the narrow terrace overlooking the town. But now he was in the midst of darkness, an infinite rolling sea of huge black waves, among which he was at first unable to distinguish anything. The factory buildings below him were the first to stand out in the gloom, in confused masses which he recognised; the engine-room, the loom-shops, the drying-rooms, the warehouses; and the view of all that huge pile of building, his pride and his wealth, overwhelmed him with pity for himself at the thought that in a few hours' time there would only be some ashes of it left. He raised his eyes towards the horizon and looked all around that black immensity, where the menace of the morrow was sleeping. On the south, in the direction of Bazeilles, some flakes of fire were flying skyward above the houses sinking into cinders; whilst, towards the north, the farm of the wood of La Garenne, set on fire during the evening, was still burning, ensanguining the trees with a great red glow. There were no other fires, nothing but those two blazes; all the rest was a fathomless abyss traversed only by scattered, terrifying noises. Some one was weeping over yonder, perhaps far away, perhaps upon the ramparts. In vain did he try to penetrate the veil, to discern the Liry and Marfée hills, the Frénois and Wadelincourt batteries, all the long belt of bronze beasts, with outstretched necks and open muzzles, whose presence he divined there. And as he lowered his eyes upon the town around him, he heard its pant of anguish--not merely the restless slumber of the soldiers fallen in the streets, the dull rustling of that mass of men, animals, and guns, but also, at least he fancied so, the anxious insomnia of the citizens, his neighbours, who, like himself, were unable to sleep, consumed by fever whilst they waited for the dawn. They all must know that the capitulation was not signed; they all must be counting the hours, shivering at the idea that if it were not signed nothing would remain for them but to go down into their cellars to die there, blocked up, crushed beneath the ruins of their homes. Then, all at once it seemed to him as though a desperate voice were ascending from the Rue des Voyards, crying 'Murder!' amid a sudden clank of arms. And thereupon he leant over the terrace railing and remained there listening in the dense night, lost amid the misty, starless sky, and seized from head to foot with such a shuddering that every hair upon his skin stood up.

Maurice awoke on the sofa at the first gleam of light. He was aching all over and did not stir, but lay there with his eyes fixed on the window panes, whilst they were slowly whitened by a livid dawn. In the acute lucidity of those waking moments, all the abominable memories returned to him, the battle of the day before, the flight, the disaster. Everything again passed before his eyes, even to the slightest details, and he experienced frightful suffering at the thought of that defeat, the crying shame of which penetrated to the very roots of his being, as though he had felt himself the culprit. And he reasoned his sufferings, analysed himself, finding the faculty of devouring himself quickened by what had happened. Was he not, after all, the first comer, a mere passer-by of the period, certainly of brilliant education, but at the same time crassly ignorant of all that he ought to have known, vain, too, even to blindness, and perverted by impatience for enjoyment, and by the lying prosperity of the reign? Then came another evocation as it were; he pictured his grandfather, born in 1780, one of the heroes of the Grand Army, one of the victors of Austerlitz, Wagram, and Friedland; next his father, born in 1811, fallen into bureaucracy, a petty official of indifferent ability, receiver of taxes at Le Chêne Populeux, where he had worn himself away; then himself, born in 1841, brought up as a gentleman, called to the bar, capable of the worst folly and of the greatest enthusiasm, vanquished at Sedan, in what he realised was an immense catastrophe, the end, indeed, of a world; and this degeneration of the race, which explained how it had become possible that France, victorious with the grandfathers, should be defeated in the person of the grandsons, crushed his heart as though it were some slowly aggravated family complaint, culminating in the fatal catastrophe when the appointed hour had struck. He would have felt so brave and triumphant had they been victorious! But in presence of defeat he was seized with the nervous weakness of a woman, and gave way to one of those fits of immense despair, during which it seemed to him as though the whole world were foundering. There was nothing left, France was dead. Sobs stifled him, and he wept, joining his hands together and stammering once more the prayers of infancy: 'Take me, my God! Take all these poor suffering wretches!'

