The Downfall: Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Between the city and Balan, Henriette got over the ground at a good,
round pace. It was not yet nine o'clock; the broad footpath, bordered
by gardens and pretty cottages, was as yet comparatively free,
although as she approached the village it began to be more and more
obstructed by flying citizens and moving troops. When she saw a great
surge of the human tide advancing on her she hugged the walls and
house-fronts, and by dint of address and perseverance slipped through,
somehow. The fold of black lace that half concealed her fair hair and
small, pale face, the sober gown that enveloped her slight form, made
her an inconspicuous object among the throng; she went her way
unnoticed by the by-passers, and nothing retarded her light, silent
steps.

At Balan, however, she found the road blocked by a regiment of
infanterie de marine. It was a compact mass of men, drawn up under the
tall trees that concealed them from the enemy's observation, awaiting
orders. She raised herself on tiptoe, and could not see the end;
still, she made herself as small as she could and attempted to worm
her way through. The men shoved her with their elbows, and the butts
of their muskets made acquaintance with her ribs; when she had
advanced a dozen paces there was a chorus of shouts and angry
protests. A captain turned on her and roughly cried:

"Hi, there, you woman! are you crazy? Where are you going?"

"I am going to Bazeilles."

"What, to Bazeilles?"

There was a shout of laughter. The soldiers pointed at her with their
fingers; she was the object of their witticisms. The captain, also,
greatly amused by the incident, had to have his joke.

"You should take us along with you, my little dear, if you are going
to Bazeilles. We were there a short while ago, and I am in hope that
we shall go back there, but I can tell you that the temperature of the
place is none too cool."

"I am going to Bazeilles to look for my husband," Henriette declared,
in her gentle voice, while her blue eyes shone with undiminished
resolution.

The laughter ceased; an old sergeant extricated her from the crowd
that had collected around her, and forced her to retrace her steps.

"My poor child, you see it is impossible to get through. Bazeilles is
no place for you. You will find your husband by and by. Come, listen
to reason!"

She had to obey, and stood aside beneath the trees, raising herself on
her toes at every moment to peer before her, firm in her resolve to
continue her journey as soon as she should be allowed to pass. She
learned the condition of affairs from the conversation that went on
around her. Some officers were criticising with great acerbity the
order for the abandonment of Bazeilles, which had occurred at a
quarter-past eight, at the time when General Ducrot, taking over the
command from the marshal, had considered it best to concentrate the
troops on the plateau of Illy. What made matters worse was, that the
valley of the Givonne having fallen into the hands of the Germans
through the premature retirement of the 1st corps, the 12th corps,
which was even then sustaining a vigorous attack in front, was
overlapped on its left flank. Now that General de Wimpffen had
relieved General Ducrot, it seemed that the original plan was to be
carried out. Orders had been received to retake Bazeilles at every
cost, and drive the Bavarians into the Meuse. And so, in the ranks of
that regiment that had been halted there in full retreat at the
entrance of the village and ordered to resume the offensive, there was
much bitter feeling, and angry words were rife. Was ever such
stupidity heard of? to make them abandon a position, and immediately
tell them to turn round and retake it from the enemy! They were
willing enough to risk their life in the cause, but no one cared to
throw it away for nothing!

A body of mounted men dashed up the street and General de Wimpffen
appeared among them, and raising himself erect on his stirrups, with
flashing eyes, he shouted, in ringing tones:

"Friends, we cannot retreat; it would be ruin to us all. And if we do
have to retreat, it shall be on Carignan, and not on Mezieres. But we
shall be victorious! You beat the enemy this morning; you will beat
them again!"

He galloped off on a road that conducted to la Moncelle. It was said
that there had been a violent altercation between him and General
Ducrot, each upholding his own plan, and decrying the plan of the
other--one asserting that retreat by way of Mezieres had been
impracticable all that morning; the other predicting that, unless they
fell back on Illy, the army would be surrounded before night. And
there was a great deal of bitter recrimination, each taxing the other
with ignorance of the country and of the situation of the troops. The
pity of it was that both were right.

But Henriette, meantime, had made an encounter that caused her to
forget her project for a moment. In some poor outcasts; stranded by
the wayside, she had recognized a family of honest weavers from
Bazeilles, father, mother, and three little girls, of whom the largest
was only nine years old. They were utterly disheartened and forlorn,
and so weary and footsore that they could go no further, and had
thrown themselves down at the foot of a wall.

"Alas! dear lady," the wife and mother said to Henriette, "we have
lost our all. Our house--you know where our house stood on the Place
de l'Eglise--well, a shell came and burned it. Why we and the children
did not stay and share its fate I do not know--"

At these words the three little ones began to cry and sob afresh,
while the mother, in distracted language, gave further details of the
catastrophe.

"The loom, I saw it burn like seasoned kindling wood, and the bed,
the chairs and tables, they blazed like so much straw. And even the
clock--yes, the poor old clock that I tried to save and could not."

"My God! my God!" the man exclaimed, his eyes swimming with tears,
"what is to become of us?"

