Jean and Pauline awoke next morning to some very queer sensations. They
had slept in their clothes upon beds of hay. Their bedroom, in fact, was
part of a cottage loft partitioned into two by rough boards; on this
side, hay—on the other a hen-roost. The poultry were cackling and
crowing and seemed to be in a flurry. Jean raised himself on his elbow
and called:
“Pauline!”
“Jean! I was just going to wake you. I have scarcely slept all night,
while you have been snoring. Listen! The battle has begun.”
Sure enough a deal of fusillading was going on, and not very far away;
and this no doubt had scared the fowls on the other side of the
partition. The loft had but a narrow slit, unglazed, close under the
eaves, to admit air and daylight. Jean crept to it, over the trusses of
hay, and peered out on the world. He could see nothing but clouds and a
few near trees wrapped in a foggy drizzle. Still the loose fusillade
went on.
“I don’t think it can be the battle,” he reported. “Philomène says that
battles always begin nowadays with the big guns, and this moreover
sounds half-hearted.”
He was right, too. The two or three trees visible in the mist were the
outposts of a plantation which straggled up to the entrance of the
village. Beyond this plantation lay two regiments that, like the rest of
the army, had marched and bivouacked in mud and rain. At dawn they had
been ordered to clean their small arms, and since the readiest way to
make sure of a musket is to fire off the charge, they had been directed
to do so, by companies.
In an interval of this fusillade the children caught the sound of
someone moving in the kitchen below, lighting the fire. Jean crept from
his window-slit to the hatchway of the loft and called down softly,
“Maman!”
The good woman of the cottage answered, bidding him go back to bed
again. His mother was not in the house, but had been called during the
night to visit a cottage some way up the road.
“That will be Antoine’s mother,” whispered Pauline, who had crept over
the hay to Jean’s side. “Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked aloud.
“It is twins,” said the good woman. “Now lie down and be sensible, you
two.”
“But where is papa?”
“Down at the château, doubtless. But God knows. He was here a little
before midnight, and left again meaning to spend the night there. Now I
have told you what I know.”
The two crept back to their lairs, and lay very obediently until the
good woman called up that coffee was ready. They hurried down the
ladder, washed their hands and faces at the pump outside, and returned
to the meal. There was coffee and a very savoury pottage in which they
dipped great slices of bread. The woman was kind to them, having no
children of her own. Her husband (she said) was somewhere in the
plantation, felling trees with the troops. He had gone out long before
dawn with a lantern, because he knew the best trees and could lead the
pioneers to them in the dark.
Jean, having breakfasted until his small belly was tight as a drum, felt
a new courage in his veins, and a great curiosity. He proposed to
Pauline in a whisper that they should run down together to the château
and see how papa was getting on, and Philomène.
“She will scold, though,” objected Pauline.
“Oh!” said Jean. “Philomène’s scolding!”
They ran out into the back garden. “That is right,” the woman called
after them. “You can play there more safely than in the road. But be
sensible now; if they should begin firing——”
It was not difficult to slip through the tumble-down fence. On the far
side of it the children struck a footpath which ran down across a
rye-field to the plantation. The rain had ceased, and above the rye many
larks were singing, though the clouds hung grey and heavy. The loose
firing, too, had ceased. Trees and the backs of a few cottages on their
left, denser woodland ahead of them, circumscribed the view here. Not a
soldier was in sight. There was nothing to be heard save the larks’
chorus.
“But, of course,” exclaimed Pauline, recollecting, “it is Sunday. People
do not fight on Sunday.”
“Are you sure?” asked Jean, with a touch of disappointment. “If it were
an ordinary Sunday the church bell would be ringing before now.”
“That is M. le Curé’s cunning. With so many soldiers about, his church
would be suffocated if he called attention——”
“But where are the soldiers?” demanded Jean.
They went down the path, which was narrow and slippery with mire,
between walls of rye that, when brushed against, shook down the golden
rain in showers. Jean led, with Pauline at his heels. They reached the
plantation and entered it by a low gap. The wood being of beech, there
was no undergrowth to wet their legs; but the boughs dripped. The
plantation ended at a bank overhanging a paved road, and down this bank
they scrambled without difficulty.