Jean, rolled up in the blanket on the floor, heard him, and began to stir. 'What is the matter, youngster? Are you ill?' asked the corporal, eventually sitting up and feeling greatly astonished. Then, realising that Maurice had been taken again with those peculiar ideas of his, he spoke to him in a fatherly way: 'Come, what is the matter? You shouldn't worry yourself like that for nothing.'

'Ah!' exclaimed Maurice, 'it's all up; we can prepare ourselves to become Prussians.'

Jean, illiterate peasant that he was, with a hard skull, expressed great astonishment on hearing this, whereupon Maurice tried to make him understand that the race was exhausted, and must disappear and make room for the necessary stream of new blood. With an obstinate shake of the head, however, the corporal refused to accept the explanation: 'What! my field no longer belong to me? I should allow the Prussians to take it when I'm not yet dead and still have my two arms left? Come, come!'

Then, in his turn, he gave utterance to his ideas, expressing himself laboriously in such words as he could think of. They had had a fearful licking; that was certain. But they were not all dead, yet; there were still some left, and these would suffice to build the house afresh, provided they were good fellows and hard-workers, and didn't drink all they earned. In a family, now, when its members take proper care and put a bit of money by, they always manage to pull through even the worst stretches of bad luck. And besides, a blow sometimes does a man good: it makes him reflect. And then, too, if it were true there was some rottenness somewhere, some putrid limbs or other, far better lop them off with an axe and have done with them, than keep them until they killed you, like the cholera. 'Exhausted, done for? No, no,' he repeated again and again. 'I'm not done for. I don't feel that way at all.'

And stiff and lame though he was, with his hair still matted together by the blood from his torn scalp, he drew himself up, full of a vivacious need of life, ready to take a tool, to drive a plough, to build the house afresh as he expressed it. He belonged to the old, stubborn, sober stratum, the sensible, hard-working, and thrifty France.

'All the same,' he resumed, 'I'm sorry for the Emperor. Trade seemed to be in a fair way, wheat sold well. But, sure enough, he has been very stupid. No sensible chap would get himself into such a mess as this.'

Maurice, who still remained quite overwhelmed, made another distressful gesture: 'Ah! the Emperor; I liked him at bottom in spite of my ideas of liberty and a Republic. Yes, I had it in my blood, on account of my grandfather, no doubt. And now you see everything's rotten, even in that direction. Ah! what will become of us?'

A wild look was glimmering in his eyes, and he raised so grievous a plaint that Jean felt anxious and was about to rise, when the door opened and Henriette came in. The sound of their voices had just awakened her in the adjoining bedchamber. A pale light was now brightening the room.

'You've come just in time to scold him,' said Jean, pretending to laugh. 'He's not behaving as he ought.'

However, the sight of his sister, so pale and afflicted, had induced a salutary crisis of sensibility. Maurice opened his arms, called her to his heart, and when she had flung her arms around his neck, a great appeasement penetrated him. She herself was weeping, and their tears mingled. 'Ah! my poor, poor darling. I'm angry with myself that I haven't more courage to console you! That good fellow Weiss--your husband who was so fond of you--what will become of you? You have always been the victim, and yet you never complained. What a deal of grief I, myself, have caused you already, and who knows whether I sha'n't cause you even more----'

She was silencing him, placing her hand before his mouth, when in came Delaherche half out of his senses. Again feeling frightfully hungry, with one of those nervous hungers which fatigue exasperates, he had at last come down from the terrace, and on going to the kitchen to get something warm to drink, he had there found the cook with one of her relatives, a carpenter of Bazeilles, to whom she was just serving some mulled wine. Thereupon, this man, one of the last to remain in the village amid the conflagration, had told him that his dyeworks were utterly destroyed, reduced to a heap of cinders.

'Ah! the brigands, would you believe it?' stammered the manufacturer, addressing Jean and Maurice. 'Everything is lost. They are going to burn down Sedan this morning as they burnt down Bazeilles yesterday--I am ruined, ruined!'