Henriette endeavored to comfort them, but it was in a voice that
quavered strangely.

"You have been preserved to each other, you are safe and unharmed;
your three little girls are left you. What reason have you to
complain?"

Then she proceeded to question them to learn how matters stood in
Bazeilles, whether they had seen her husband, in what state they had
left her house, but in their half-dazed condition they gave
conflicting answers. No, they had not seen M. Weiss. One of the little
girls, however, declared that she had seen him, and that he was lying
on the ground with a great hole in his head, whereon the father gave
her a box on the ear, bidding her hold her tongue and not tell such
lies to the lady. As for the house, they could say with certainty that
it was intact at the time of their flight; they even remembered to
have observed, as they passed it, that the doors and windows were
tightly secured, as if it was quite deserted. At that time, moreover,
the only foothold that the Bavarians had secured for themselves was in
the Place de l'Eglise, and to carry the village they would have to
fight for it, street by street, house by house. They must have been
gaining ground since then, though; all Bazeilles was in flames by that
time, like enough, and not a wall left standing, thanks to the
fierceness of the assailants and the resolution of the defenders. And
so the poor creatures went on, with trembling, affrighted gestures,
evoking the horrid sights their eyes had seen and telling their
dreadful tale of slaughter and conflagration and corpses lying in
heaps upon the ground.

"But my husband?" Henriette asked again.

They made no answer, only continued to cover their face with their
hands and sob. Her cruel anxiety, as she stood there erect, with no
outward sign of weakness, was only evinced by a slight quivering of
the lips. What was she to believe? Vainly she told herself the child
was mistaken; her mental vision pictured her husband lying there dead
before her in the street with a bullet wound in the head. Again, that
house, so securely locked and bolted, was another source of alarm; why
was it so? was he no longer in it? The conviction that he was dead
sent an icy chill to her heart; but perhaps he was only wounded,
perhaps he was breathing still; and so sudden and imperious was the
need she felt of flying to his side that she would again have
attempted to force her passage through the troops had not the bugles
just then sounded the order for them to advance.

The regiment was largely composed of raw, half-drilled recruits from
Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, men who had never fired a shot, but all
that morning they had fought with a bravery and firmness that would
not have disgraced veteran troops. They had not shown much aptitude
for marching on the road from Rheims to Mouzon, weighted as they were
with their unaccustomed burdens, but when they came to face the enemy
their discipline and sense of duty made themselves felt, and
notwithstanding the righteous anger that was in their hearts, the
bugle had but to sound and they returned to brave the fire and
encounter the foe. Three several times they had been promised a
division to support them; it never came. They felt that they were
deserted, sacrificed; it was the offering of their life that was
demanded of them by those who, having first made them evacuate the
place, were now sending them back into the fiery furnace of Bazeilles.
And they knew it, and they gave their life, freely, without a murmur,
closing up their ranks and leaving the shelter of the trees to meet
afresh the storm of shell and bullets.

Henriette gave a deep sigh of relief; at last they were about to move!
She followed them, with the hope that she might enter the village
unperceived in their rear, prepared to run with them should they take
the double-quick. But they had scarcely begun to move when they came
to a halt again. The projectiles were now falling thick and fast; to
regain possession of Bazeilles it would be necessary to dispute every
inch of the road, occupying the cross-streets, the houses and gardens
on either side of the way. A brisk fire of musketry proceeded from the
head of the column, the advance was irregular, by fits and starts,
every petty obstacle entailed a delay of many minutes. She felt that
she would never attain her end by remaining there at the rear of the
column, waiting for it to fight its way through, and with prompt
decision she bent her course to the right and took a path that led
downward between two hedges to the meadows.

Henriette's plan now was to reach Bazeilles by those broad levels that
border the Meuse. She was not very clear about it in her mind,
however, and continued to hasten onward in obedience to that blind
instinct which had originally imparted to her its impulse. She had not
gone far before she found herself standing and gazing in dismay at a
miniature ocean which barred her further progress in that direction.
It was the inundated fields, the low-lying lands that a measure of
defense had converted into a lake, which had escaped her memory. For a
single moment she thought of turning back; then, at the risk of
leaving her shoes behind, she pushed on, hugging the bank, through the
water that covered the grass and rose above her ankles. For a hundred
yards her way, though difficult, was not impracticable; then she
encountered a garden-wall directly in her front; the ground fell off
sharply, and where the wall terminated the water was six feet deep.
Her path was closed effectually; she clenched her little fists and had
to summon up all her resolution to keep from bursting into tears. When
the first shock of disappointment had passed over she made her way
along the enclosure and found a narrow lane that pursued a tortuous
course among the scattered houses. She believed that now her troubles
were at an end, for she was acquainted with that labyrinth, that
tangled maze of passages, which, to one who had the key to them, ended
at the village.