The pavement ran down the middle of the road, and they followed this,
avoiding the slush which lined it on either side. The ruts here were
prodigious. In fact, the children, who had driven the cattle up this
road a few hours ago, found it almost unrecognisable.
They now heard sounds of wood-cutters’ axes, creaking timber, men’s
voices—foreign voices, and at an angle of the road came on a sudden
glimpse of scarlet. The avenue to the château turned off from the
high-road just here; and just beyond the turning a company of British
red-coats were completing an abattis, breast-high, of lopped trees
criss-crossed and interlaced with beech-boughs.
An officer caught sight of the children as they stood hesitating, and
warned them sharply to go back.
“But we have a message for our father, who is the gardener yonder,”
spoke up Jean, with a jerk of his thumb towards the château.
“Well, you can give it to the sentry at the gate, if he’ll take it. But
be quick!”
The children darted up the avenue between the poplars. At the entrance
gate, which stood open, sure enough they found a red-coat posted.
“We bring a message for our father, who is the gardener here,” said
Jean, hardily.
The sentinel made him repeat it, and answered in execrable French.
“Well, I suppose there is no harm in letting you carry it, if the
message is urgent. Your father’s somewhere in the garden; I saw him pass
that way a minute ago. But you must promise to be back within five
minutes.”
“Lord, now,” added the sentry, smiling down at them, “I left just such a
pair as you at home, not two months ago. I’d be sorry, much as I love
them, to see them anyways here.”
“I like that man,” said Pauline, as she and Jean passed into the yard.
The place was empty, save for two soldiers—Lunsbrugers—in green uniform,
who were carrying a bench from the chapel towards the small gate of the
garden.
“But we have no message for papa,” said Pauline, “unless we tell him
that Antoine’s mother has twins.”
“And he won’t be in a hurry to hear that.” Just then a dull noise
sounded afar to the southward, and the ground seemed to shake a little.
“We will first seek Philomène.”
He had hardly spoken the words when something screamed in the air above
and struck the edge of the stable-steps with a terrific crash. The
children, frightened out of their lives, dashed for the ladder of the
pigeon-house—the nearest solid object to which they could cling. Across
the smoke, as they clung and turned, they saw the sentry very coolly
shutting the gate. Four or five green-coats ran out of the chapel to
help him, but paused a moment as a second and a third shot whistled wide
overhead. Then they rushed forward, heads down, to the gate, which was
quickly shut and barred. They had not seen the children, who now,
climbing up the ladder, stayed not until they had squeezed through the
square hole of the platform and crawled into the pigeon-house, where
they lay panting.
[Illustration: “They had not seen the children, who now, climbing up the
ladder, stayed not until they had squeezed through the square hole of
the platform” (page 170).]
It was, of course, quite foolish to seek shelter here. For the moment
they would have been far safer in the courtyard below, under the lee of
the outbuildings. A ball, striking the pigeon-house, would knock it to
shivers at one blow. But they had climbed in pure panic, and even now,
without any excuse of reason, they felt more secure here.
As a matter of fact the danger was lessening, for with these first shots
the artillery to the southward, beyond the trees, had been finding its
range and now began to drop its fire shorter, upon the garden below the
château. Through their pigeon-holes Jean and Pauline overlooked almost
the whole stretch of the garden, the foot of which along the brick wall
was closely lined with soldiers—tall red-coats for the most part, with
squads of green-jackets here and there and a sprinkling of men who
carried yellow knapsacks. They had broken down the cups of the
buttresses during the night and laid planks from buttress to buttress,
forming a platform that ran the entire length of the wall. Along this
platform a part of the defenders stood ready with bayonets fixed in
their muskets, which they rested for the moment on the brick coping;
others knelt on the flower border close beneath the platform watching at
apertures where a few bricks had been knocked out. There were green
jackets and yellow, too, in the grove beyond, posted here and there
behind the breech-holes—a line of them pushed forward to a hedge on the
left—with a line of retreat left open by a small doorway.
This was all that Jean and Pauline could see of the defence; and even
this they took in hurriedly, for the round shot by now was sweeping the
garden terraces and ploughing through the flower-beds. It still passed
harmlessly over the wall and the soldiery lining it; and the children
could see the men turn to watch the damage and grin at one another
jocosely. Pauline wondered at their levity; for the hail under which
they stood and the whistling noise of it, the constant throbbing of
earth and air and the repeated heavy thuds upon the terrace were enough
to strike terror into anyone.