Struck all at once by the scar which he observed on Henriette's forehead, he remembered that he had not yet been able to speak with her. 'It's true, then,' he added, 'you went there, and got hurt like that? Ah! poor Weiss!' And then, understanding by the young woman's red eyes that she knew of her husband's death, he blurted out a fearful detail which he had just learnt from the carpenter: 'That poor Weiss! It appears they burned him! Yes, they threw the bodies of the inhabitants they had shot into the flames of a blazing house, which they had smeared with petroleum.'[34]

Henriette listened, struck with horror. Good Lord! So she would not even have the consolation of recovering and burying her dear husband, whose ashes would be swept away by the wind! Maurice had again pressed her to his heart, and in a caressing voice was calling her his poor Cinderella, and beseeching her not to give way to so much grief, she who was so brave.

After an interval of silence, during which Delaherche stood at the window observing the brightening of the light, he hastily turned and said to the two soldiers: 'By the way, I was forgetting, but I came to tell you that downstairs, in the coach-house, where the treasury-chest is deposited, there is an officer distributing the money among the men, so that the Prussians may not get it. You ought to go down, for money may be useful if we are not all of us dead to-night.'

The advice was good, and Maurice and Jean went down, as soon as Henriette had consented to take her brother's place on the sofa. Delaherche, meantime, passed into the adjoining room, where he found Gilberte, still with her face quite calm, and sleeping as peacefully as a child; neither the loud talking nor the sobs having caused so much as a change in her position. And thence he peeped into the room where his mother was watching over M. de Vineuil, and found that she had dozed off in her armchair, whilst the colonel, whose eyes were closed, had not stirred, being utterly prostrated by fever. All at once, however, he opened his eyes widely, and asked: 'Well, it is finished, isn't it?'

Vexed by this question, which detained him just when he wished to take himself off, Delaherche made an angry gesture, whilst deadening his voice to answer: 'Ah, yes, finished, till it begins again! Nothing has been signed.'

A prey to incipient delirium, the colonel continued in faint tones: 'My God, may I die before the finish! I don't hear the guns. Why are they no longer firing? Up at St. Menges and Fleigneux we command all the roads; we will fling the Prussians into the Meuse should they venture to turn Sedan, to attack us. The town is at our feet between them and us, like an obstacle which strengthens our position. March! the Seventh Corps will take the lead, the Twelfth will cover the retreat----'

His hands jogged up and down on the sheet as though in unison with the trot of the horse, which, in his dream, was carrying him along. Little by little, however, as his words fell more heavily from his lips and he sank asleep, their movement became slower, till at last it altogether ceased, and he lay there, without a breath, overwhelmed.

'Rest yourself,' Delaherche had whispered, 'I will come back as soon as I have some news.' Then, after making sure that he had not awakened his mother, he slipped out of the room and disappeared.

Seated on a kitchen chair in the coach-house down below, Jean and Maurice had found a paymaster who was distributing fortunes there, screened merely by a little deal table placed in front of him, and without having recourse to pens, receipt forms, or papers of any kind. He simply dipped his hand into the bags overflowing with gold coins, and without even taking the trouble to count them, rapidly dropped a handful into the cap of each sergeant of the Seventh Corps who defiled before him. It was understood that the sergeants were to divide the sums given them among the men of their half-section. They all received the money with an awkward air, as though it had been some ration of meat or coffee, and then went off in embarrassment, emptying their képis into their pockets, so that they might not find themselves in the streets with all that gold displayed to view. And not a word was spoken. The only sound was the crystalline chinking of the coins amid the stupefaction which these poor devils experienced at finding themselves laden with all this wealth when there was no longer a loaf of bread or a quart of wine to be purchased in the whole town.

When Jean and Maurice stepped forward, the paymaster at first withdrew the handful of gold which he had ready, and exclaimed: 'Neither of you is a sergeant. Only the sergeants have a right to receive----' Then, tired already, and anxious to have done with it, he added: 'Here, corporal, you can take some all the same. Quick there, whose turn next?'

He had let the coins drop into the képi which Jean held out to him; and the corporal, stirred at sight of the amount, nearly six hundred francs, immediately desired Maurice to take half of it. There was no telling, said he; it was quite possible that they might be suddenly separated from one another. They accordingly divided the money in the garden in front of the ambulance, which they afterwards entered, having noticed their company's drummer, a gay, fat fellow named Bastian, lying on the straw near the entry. At about five o'clock on the previous evening, when the battle was over, he had been unluckily wounded in the groin by a stray bullet.