But the missiles seemed to be falling there even more thickly than
elsewhere. Henriette stopped short in her tracks and all the blood in
her body seemed to flow back upon her heart at a frightful detonation,
so close that she could feel the wind upon her cheek. A shell had
exploded directly before her and only a few yards away. She turned her
head and scrutinized for a moment the heights of the left bank, above
which the smoke from the German batteries was curling upward; she saw
what she must do, and when she started on her way again it was with
eyes fixed on the horizon, watching for the shells in order to avoid
them. There was method in the rash daring of her proceeding, and all
the brave tranquillity that the prudent little housewife had at her
command. She was not going to be killed if she could help it; she
wished to find her husband and bring him back with her, that they
might yet have many days of happy life together. The projectiles still
came tumbling frequently as ever; she sped along behind walls, made a
cover of boundary stones, availed herself of every slight depression.
But presently she came to an open space, a bit of unprotected road
where splinters and fragments of exploded shells lay thick, and she
was watching behind a shed for a chance to make a dash when she
perceived, emerging from a sort of cleft in the ground in front of
her, a human head and two bright eyes that peered about inquisitively.
It was a little, bare-footed, ten-year-old boy, dressed in a shirt and
ragged trousers, an embryonic tramp, who was watching the battle with
huge delight. At every report his small black beady eyes would snap
and sparkle, and he jubilantly shouted:

"Oh my! aint it bully!--Look out, there comes another one! don't stir!
Boom! that was a rouser!--Don't stir! don't stir!"

And each time there came a shell he dived to the bottom of his hole,
then reappeared, showing his dirty, elfish face, until it was time to
duck again.

Henriette now noticed that the projectiles all came from Liry, while
the batteries at Pont-Maugis and Noyers were confining their attention
to Balan. At each discharge she could see the smoke distinctly,
immediately afterward she heard the scream of the shell, succeeded by
the explosion. Just then the gunners afforded them a brief respite;
the bluish haze above the heights drifted slowly away upon the wind.

"They've stopped to take a drink, you can go your money on it," said
the urchin. "Quick, quick, give me your hand! Now's the time to skip!"

He took her by the hand and dragged her along with him, and in this
way they crossed the open together, side by side, running for dear
life, with head and shoulders down. When they were safely ensconced
behind a stack that opportunely offered its protection at the end of
their course and turned to look behind them, they beheld another shell
come rushing through the air and alight upon the shed at the very spot
they had occupied so lately. The crash was fearful; the shed was
knocked to splinters. The little ragamuffin considered that a capital
joke, and fairly danced with glee.

"Bravo, hit 'em agin! that's the way to do it!--But it was time for us
to skip, though, wasn't it?"

But again Henriette struck up against insurmountable obstacles in the
shape of hedges and garden-walls, that offered absolutely no outlet.
Her irrepressible companion, still wearing his broad grin and
remarking that where there was a will there was a way, climbed to the
coping of a wall and assisted her to scale it. On reaching the further
side they found themselves in a kitchen garden among beds of peas and
string-beans and surrounded by fences on every side; their sole exit
was through the little cottage of the gardener. The boy led the way,
swinging his arms and whistling unconcernedly, with an expression on
his face of most profound indifference. He pushed open a door that
admitted him to a bedroom, from which he passed on into another room,
where there was an old woman, apparently the only living being upon
the premises. She was standing by a table, in a sort of dazed stupor;
she looked at the two strangers who thus unceremoniously made a
highway of her dwelling, but addressed them no word, nor did they
speak a word to her. They vanished as quickly as they had appeared,
emerging by the exit opposite their entrance upon an alley that they
followed for a moment. After that there were other difficulties to be
surmounted, and thus they went on for more than half a mile, scaling
walls, struggling through hedges, availing themselves of every short
cut that offered, it might be the door of a stable or the window of a
cottage, as the exigencies of the case demanded. Dogs howled
mournfully; they had a narrow escape from being run down by a cow that
was plunging along, wild with terror. It seemed as if they must be
approaching the village, however; there was an odor of burning wood in
the air, and momentarily volumes of reddish smoke, like veils of finest
gauze floating in the wind, passed athwart the sun and obscured his
light.

All at once the urchin came to a halt and planted himself in front of
Henriette.

"I say, lady, tell us where you're going, will you?"

"You can see very well where I am going; to Bazeilles."

He gave a low whistle of astonishment, following it up with the shrill
laugh of the careless vagabond to whom nothing is sacred, who is not
particular upon whom or what he launches his irreverent gibes.

"To Bazeilles--oh, no, I guess not; I don't think my business lies
that way--I have another engagement. Bye-bye, ta-ta!"

He turned on his heel and was off like a shot, and she was none the
wiser as to whence he came or whither he went. She had found him in a
hole, she had lost sight of him at the corner of a wall, and never was
she to set eyes on him again.

