the force and attitude of the enemy, now so mute that one could have believed that they had disappeared, vanished, escaped through the venthole.
Monsieur Lavigne struck the trapdoor and called: “Mr. Prussian officer!”
The German did not answer.
The commander repeated: “Mr. Prussian officer!”
It was in vain. For twenty minutes he summoned this silent officer to surrender his arms and baggage, promising to spare his life and the lives of his men, and military honors for him and his soldiers. But he obtained no sign of consent or of hostility. The situation was becoming difficult.
The citizen soldiers stamped their feet in the snow, struck their shoulders great blows with their arms, like cabmen trying to keep warm, and looked at the venthole with a growing and childish desire to pass before it.
One of them, finally, Potdevin by name, took the hazard, as he was very swift. He made a leap and ran past it like a deer. The feat was a success. The prisoners seemed dead.
One voice cried: “There is no one there.”
And then another soldier crossed the free space before the dangerous hole. Then it was like a game. From minute to minute some man would throw himself past the troop, as children play jumping bars, hurling behind them lumps of snow from their swiftly moving feet. For comfort, someone lighted a great fire of dead wood, which seemed to illuminate this profile of the national guard in its rapid journey from the camp on the right to the camp on the left.
Someone cried: “Now you, Maloison!”
Maloison was a big baker whose rotundity was a source of laughter to his comrades. He hesitated. They teased him. Then, straightening up, he started, with the little, regular, gymnastic step, puffing so that it shook his powerful corporosity.
All the detachment laughed until they cried. To encourage him, they called out: “Bravo, bravo, Maloison!”
He had made about two thirds of his distance when a long flame, rapid and red, sprang out of the venthole. A report sounded, and the vast body of the baker fell face downward, while he gave a frightful cry.
No one dared go to his aid. They saw him dragging himself along on all fours, in the glistening snow, and, when he had passed the terrible opening, he vanished.
He had received a ball in the thick part of the thigh, but near the surface.
After the first surprise and the first fright, a new laugh went round. But Commander Lavigne appeared upon the doorsill of the forest house. He came to stop his plan of attack. In a vibrating voice, he commanded:
“The zinc-worker and his workmen come here.”
Three men approached.
“Unfasten the gutters of the house.”
In a quarter of an hour they had carried to the commander twenty meters of gutter pipe. Then he made them, with a thousand precautions, fit one into a little round hole at the edge of the trapdoor, and, attaching a pipe from the pump to this conduit, he declared, with an enchanted air:
“Now we are going to drink to the health of these German gentlemen.”
A frenzied hurrah of admiration went up, followed by shouts of joy and wild laughter. The commander organized squads for the work, who should relieve each other every five minutes. Then he gave the order:
“Pump!”
The iron handle having been put in motion, a little sound glided along the length of pipe and fell into the cellar with the murmur of a cascade.
They listened. One hour passed, then two, then three.
The commander walked about the kitchen in a feverish state of mind, placing his ear to the floor from time to time, seeking to find out what the enemy was doing, and asking himself if they were going to capitulate.
Now the enemy was moving about. They heard them moving the barrels and talking. Then, toward eight o’clock in the morning: a voice came from the venthold:
“I vish to speak to the French officer.”
Lavigne responded from the window, without putting his head too far out: “What do you wish?”
“I surrender myself.”
“Pass out the guns, then.”
And immediately a gun came out of the hole upon the snow, then two, three, and all the others. The same voice said:
“I hav no more. Hurry! I am drowning.”
The commander ordered:
“Stop pumping.”
The handle of the pump fell motionless. And, having filled the kitchen with soldiers armed to the teeth, he slowly raised the oaken trapdoor.
Four heads appeared, soaked, four blond heads with long, pale hair; and they saw come out, rushing as if frightened, six Germans, shivering with cold.
They were seized and bound. Then, as they feared a surprise from another detachment, they formed into two convoys, one conducting the prisoners and the other carrying Maloison on a mattress placed upon poles.
They returned triumphant into Rethel.
Monsieur Lavigne was decorated for having captured an advance guard of the Prussians, and the great baker received a military medal for wounds received before the enemy.
For Sale
To set out on foot, when the sun is just rising, and walk through the dew, by the side of the fields, at the verge of the quiet sea, what ecstasy!
What ecstasy! It enters in through the eyes with the radiant light, through the nostrils with the sharp air, through the skin with the caressing wind.
Why do we retain, so clear, so precious, so sharp a memory of a few moments of passionate union with the Earth, the memory of a swift divine emotion, of the almost caressing greeting of a countryside revealed by a twist of the road, at the mouth of a valley, at the edge of a river, just as if we had come upon a charming and complaisant young girl?
I remember one day, among many. I was walking along the coast of Brittany towards the outthrust headland of Finistère. I walked quickly, thinking of nothing at all, along the edge of the water. This was in the neighbourhood of Quimperlé, in the loveliest and most adorable part of Brittany.
It was a morning in spring, one of those mornings in which
