Prussians' mouths gratis? What they get from me they have to pay for. Folks will see how it is some of these days!'
On the second day of his employment Jean remained too long on foot, and the doctor's secret fears proved not to be unfounded; the wound opened, the leg became greatly inflamed and swollen, he was compelled to take to his bed again. Dalichamp suspected that the mischief was due to a spicule of bone that the two consecutive days of violent exercise had served to liberate. He explored the wound and was so fortunate as to find the fragment, but there was a shock attending the operation, succeeded by a high fever, which exhausted all Jean's strength. He had never in his life been reduced to a condition of such debility: his recovery promised to be a work of time, and faithful Henriette resumed her position as nurse and companion in the little chamber, where winter with icy breath now began to make its presence felt. It was early November, already the east wind had brought on its wings a smart flurry of snow, and between those four bare walls, on the uncarpeted floor where even the tall, gaunt old clothes- press seemed to shiver with discomfort, the cold was extreme. As there was no fireplace in the room they determined to set up a stove, of which the purring, droning murmur assisted to brighten their solitude a bit.
The days wore on, monotonously, and that first week of the relapse was to Jean and Henriette the dreariest and saddest in all their long, unsought intimacy. Would their suffering never end? were they to hope for no surcease of misery, the danger always springing up afresh? At every moment their thoughts sped away to Maurice, from whom they had received no further word. They were told that others were getting letters, brief notes written on tissue paper and brought in by carrier-pigeons. Doubtless the bullet of some hated German had slain the messenger that, winging its way through the free air of heaven, was bringing them their missive of joy and love. Everything seemed to retire into dim obscurity, to die and be swallowed up in the depths of the premature winter. Intelligence of the war only reached them a long time after the occurrence of events, the few newspapers that Doctor Dalichamp still continued to supply them with were often a week old by the time they reached their hands. And their dejection was largely owing to their want of information, to what they did not know and yet instinctively felt to be the truth, to the prolonged death-wail that, spite of all, came to their ears across the frozen fields in the deep silence that lay upon the country.
One morning the doctor came to them in a condition of deepest discouragement. With a trembling hand he drew from his pocket a Belgian newspaper and threw it on the bed, exclaiming:
'Alas, my friends, poor France is murdered; Bazaine has played the traitor!'
Jean, who had been dozing, his back supported by a couple of pillows, suddenly became wide-awake.
'What, a traitor?'
'Yes, he has surrendered Metz and the army. It is the experience of Sedan over again, only this time they drain us of our last drop of life-blood.' Then taking up the paper and reading from it: 'One hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, one hundred and fifty-three eagles and standards, one hundred and forty-one field guns, seventy-six machine guns, eight hundred casemate and barbette guns, three hundred thousand muskets, two thousand military train wagons, material for eighty-five batteries-'
And he went on giving further particulars: how Marshal Bazaine had been blockaded in Metz with the army, bound hand and foot, making no effort to break the wall of adamant that surrounded him; the doubtful relations that existed between him and Prince Frederick Charles, his indecision and fluctuating political combinations, his ambition to play a great role in history, but a role that he seemed not to have fixed upon himself; then all the dirty business of parleys and conferences, and the communications by means of lying, unsavory emissaries with Bismarck, King William and the Empress-regent, who in the end put her foot down and refused to negotiate with the enemy on the basis of a cession of territory; and, finally, the inevitable catastrophe, the completion of the web that destiny had been weaving, famine in Metz, a compulsory capitulation, officers and men, hope and courage gone, reduced to accept the bitter terms of the victor. France no longer had an army.
'In God's name!' Jean ejaculated in a deep, low voice. He had not fully understood it all, but until then Bazaine had always been for him the great captain, the one man to whom they were to look for salvation. 'What is left us to do now? What will become of them at Paris?'