When she was alone again Henriette experienced a strange sensation of
fear. He had been no protection to her, that scrubby urchin, but his
chatter had been a distraction; he had kept her spirits up by his way
of making game of everything, as if it was all one huge raree show.
Now she was beginning to tremble, her strength was failing her, she,
who by nature was so courageous. The shells no longer fell around her:
the Germans had ceased firing on Bazeilles, probably to avoid killing
their own men, who were now masters of the village; but within the
last few minutes she had heard the whistling of bullets, that peculiar
sound like the buzzing of a bluebottle fly, that she recognized by
having heard it described. There was such a raging, roaring clamor
rising to the heavens in the distance, the confused uproar of other
sounds was so violent, that in it she failed to distinguish the report
of musketry. As she was turning the corner of a house there was a
deadened thud close at her ear, succeeded by the sound of falling
plaster, which brought her to a sudden halt; it was a bullet that had
struck the facade. She was pale as death, and asked herself if her
courage would be sufficient to carry her through to the end; and
before she had time to frame an answer, she received what seemed to
her a blow from a hammer upon her forehead, and sank, stunned, upon
her knees. It was a spent ball that had ricocheted and struck her a
little above the left eyebrow with sufficient force to raise an ugly
contusion. When she came to, raising her hands to her forehead, she
withdrew them covered with blood. But the pressure of her fingers had
assured her that the bone beneath was uninjured, and she said aloud,
encouraging herself by the sound of her own voice:

"It is nothing, it is nothing. Come, I am not afraid; no, no! I am not
afraid."

And it was the truth; she arose, and from that time walked amid the
storm of bullets with absolute indifference, like one whose soul is
parted from his body, who reasons not, who gives his life. She marched
straight onward, with head erect, no longer seeking to shelter
herself, and if she struck out at a swifter pace it was only that she
might reach her appointed end more quickly. The death-dealing missiles
pattered on the road before and behind her; twenty times they were
near taking her life; she never noticed them. At last she was at
Bazeilles, and struck diagonally across a field of lucerne in order to
regain the road, the main street that traversed the village. Just as
she turned into it she cast her eyes to the right, and there, some two
hundred paces from her, beheld her house in a blaze. The flames were
invisible against the bright sunlight; the roof had already fallen in
in part, the windows were belching dense clouds of black smoke. She
could restrain herself no longer, and ran with all her strength.

Ever since eight o'clock Weiss, abandoned by the retiring troops, had
been a self-made prisoner there. His return to Sedan had become an
impossibility, for the Bavarians, immediately upon the withdrawal of
the French, had swarmed down from the park of Montivilliers and
occupied the road. He was alone and defenseless, save for his musket
and what few cartridges were left him, when he beheld before his door
a little band of soldiers, ten in number, abandoned, like himself, and
parted from their comrades, looking about them for a place where they
might defend themselves and sell their lives dearly. He ran downstairs
to admit them, and thenceforth the house had a garrison, a lieutenant,
corporal and eight men, all bitterly inflamed against the enemy, and
resolved never to surrender.

"What, Laurent, you here!" he exclaimed, surprised to recognize among
the soldiers a tall, lean young man, who held in his hand a musket,
doubtless taken from some corpse.

Laurent was dressed in jacket and trousers of blue cloth; he was
helper to a gardener of the neighborhood, and had lately lost his
mother and his wife, both of whom had been carried off by the same
insidious fever.

"And why shouldn't I be?" he replied. "All I have is my skin, and I'm
willing to give that. And then I am not such a bad shot, you know, and
it will be just fun for me to blaze away at those rascals and knock
one of 'em over every time."

The lieutenant and the corporal had already begun to make an
inspection of the premises. There was nothing to be done on the ground
floor; all they did was to push the furniture against the door and
windows in such a way as to form as secure a barricade as possible.
After attending to that they proceeded to arrange a plan for the
defense of the three small rooms of the first floor and the open
attic, making no change, however, in the measures that had been
already taken by Weiss, the protection of the windows by mattresses,
the loopholes cut here and there in the slats of the blinds. As the
lieutenant was leaning from the window to take a survey of their
surroundings, he heard the wailing cry of a child.

"What is that?" he asked.

Weiss looked from the window, and, in the adjoining dyehouse, beheld
the little sick boy, Charles, his scarlet face resting on the white
pillow, imploringly begging his mother to bring him a drink: his
mother, who lay dead across the threshold, beyond hearing or
answering. With a sorrowful expression he replied:

"It is a poor little child next door, there, crying for his mother,
who was killed by a Prussian shell."

"_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" muttered Laurent, "how are they ever going to
pay for all these things!"