The spectacle which the ambulance presented in the white morning twilight, at this moment of the reveille, fairly froze their hearts. Three more of the wounded had died, unperceived, during the night, and now the attendants were hastily making room for others by carrying the corpses away. Every now and then the men amputated on the previous day, lying there in a somnolent state, would abruptly open their eyes and gaze with stupor on the vast dormitory of suffering in which they found themselves, and where, as in the shambles, a half-slaughtered flock lay prone upon the straw. The attendants had certainly swept and somewhat tidied the place on the previous evening, after all the bloody cuisine of the operations; but here and there trails of blood could be seen on the badly wiped floor, whilst a large red-spotted sponge, looking not unlike a human brain, was floating in a pail, and a forgotten hand, with broken fingers, was lying just outside the door, under the shed. These were the crumbs as it were of the butchery, the frightful scraps of the morrow of a day of massacre, dimly seen in the mournful rising of the dawn. And all the agitation and turbulent assertion of life of the earlier hours had, under the heavy weight of fever, given way to prostration. Scarcely a stammered plaint, deadened by sleepiness, disturbed the moist silence. A scared look came into the sufferer's glassy eyes as they again encountered the daylight; their clammy mouths exhaled foul breath; the whole hall was sinking into the succession of endless, livid, nauseous, death-sprinkled days which were now reserved to those wretched, mutilated men, who, at the end of two or three months, might possibly get over it, but at the cost of one of their limbs.

Bouroche, who was beginning his round, after a few hours' repose, paused for an instant in front of Drummer Bastian, and then passed on with a scarcely perceptible shrug of the shoulders. Nothing could be done for that poor devil. The drummer, however, had opened his eyes, and, as though resuscitated, was keenly watching a sergeant, who, with his cap full of gold, had come to see whether some of his men were among the wounded. It so happened that there were a couple, and he gave each of them twenty francs. Other sergeants now arrived; gold began to rain upon the straw, and Bastian, who had succeeded in sitting up, held out both his hands, which the death pangs were already shaking, and stammered: 'For me! For me!'

The sergeant intended to pass on, as Bouroche had done. What, indeed, could be the use of money to a dying man? Suddenly yielding, however, to a good-natured impulse, he dropped some coins, without counting them, into the drummer's hands, which were already icy cold. 'For me! For me!' gasped Bastian once more. He had fallen back again, and fumbled for some time with his stiffened fingers, endeavouring to recover the gold which slipped from his grasp. Then he expired.

'Good night! The gent has blown his candle out!' said a dark, lean, little Zouave, who was lying near by. 'It's vexing all the same, just as one's got the brass to pay for a drink.'

The Zouave had his left foot bandaged; nevertheless he managed to raise himself and crawl on his knees and elbows to the side of the corpse, when he picked up all the money, searching both the drummer's hands and the folds of his great-coat. And noticing, when he had returned to his place with the cash, that the others were looking at him, he contented himself with remarking: 'Needn't let it be lost, eh?'

Maurice, whom this atmosphere of human misery suffocated, had made all haste to draw Jean outside again. As they were once more passing through the operating-shed they saw Bouroche there. He was exasperated at not having been able to procure any chloroform, but was all the same making up his mind to amputate the leg of a little fellow of twenty. Jean and Maurice fled, so as not to hear the poor devil's shrieks.

At that moment Delaherche came in from the street, and waving his arm to them, called out: 'Come upstairs, come at once. We are going to have some breakfast; the cook has managed to get some milk. It's very fortunate, for we need something warm.'

Despite the effort he was making, he could not conceal his exultant delight, and as the others approached him, he lowered his voice and added, with a radiant face: 'This time it's settled. General de Wimpffen has gone back to sign the capitulation.'