The doctor was just coming to the news from Paris, which was of a disastrous character. He called their attention to the fact that the paper from which he was reading was dated November 5. The surrender of Metz had been consummated on the 27th of October, and the tidings were not known in Paris until the 30th. Coming, as it did, upon the heels of the reverses recently sustained at Chevilly, Bagneux and la Malmaison, after the conflict at Bourget and the loss of that position, the intelligence had burst like a thunderbolt over the desperate populace, angered and disgusted by the feebleness and impotency of the government of National Defense. And thus it was that on the following day, the 31st, the city was threatened with a general insurrection, an immense throng of angry men, a mob ripe for mischief, collecting on the Place de l'Hotel de Ville, whence they swarmed into the halls and public offices, making prisoners the members of the Government, whom the National Guard rescued later in the day only because they feared the triumph of those incendiaries who were clamoring for the commune. And the Belgian journal wound up with a few stinging comments on the great City of Paris, thus torn by civil war when the enemy was at its gates. Was it not the presage of approaching decomposition, the puddle of blood and mire that was to engulf a world?
'That's true enough!' said Jean, whose face was very white. 'They've no business to be squabbling when the Prussians are at hand!'
But Henriette, who had said nothing as yet, always making it her rule to hold her tongue when politics were under discussion, could not restrain a cry that rose from her heart. Her thoughts were ever with her brother.
'
They were all silent in their distress; and it was the doctor, who was ardently patriotic, who resumed the conversation.
'Never mind; if there are no more soldiers, others will grow. Metz has surrendered, Paris may surrender, even; but it don't follow from that that France is wiped out. Yes, the strong-box is all right, as our peasants say, and we will live on in spite of all.'
It was clear, however, that he was hoping against hope. He spoke of the army that was collecting on the Loire, whose initial performances, in the neighborhood of Arthenay, had not been of the most promising; it would become seasoned and would march to the relief of Paris. His enthusiasm was aroused to boiling pitch by the proclamations of Gambetta, who had left Paris by balloon on the 7th of October and two days later established his headquarters at Tours, calling on every citizen to fly to arms, and instinct with a spirit at once so virile and so sagacious that the entire country gave its adhesion to the dictatorial powers assumed for the public safety. And was there not talk of forming another army in the North, and yet another in the East, of causing soldiers to spring from the ground by sheer force of faith? It was to be the awakening of the provinces, the creation of all that was wanting by exercise of indomitable will, the determination to continue the struggle until the last sou was spent, the last drop of blood shed.
'Bah!' said the doctor in conclusion as he arose to go, 'I have many a time given up a patient, and a week later found him as lively as a cricket.'
Jean smiled. 'Doctor, hurry up and make a well man of me, so I can go back to my post down yonder.'
But those evil tidings left Henriette and him in a terribly disheartened state. There came another cold wave, with snow, and when the next day Henriette came in shivering from the hospital she told her friend that Gutman was dead. The intense cold had proved fatal to many among the wounded; it was emptying the rows of beds. The miserable man whom the loss of his tongue had condemned to silence had lain two days in the throes of death. During his last hour she had remained seated at his bedside, unable to resist the supplication of his pleading gaze. He seemed to be speaking to her with his tearful eyes, trying to tell, it may be, his real name and the name of the village, so far away, where a wife and little ones were watching for his return. And he had gone from them a stranger, known of none, sending her a last kiss with his uncertain, stiffening fingers, as if to thank her once again for all her gentle care. She was the only one who accompanied the remains to the cemetery, where the frozen earth, the unfriendly soil of the stranger's country, rattled with a dull, hollow sound on the pine coffin, mingled with flakes of snow.
The next day, again, Henriette said upon her return at evening:
''Poor boy' is dead.' She could not keep back her tears at mention of his name. 'If you could but have seen and heard him in his pitiful delirium! He kept calling me: 'Mamma! mamma!' and stretched his poor thin arms out to me so entreatingly that I had to take him on my lap. His suffering had so wasted him that he was no heavier than a boy