As yet only a few random shots had struck the front of the house.
Weiss and the lieutenant, accompanied by the corporal and two men, had
ascended to the attic, where they were in better position to observe
the road, of which they had an oblique view as far as the Place de
l'Eglise. The square was now occupied by the Bavarians, but any
further advance was attended by difficulties that made them very
circumspect. A handful of French soldiers, posted at the mouth of a
narrow lane, held them in check for nearly a quarter of an hour, with
a fire so rapid and continuous that the dead bodies lay in piles. The
next obstacle they encountered was a house on the opposite corner,
which also detained them some time before they could get possession of
it. At one time a woman, with a musket in her hands, was seen through
the smoke, firing from one of the windows. It was the abode of a
baker, and a few soldiers were there in addition to the regular
occupants; and when the house was finally carried there was a hoarse
shout: "No quarter!" a surging, struggling, vociferating throng poured
from the door and rolled across the street to the dead-wall opposite,
and in the raging torrent were seen the woman's skirt, the jacket of a
man, the white hairs of the grandfather; then came the crash of a
volley of musketry, and the wall was splashed with blood from base to
coping. This was a point on which the Germans were inexorable;
everyone caught with arms in his hands and not belonging to some
uniformed organization was shot without the formality of a trial, as
having violated the law of nations. They were enraged at the obstinate
resistance offered them by the village, and the frightful loss they
had sustained during the five hours' conflict provoked them to the
most atrocious reprisals. The gutters ran red with blood, the piled
dead in the streets formed barricades, some of the more open places
were charnel-houses, from whose depths rose the death-rattle of men in
their last agony. And in every house that they had to carry by assault
in this way men were seen distributing wisps of lighted straw, others
ran to and fro with blazing torches, others smeared the walls and
furniture with petroleum; soon whole streets were burning,
Bazeilles was in flames.

And now Weiss's was the only house in the central portion of the
village that still continued to hold out, preserving its air of
menace, like some stern citadel determined not to yield.

"Look out! here they come!" shouted the lieutenant.

A simultaneous discharge from the attic and the first floor laid low
three of the Bavarians, who had come forward hugging the walls. The
remainder of the body fell back and posted themselves under cover
wherever the street offered facilities, and the siege of the house
began; the bullets pelted on the front like rattling hail. For nearly
ten minutes the fusillade continued without cessation, damaging the
stucco, but not doing much mischief otherwise, until one of the men
whom the lieutenant had taken with him to the garret was so imprudent
as to show himself at a window, when a bullet struck him square in the
forehead, killing him instantly. It was plain that whoever exposed
himself would do so at peril of his life.

"Doggone it! there's one gone!" growled the lieutenant. "Be careful,
will you; there's not enough of us that we can afford to let ourselves
be killed for the fun of it!"

He had taken a musket and was firing away like the rest of them from
behind the protection of a shutter, at the same time watching and
encouraging his men. It was Laurent, the gardener's helper, however,
who more than all the others excited his wonder and admiration.
Kneeling on the floor, with his chassepot peering out of the narrow
aperture of a loophole, he never fired until absolutely certain of his
aim; he even told in advance where he intended hitting his living
target.

"That little officer in blue that you see down there, in the heart.
--That other fellow, the tall, lean one, between the eyes.--I don't
like the looks of that fat man with the red beard; I think I'll let
him have it in the stomach."

And each time his man went down as if struck by lightning, hit in the
very spot he had mentioned, and he continued to fire at intervals,
coolly, without haste, there being no necessity for hurrying himself,
as he remarked, since it would require too long a time to kill them
all in that way.

"Oh! if I had but my eyes!" Weiss impatiently exclaimed. He had broken
his spectacles a while before, to his great sorrow. He had his double
eye-glass still, but the perspiration was rolling down his face in
such streams that it was impossible to keep it on his nose. His usual
calm collectedness was entirely lost in his over-mastering passion;
and thus, between his defective vision and his agitated nerves, many
of his shots were wasted.

"Don't hurry so, it is only throwing away powder," said Laurent. "Do
you see that man who has lost his helmet, over yonder by the grocer's
shop? Well, now draw a bead on him,--carefully, don't hurry. That's
first-rate! you have broken his paw for him and made him dance a jig
in his own blood."

Weiss, rather pale in the face, gave a look at the result of his
marksmanship.

"Put him out of his misery," he said.

"What, waste a cartridge! Not, much. Better save it for another of
'em."

The besiegers could not have failed to notice the remarkable practice
of the invisible sharpshooter in the attic. Whoever of them showed
himself in the open was certain to remain there. They therefore
brought up re-enforcements and placed them in position, with
instructions to maintain an unremitting fire upon the roof of the
building. It was not long before the attic became untenable; the
slates were perforated as if they had been tissue paper, the bullets
found their way to every nook and corner, buzzing and humming as if
the room had been invaded by a swarm of angry bees. Death stared them
all in the face if they remained there longer.

"We will go downstairs," said the lieutenant. "We can hold the first
floor for awhile yet." But as he was making for the ladder a bullet
struck him in the groin and he fell. "Too late, doggone it!"

Weiss and Laurent, aided by the remaining soldiers, carried him below,
notwithstanding his vehement protests; he told them not to waste their
time on him, his time had come; he might as well die upstairs as down.
He was still able to be of service to them, however, when they had
laid him on a bed in a room of the first floor, by advising them what
was best to do.

"Fire into the mass," he said; "don't stop to take aim. They are too
cowardly to risk an advance unless they see your fire begin to
slacken."

