The Captain had a plan of his own, that he had been cogitating over for
some time. A man in that part of the country, whom he knew, was going to
lend him a cart, and six suits of peasants' clothes. We could hide under
some straw at the bottom of the wagon, and it would be loaded with
Gruyère cheese, which he was supposed to be going to sell in France. The
captain told the sentinels that he was taking two friends with him, to
protect his goods, in case any one should try to rob him, which did not
seem an extraordinary precaution. A Swiss officer seemed to look at the
wagon in a knowing manner, but that was in order to impress his
soldiers. In a word, neither officers nor men could make it out.
"Get on," the captain said to the horses, as he cracked his whip, while
our three men quietly smoked their pipes. I was half-suffocated in my
box, which only admitted the air through those holes in front, while at
the same time I was nearly frozen, for it was terribly cold.
"Get on," the captain said again, and the wagon loaded with Gruyère
cheese entered France.
The Prussian lines were very badly guarded, as the enemy trusted to the
watchfulness of the Swiss. The sergeant spoke North German, while our
captain spoke the bad German of the _Four Cantons_, and so they could
not understand each other; the sergeant, however, pretended to be very
intelligent, and in order to make us believe that he understood us, they
allowed us to continue our journey, and after traveling for seven hours,
being continually stopped in the same manner, we arrived at a small
village of the Jura, in ruins, at nightfall.
What were wre going to do? Our only arms were the captain's whip, our
uniforms, our peasants' blouses, and our food our Gruyère cheese. Our
sole riches consisted in our ammunition, packets of cartridges which we
had stowed away inside some of the huge cheeses. We had about a thousand
of them, just two hundred each, but then we wanted rifles, and they must
be Chassepots; luckily, however, the captain was a bold man of an
inventive mind, and this was the plan that he hit upon.
While three of us remained hidden in a cellar in the abandoned village,
he continued his journey as far as Besançon with the empty wagon and one
man. The town was invested, but one can always make one's way into a
town among the hills by crossing the table-land till within about ten
miles of the walls, and then by following paths and ravines on foot.
They left their wagon at Omans, among the Germans, and escaped out of it
at night on foot, so as to gain the heights which border the river
Doubs; the next day they entered Besançon, where there were plenty of
Chassepots. There were nearly forty thousand of them left in the
arsenal, and General Roland, a brave marine, laughed at the captain's
daring project, but let him have six rifles and wished him "good luck."
There he had also found his wife, who had been through all the war with
us before the campaign in the East, and who had been only prevented by
illness from continuing with Bourbaki's army. She had recovered,
however, in spite of the cold, which was growing more and more intense,
and in spite of the numberless privations that awaited her, she
persisted in accompanying her husband. He was obliged to give way to
her, and they all three, the captain, his wife, and our comrade, started
on their expedition.
Going was nothing in comparison to returning. They were obliged to
travel by night, so as to avoid meeting anybody, as the possession of
six rifles would have made them liable to suspicion. But in spite of
everything, a week after leaving us, the captain and his _two men_ were
back with us again. The campaign was about to begin.