Ah! what an immense relief; his factory saved, the atrocious nightmare dissipated, life coming back again, full of pain and sorrow, no doubt; but for all that life, yes, life! Nine o'clock was now striking, and little Rose, whom he had met in the neighbourhood, had just told him what had taken place during the early morning at the Sub-Prefecture. She had made her way to this part of the town, through the somewhat less crowded streets, with the view of trying to obtain some bread from an aunt, who kept a baker's shop. At eight o'clock, said she, General de Wimpffen had assembled a fresh council of war, composed of more than thirty generals, whom he had informed of the result of the step he had taken, of the futility of his efforts, and of the harsh exactions of the victorious enemy. His hands trembled whilst he described the interview, violent emotion filled his eyes with tears; and he was still speaking when a colonel of the Prussian staff presented himself as a parlementaire, in General von Moltke's name, with a reminder that if a decision had not been come to by ten o'clock the German fire would reopen on the town of Sedan. Thereupon, in this extreme, frightful necessity, the council had adopted the only course that was open to it, that of authorising General de Wimpffen to return to the château of Bellevue to accept everything. The general must have already arrived there, and the entire French army was surrendering.

Rose next launched out into a variety of details concerning the extraordinary agitation which the news was exciting in the town. At the Sub-Prefecture she had seen some officers tearing off their epaulettes, and bursting into tears like children. Cuirassiers flung their sabres into the Meuse from the bridge, over which an entire regiment had defiled, man after man throwing away his weapon and gazing on the water as it spurted and then closed up. In the streets, too, the soldiers took hold of their chassepots by the barrels, and broke the butts against the house-walls, whilst artillerymen removed the pieces of mechanism from the mitrailleuses, and consigned them to the sewers. There were some soldiers, also, who buried, and others who burned the flags. On the Place Turenne she had seen an old sergeant climb upon a corner stone, and as though seized with sudden madness, heap insults upon the commanders and taunt them with cowardice. Other men seemed stultified and wept big silent tears. And, it must be said, there were others, the greater number too, whose eyes smiled with gladness, whose persons from head to foot denoted enraptured relief. So at last there was to be an end to their misery; they were prisoners, and there would be no more fighting. They had for so many days been suffering from excessive marching and lack of food. Besides, what was the use of fighting since they were not the stronger? So much the better if the commanders had sold them, so as to have done with the business at once. It was so delightful to think that they would soon have white bread again and sleep in beds.

As Delaherche was entering the dining-room upstairs with Maurice and Jean, his mother called him: 'Come here a moment. I'm anxious about the colonel.'

With open eyes, M. de Vineuil was once more venting aloud the panting dream of his feverish delirium: 'What matters it? If the Prussians do cut us off from Mézières----' he gasped; 'here come some of them turning the wood of La Falizette, whilst others are coming up along the valley of the Givonne. But the frontier is behind us, and we can cross it at a bound, as soon as we have killed as many of them as possible--that was what I wanted yesterday----'

His ardent eyes, however, had just caught sight of Delaherche. He recognised him, and seemed to come to his senses, to emerge from his hallucinatory somnolence; and as he thus returned to a consciousness of the terrible reality, he asked for the third time; 'It's finished, eh?'

And this time, the manufacturer was quite unable to restrain the outburst of his satisfaction: 'Yes, thank heavens! quite finished! The capitulation must now be signed.'

On hearing this, the colonel, despite his bandaged foot, rose violently from the bed, and taking his sword, which had remained lying on a chair, he made an effort to break it. But his hands were trembling, and the blade slipped.

'Take care! he'll hurt himself,' cried Delaherche. 'Take it out of his hands; it's dangerous!'

Old Madame Delaherche seized hold of the sword, but at sight of M. de Vineuil's despair she did not hide it, as her son advised her to do. Putting forth strength extraordinary in one so old, and of which she herself would not have thought her poor hands capable, she broke it with a sharp snap upon her knee. The colonel had got into bed again, and lay there weeping, and looking at his old friend with an expression of infinite tenderness.