And so the siege of the little house went on as if it was to last for
eternity. Twenty times it seemed as if it must be swept away bodily by
the storm of iron that beat upon it, and each time, as the smoke
drifted away, it was seen amid the sulphurous blasts, torn, pierced,
mangled, but erect and menacing, spitting fire and lead with
undiminished venom from each one of its orifices. The assailants,
furious that they should be detained for such length of time and lose
so many men before such a hovel, yelled and fired wildly in the
distance, but had not courage to attempt to carry the lower floor by a
rush.

"Look out!" shouted the corporal, "there is a shutter about to fall!"

The concentrated fire had torn one of the inside blinds from its
hinges, but Weiss darted forward and pushed a wardrobe before the
window, and Laurent was enabled to continue his operations under
cover. One of the soldiers was lying at his feet with his jaw broken,
losing blood freely. Another received a bullet in his chest, and
dragged himself over to the wall, where he lay gasping in protracted
agony, while convulsive movements shook his frame at intervals. They
were but eight, now, all told, not counting the lieutenant, who, too
weak to speak, his back supported by the headboard of the bed,
continued to give his directions by signs. As had been the case with
the attic, the three rooms of the first floor were beginning to be
untenable, for the mangled mattresses no longer afforded protection
against the missiles; at every instant the plaster fell in sheets from
the walls and ceiling, and the furniture was in process of demolition:
the sides of the wardrobe yawned as if they had been cloven by an ax.
And worse still, the ammunition was nearly exhausted.

"It's too bad!" grumbled Laurent; "just when everything was going so
beautifully!"

But suddenly Weiss was struck with an idea.

"Wait!"

He had thought of the dead soldier up in the garret above, and climbed
up the ladder to search for the cartridges he must have about him. A
wide space of the roof had been crushed in; he saw the blue sky, a
patch of bright, wholesome light that made him start. Not wishing to
be killed, he crawled over the floor on his hands and knees, then,
when he had the cartridges in his possession, some thirty of them, he
made haste down again as fast his legs could carry him.

Downstairs, as he was sharing his newly acquired treasure with the
gardener's lad, a soldier uttered a piercing cry and sank to his
knees. They were but seven; and presently they were but six, a bullet
having entered the corporal's head at the eye and lodged in the brain.

From that time on, Weiss had no distinct consciousness of what was
going on around him; he and the five others continued to blaze away
like lunatics, expending their cartridges, with not the faintest idea
in their heads that there could be such a thing as surrender. In the
three small rooms the floor was strewn with fragments of the broken
furniture. Ingress and egress were barred by the corpses that lay
before the doors; in one corner a wounded man kept up a pitiful wail
that was frightful to hear. Every inch of the floor was slippery with
blood; a thin stream of blood from the attic was crawling lazily down
the stairs. And the air was scarce respirable, an air thick and hot
with sulphurous fumes, heavy with smoke, filled with an acrid,
nauseating dust; a darkness dense as that of night, through which
darted the red flame-tongues of the musketry.

"By God's thunder!" cried Weiss, "they are bringing up artillery!"

It was true. Despairing of ever reducing that handful of madmen, who
had consumed so much of their time, the Bavarians had run up a gun to
the corner of the Place de l'Eglise, and were putting it into
position; perhaps they would be allowed to pass when they should have
knocked the house to pieces with their solid shot. And the honor there
was to them in the proceeding, the gun trained on them down there in
the square, excited the bitter merriment of the besieged; the utmost
intensity of scorn was in their gibes. Ah! the cowardly _bougres_,
with their artillery! Kneeling in his old place still, Laurent
carefully adjusted his aim and each time picked off a gunner, so that
the service of the piece became impossible, and it was five or six
minutes before they fired their first shot. It ranged high, moreover,
and only clipped away a bit of the roof.

But the end was now at hand. It was all in vain that they searched the
dead men's belts; there was not a single cartridge left. With
vacillating steps and haggard faces the six groped around the room,
seeking what heavy objects they might find to hurl from the windows
upon their enemies. One of them showed himself at the casement,
vociferating insults, and shaking his fist; instantly he was pierced
by a dozen bullets; and there remained but five. What were they to do?
go down and endeavor to make their escape by way of the garden and the
meadows? The question was never answered, for at that moment a tumult
arose below, a furious mob came tumbling up the stairs: it was the
Bavarians, who had at last thought of turning the position by breaking
down the back door and entering the house by that way. For a brief
moment a terrible hand-to-hand conflict raged in the small rooms among
the dead bodies and the debris of the furniture. One of the soldiers
had his chest transfixed by a bayonet thrust, the two others were made
prisoners, while the attitude of the lieutenant, who had given up the
ghost, was that of one about to give an order, his mouth open, his arm
raised aloft.

While these things were occurring an officer, a big, flaxen-haired
man, carrying a revolver in his hand, whose bloodshot eyes seemed
bursting from their sockets, had caught sight of Weiss and Laurent,
both in their civilian attire; he roared at them in French:

"Who are you, you fellows? and what are you doing here?"

