The Downfall Part 29

"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 sh.e.l.l 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 G.o.d! my G.o.d!" 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sailants 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 pa.s.sage 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 apt.i.tude 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 sh.e.l.l 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sages, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 s.p.a.ce, a bit of unprotected road where splinters and fragments of exploded sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 ragam.u.f.fin 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 a.s.sisted 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 pa.s.sed 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, pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 a.s.sured 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 sh.e.l.l."

"_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 circ.u.mspect. 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sault 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 cha.s.sepot 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.