Meantime, in the dining-room, the cook had served bowls of café-au-lait for everybody. Both Henriette and Gilberte were now awake, the latter well rested by her good sleep, and with a clear face and gay eyes. And tenderly did she kiss her friend, whom she pitied, so she said, from the very depths of her heart. Maurice placed himself near his sister, whilst Jean, who had been pressed to stay, and who felt somewhat embarrassed, found himself facing Delaherche. Old Madame Delaherche could not be prevailed upon to come and sit down at table, and merely drank a bowl of coffee which was taken to her. The breakfast of the five others, however, though begun in silence, soon became animated. They were empty and very hungry, and how could they not feel glad at finding themselves there, virtually unharmed and in good health, when thousands of poor devils were strewing the surrounding country? And in the large, cool dining-room, too, the spotless white table-cloth was a joy for the eyes, whilst the café-au-lait, which was very hot, seemed exquisite.

They talked. Delaherche, who had already recovered all the assurance of the rich manufacturer, the bonhomie of the master fond of popularity, severe only towards those who failed, reverted to Napoleon III., whose face had been haunting him for a couple of days past. And he addressed himself to Jean, having only that artless fellow there. 'Ah! monsieur,' he began, 'yes, I can indeed say that the Emperor has greatly deceived me. For however much his incense-bearers may plead extenuating circumstances, he is evidently the first cause, the only cause of our disasters.'

He was already forgetting that he had formerly shown himself an ardent Bonapartist, and but a few months previously had done all he could to insure the triumph of the Plebiscitum. And he no longer even pitied the fallen Sovereign who was about to become the Man of Sedan, but taxed him with every iniquity.

'Absolutely incapable, as one is forced to recognise at the present moment; still that by itself would be nothing--but his mind has always been addicted to chimeras; he's a man with an ill-proportioned brain, with whom things seemed to succeed just so long as he had luck on his side. No; people mustn't try to make us pity his fate, by telling us that he was deceived by others, and that the Opposition refused him the necessary men and credits. It is he who has deceived us, whose vices and blunders have plunged us into the frightful mess in which we find ourselves.'

Maurice, who did not wish to take any part in the conversation, could not restrain a smile, whilst Jean, whom this talk about politics rendered uncomfortable, and who feared that he might say something foolish, contented himself with replying: 'Folks say, all the same, that he's a good fellow.'

However, these few words, modestly spoken though they were, almost made Delaherche leap from his seat. All the fright he had experienced, all the anguish he had undergone, burst forth in a cry of exasperated passion that had turned to hatred. 'A good fellow, indeed; that's easily said! Do you know, monsieur, that three shells fell here in my factory, and that it wasn't the Emperor's fault if the buildings were not burnt down? Do you know that I who speak to you, I shall lose a hundred thousand francs in this idiotic affair? Ah! no, no, it is altogether too much--France invaded, burnt, exterminated, industry at a standstill, trade destroyed! We've had quite enough of such a good fellow as that, Heaven preserve us from him! He's down in the mud and the blood, and I say let him stay there!'

Thereupon he made an energetic gesture with his fist as though he were pushing down some struggling wretch and keeping him under water. Then, with a greedy lip, he finished drinking his coffee. Gilberte had given vent to a slight involuntary laugh at sight of the painful abstractedness of Henriette, whom she served like a child. The meal continued till at last the bowls were emptied; still they did not stir, preferring to linger awhile amid the gladsome peacefulness of that large, cool room.