Then, glancing at their faces, black with powder-stains, he saw how
matters stood, he heaped insult and abuse on them in guttural German,
in a voice that shook with anger. Already he had raised his revolver
and was about to send a bullet into their heads, when the soldiers of
his command rushed in, seized Laurent and Weiss, and hustled them out
to the staircase. The two men were borne along like straws upon a
mill-race amidst that seething human torrent, under whose pressure
they were hurled from out the door and sent staggering, stumbling
across the street to the opposite wall amid a chorus of execration
that drowned the sound of their officers' voices. Then, for a space of
two or three minutes, while the big fair-haired officer was
endeavoring to extricate them in order to proceed with their
execution, an opportunity was afforded them to raise themselves erect
and look about them.

Other houses had taken fire; Bazeilles was now a roaring, blazing
furnace. Flames had begun to appear at the tall windows of the church
and were creeping upward toward the roof. Some soldiers who were
driving a venerable lady from her home had compelled her to furnish
the matches with which to fire her own beds and curtains. Lighted by
blazing brands and fed by petroleum in floods, fires were rising and
spreading in every quarter; it was no longer civilized warfare, but a
conflict of savages, maddened by the long protracted strife, wreaking
vengeance for their dead, their heaps of dead, upon whom they trod at
every step they took. Yelling, shouting bands traversed the streets
amid the scurrying smoke and falling cinders, swelling the hideous
uproar into which entered sounds of every kind: shrieks, groans, the
rattle of musketry, the crash of falling walls. Men could scarce see
one another; great livid clouds drifted athwart the sun and obscured
his light, bearing with them an intolerable stench of soot and blood,
heavy with the abominations of the slaughter. In every quarter the
work of death and destruction still went on: the human brute
unchained, the imbecile wrath, the mad fury, of man devouring his
brother man.

And Weiss beheld his house burn before his eyes. Some soldiers had
applied the torch, others fed the flame by throwing upon it the
fragments of the wrecked furniture. The _rez-de-chaussee_ was quickly
in a blaze, the smoke poured in dense black volumes from the wounds in
the front and roof. But now the dyehouse adjoining was also on fire,
and horrible to relate, the voice of little Charles, lying on his bed
delirious with fever, could be heard through the crackling of the
flames, beseeching his mother to bring him a draught of water, while
the skirts of the wretched woman who, with her disfigured face, lay
across the door-sill, were even then beginning to kindle.

"Mamma, mamma, I am thirsty! Mamma, bring me a drink of water--"

The weak, faint voice was drowned in the roar of the conflagration;
the cheering of the victors rose on the air in the distance.

But rising above all other sounds, dominating the universal clamor, a
terrible cry was heard. It was Henriette, who had reached the place at
last, and now beheld her husband, backed up against the wall, facing a
platoon of men who were loading their muskets.

She flew to him and threw her arms about his neck.

"My God! what is it! They cannot be going to kill you!"

Weiss looked at her with stupid, unseeing eyes. She! his wife, so long
the object of his desire, so fondly idolized! A great shudder passed
through his frame and he awoke to consciousness of his situation. What
had he done? why had he remained there, firing at the enemy, instead
of returning to her side, as he had promised he would do? It all
flashed upon him now, as the darkness is illuminated by the
lightning's glare: he had wrecked their happiness, they were to be
parted, forever parted. Then he noticed the blood upon her forehead.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. "You were mad to come--"

She interrupted him with an impatient gesture.

"Never mind me; it is a mere scratch. But you, you! why are you here?
They shall not kill you; I will not suffer it!"

The officer, who was endeavoring to clear the road in order to give
the firing party the requisite room, came up on hearing the sound of
voices, and beholding a woman with her arms about the neck of one of
his prisoners, exclaimed loudly in French:

"Come, come, none of this nonsense here! Whence come you? What is your
business here?"

"Give me my husband."

"What, is he your husband, that man? His sentence is pronounced; the
law must take its course."

"Give me my husband."

"Come, be rational. Stand aside; we do not wish to harm you."

"Give me my husband."

Perceiving the futility of arguing with her, the officer was about to
give orders to remove her forcibly from the doomed man's arms when
Laurent, who until then had maintained an impassive silence, ventured
to interfere.

"See here, Captain, I am the man who killed so many of your men; go
ahead and shoot me--that will be all right, especially as I have
neither chick nor child in all the world. But this gentleman's case is
different; he is a married man, don't you see. Come, now, let him go;
then you can settle my business as soon as you choose."

Beside himself with anger, the captain screamed:

"What is all this lingo? Are you trying to make game of me? Come, step
out here, some one of you fellows, and take away this woman!"

He had to repeat his order in German, whereon a soldier came forward
from the ranks, a short stocky Bavarian, with an enormous head
surrounded by a bristling forest of red hair and beard, beneath which
all that was to be seen were a pair of big blue eyes and a massive
nose. He was besmeared with blood, a hideous spectacle, like nothing
so much as some fierce, hairy denizen of the woods, emerging from his
cavern and licking his chops, still red with the gore of the victims
whose bones he has been crunching.

With a heart-rending cry Henriette repeated:

"Give me my husband, or let me die with him."

This seemed to cause the cup of the officer's exasperation to overrun;
he thumped himself violently on the chest, declaring that he was no
executioner, that he would rather die than harm a hair of an innocent
head. There was nothing against her; he would cut off his right hand
rather than do her an injury. And then he repeated his order that she
be taken away.

As the Bavarian came up to carry out his instructions Henriette
tightened her clasp on Weiss's neck, throwing all her strength into
her frantic embrace.

"Oh, my love! Keep me with you, I beseech you; let me die with you--"

Big tears were rolling down his cheeks as, without answering, he
endeavored to loosen the convulsive clasp of the fingers of the poor
creature he loved so dearly.

"You love me no longer, then, that you wish to die without me. Hold
me, keep me, do not let them take me. They will weary at last, and
will kill us together."

He had loosened one of the little hands, and carried it to his lips
and kissed it, working all the while to make the other release its
hold.

"No, no, it shall not be! I will not leave thy bosom; they shall
pierce my heart before reaching thine. I will not survive--"

But at last, after a long struggle, he held both the hands in his.
Then he broke the silence that he had maintained until then, uttering
one single word:

"Farewell, dear wife."

And with his own hands he placed her in the arms of the Bavarian, who
carried her away. She shrieked and struggled, while the soldier,
probably with intent to soothe her, kept pouring in her ear an
uninterrupted stream of words in unmelodious German. And, having freed
her head, looking over the shoulder of the man, she beheld the end.

It lasted not five seconds. Weiss, whose eye-glass had slipped from
its position in the agitation of their parting, quickly replaced it
upon his nose, as if desirous to look death in the face. He stepped
back and placed himself against the wall, and the face of the
self-contained, strong young man, as he stood there in his tattered
coat, was sublimely beautiful in its expression of tranquil courage.
Laurent, who stood beside him, had thrust his hands deep down into his
pockets. The cold cruelty of the proceeding disgusted him; it seemed
to him that they could not be far removed from savagery who could thus
slaughter men before the eyes of their wives. He drew himself up,
looked them square in the face, and in a tone of deepest contempt
expectorated:

"Dirty pigs!"

The officer raised his sword; the signal was succeeded by a crashing
volley, and the two men sank to the ground, an inert mass, the
gardener's lad upon his face, the other, the accountant, upon his
side, lengthwise of the wall. The frame of the latter, before he
expired, contracted in a supreme convulsion, the eyelids quivered, the
mouth opened as if he was about to speak. The officer came up and
stirred him with his foot, to make sure that he was really dead.

Henriette had seen the whole: the fading eyes that sought her in
death, the last struggle of the strong man in agony, the brutal boot
spurning the corpse. And while the Bavarian still held her in his
arms, conveying her further and further from the object of her love,
she uttered no cry; she set her teeth, in silent fury, into what was
nearest: a human hand, it chanced to be. The soldier gave vent to a
howl of anguish and dashed her to the ground; raising his uninjured
fist above her head he was on the point of braining her. And for a
moment their faces were in contact; she experienced a feeling of
intensest loathing for the monster, and that blood-stained hair and
beard, those blue eyes, dilated and brimming with hate and rage, were
destined to remain forever indelibly imprinted on her memory.

In after days Henriette could never account distinctly to herself for
the time immediately succeeding these events. She had but one desire:
to return to the spot where her loved one had died, take possession of
his remains, and watch and weep over them; but, as in an evil dream,
obstacles of every sort arose before her and barred the way. First a
heavy infantry fire broke out afresh, and there was great activity
among the German troops who were holding Bazeilles; it was due to the
arrival of the infanterie de marine and other regiments that had been
despatched from Balan to regain possession of the village, and the
battle commenced to rage again with the utmost fury. The young woman,
in company with a band of terrified citizens, was swept away to the
left into a dark alley. The result of the conflict could not remain
long doubtful, however; it was too late to reconquer the abandoned
positions. For near half an hour the infantry struggled against
superior numbers and faced death with splendid bravery, but the
enemy's strength was constantly increasing, their re-enforcements were
pouring in from every direction, the roads, the meadows, the park of
Montivilliers; no force at our command could have dislodged them from
the position, so dearly bought, where they had left thousands of their
bravest. Destruction and devastation now had done their work; the
place was a shambles, disgraceful to humanity, where mangled forms lay
scattered among smoking ruins, and poor Bazeilles, having drained the
bitter cup, went up at last in smoke and flame.

Henriette turned and gave one last look at her little house, whose
floors fell in even as she gazed, sending myriads of little sparks
whirling gayly upward on the air. And there, before her, prone at the
wall's foot, she saw her husband's corpse, and in her despair and
grief would fain have returned to him, but just then another crowd
came up and surged around her, the bugles were sounding the signal to
retire, she was borne away, she knew not how, among the retreating
troops. Her faculty of self-guidance left her; she was as a bit of
flotsam swept onward by the eddying human tide that streamed along the
way. And that was all she could remember until she became herself
again and found she was at Balan, among strangers, her head reclined
upon a table in a kitchen, weeping.

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