And at that same hour Napoleon III. was in the weaver's poor house on the Donchery road. Already at five in the morning he had insisted upon leaving the Sub-Prefecture, ill at ease at feeling Sedan encompassing him, like a reproach and a threat; still worried, moreover, by a desire to soothe his sensitive heart by obtaining more favourable terms for his unfortunate army. He wished to see the King of Prussia. So, getting into a hired calash, he had set out along the broad highway, bordered with lofty poplars, that first portion of his journey into exile, accomplished in the freshness of the dawn, with a consciousness of all the fallen grandeur that he was leaving behind him in his flight; and it was upon that road that he met Bismarck hastening to him, in an old flat cap and long greased boots, for the sole purpose of trifling with him and preventing him from seeing the King until the capitulation was signed. The King was still at Vendresse, eight and a half miles away. Where should he go? Where could he wait? Afar off, the palace of the Tuileries had disappeared, enveloped in a thundercloud. Sedan, too, already seemed to have receded a distance of many leagues, shut off, as it were, by a river of blood. There were no more imperial châteaux in France, no more official residences; there was not even a corner in the abode of the smallest functionary where he dared to go and seat himself. And it was in the weaver's house that he was minded to strand--the wretched house espied beside the road, with its narrow kitchen-garden skirted by a hedge, and comprising merely a ground-floor and one upper storey with mournful little windows. The room upstairs had whitewashed walls and a tiled floor, and its only furniture was a deal table and two straw-bottomed chairs. There he waited for hours, at first in the company of Bismarck, who smiled on hearing him talk of generosity, and then all alone, dragging his misery up and down the room, pressing his ashy face to the window-panes, and gazing once more upon that soil of France, that Meuse which looked so beautiful as it flowed along athwart vast, fertile fields.[35]

Then that day, the next day, and the following days, there came the other abominable marches and their halting places: the château of Bellevue, that smiling bourgeois country-seat overlooking the river, where he slept, and where he wept after his interview with King William; then the cruel departure, Sedan avoided for fear of the vanquished and the famished, the pontoon bridge, which the Prussians had thrown across the river at Iges, the long circuit on the northern side of the town, the by-ways, the remote roads of Floing, Fleigneux, and Illy--all that lamentable flight in the open calash; and there, on that tragic, corpse-strewn plateau of Illy, occurred the legendary meeting--the wretched Emperor, no longer able to endure the motion of the vehicle, sinking down under the violence of some spasm, maybe mechanically smoking his everlasting cigarette, whilst a flock of haggard, blood-and-dust-covered prisoners, whom their captors were escorting from Fleigneux to Sedan, ranged themselves at the edge of the road to allow the carriage to pass; the first ones silent, the next ones growling, and the others, beyond, growing more and more exasperated until they burst into jeers and brandished their fists with gestures of insult and malediction. And after that there was yet the interminable journey across other portions of the battlefield, a league of broken-up roads, past ruins, and corpses with widely opened, threatening eyes; and then came a bare stretch of country with vast, silent woods, and the frontier atop of an incline; and beyond it the end of everything--a dip into a narrow valley where the road was edged with pines.

And what a first night of exile that was at Bouillon, in an inn, the Hôtel de la Poste, where he found himself amid such a throng of mere sightseers and French refugees that he deemed it proper to show himself, whereat there was loud murmuring and hissing! The room, with its three windows overlooking the Place and the Semoy, was the commonplace hotel-room, with the usual chairs upholstered in red damask, the usual mahogany wardrobe with a plate-glass door, the mantelshelf decked with the usual zinc clock, flanked by shells and vases of artificial flowers under glass cases. Right and left of the door were two little fellow beds. In one of them slept an aide-de-camp, so overcome by fatigue that at nine o'clock he was already sound asleep. In the other one the Emperor must have turned and turned for hours, unable to close his eyes; and if he got up to assuage his sufferings by walking, his only diversion can have been to look at two engravings, hanging on the wall there, on either side of the chimney-piece--one representing Rouget de l'Isle singing the Marseillaise; the other, the Day of Judgment, the mighty call sounded by the trumps of the Archangels, drawing all the dead from the bosom of the earth, the resurrection of the ossuaries of the battlefields, ascending to testify before God.[36]

All the train of the Imperial household, the cumbersome, accursed baggage vans, had remained at Sedan, in distress behind the sub-prefect's lilac bushes. Those in charge were at a loss how to spirit them away, how to remove them safely from the sight of the poor folks dying of misery, so intolerable indeed became the aggressive insolence which they had assumed, the frightful irony with which the defeat had imbued them. A very dark night had to be waited for, and then the horses, the carriages, and the vans, with their silver saucepans, their spits, and their baskets of fine wines, went forth from Sedan with great mystery, and in their turn betook themselves to Belgium, journeying with muffled tread and roll along the dark roads amid an uneasy shivering, such as attends a theft.

END OF PART II.

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Part III

WOE TO THE VANQUISHED!

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