She cried “O—oh!” as a tall orange-tree fell, shorn through as easily as
a cabbage stump.
But Jean dragged at her arm. Between the tree tops in a gap of the smoke
that hung and drifted beyond the wood—which dipped southward with the
lie of the slope and fined away there to an acute angle—the enemy
batteries, or two of them, were visible, shooting out fresh wings of
smoke on the sullen air, and on a rising ground beyond, dense masses of
infantry, with squadrons of horsemen moving and taking up position.
Flags and pennons flickered, and from moment to moment, as a troop
shifted ground, quick rivulets of light played across lines of cuirasses
and helmets. Tens—hundreds—of thousands were gathered there and
stretched away to the left (the trees were lower to the left and gave a
better view); and the object of this tremendous concourse, as it
presented itself to Jean—all to descend upon the château and swallow up
this thin line of men by the garden wall. To him, as to Pauline, this
home of theirs meant more than the capital, being the centre of their
world; and of other preparations to resist the multitude opposite they
could see nothing.
Jean wondered why, seeing it was so easy, the great masses hung on the
slope and refrained from descending to deliver the blow.
By and by that part of the main body which stood facing the angle where
the wood ended threw out, as it were by a puff, a cloud of little
figures to left and right, much like two swarms of bees; and these two
dark swarms, each as it came on in irregular order, expanding until
their inner sides melted together and made one, descended under cover of
their artillery to the dip, where for a few minutes Jean lost sight of
them.
In less than a minute the booming of the heavy guns ceased, and their
music was taken up by a quick crackle of small arms on both sides of the
wood. The line of defenders by the hedge shook, wavered, broke and came
running back, mingling with their supporters posted behind the
beech-boles; under whose cover they found time to reload and fire again,
dodging from tree to tree. But still as it dodged the whole body of men
in the wood was being driven backward and inward from both sides upon
the small door admitting to the garden. At this point the crush was
hidden by the intervening wall. The children could only see the thin
trickle of men, as after jostling without they escaped back through the
doorway. But across the wall could now be seen the first of the
assailants closing in among the beech-trunks. A line of red jackets,
hitherto hidden, sprang forward—as it were from the base of the wall on
the far side—to cover the route. But they were few and seemed doomed to
perish when——
Whirr-rh! Over the children’s heads, from somewhere behind the château,
a shell hissed, plunged into the trees right amongst the assailants, and
exploded. It was followed by another, another, and yet another. The
whole air screamed with shells as the earth shook again with their
explosions. But the marvel was the accuracy with which they dropped,
plump among trees through which the assailants crowded—white-breasted
regiments of the line, blue-coated, black-gaitered, sharpshooters
closing in on their flanks. The edge of this ring within thirty seconds
was a semicircle of smoke and flame along which, as globe after globe
fell and crashed, arms tossed, bodies leapt and pitched back
convulsively; while even two hundred yards nearer at most, the knot of
defenders stood unscathed.
Within five minutes—so deadly was the play of these unseen howitzers—not
a blue-coat stood anywhere in sight. A few wounded could be seen
crawling away to shelter. The rest of the front and second lines lay in
an irregular ring, and behind it the assault, which had swept so close
up to the wall, melted clean away. Amid hurrahs the streams of green and
yellow jackets, which had been pouring in at the entry, steadied itself
and began to pour forth again to reoccupy the wood, gaily encouraged by
the tall red-coats on the platform. The hail of shells ceased as
suddenly as it had begun.
In the lull Jean found tune to look below him, then through another
pigeon-hole which faced the gateway he saw his father crossing the yard
with a red-coated officer who was persuading him to leave it.
“Philomène!” shouted the gardener.
The serving-woman came forth from the doorway of the house, bearing a
large basin. She emptied it into a sink beside the steps, and what she
poured was to appearance a bowlful of blood.
“We are to go, it seems,” called the gardener. “They will try again, and
the likes of us will be shot as having no business here.”
“No business?” called back Philomène. “I don’t remember when I had so
much.” She disappeared into the house.
“Papa!” shrilled Jean, and pushed Pauline out towards the platform. “For
your life, quick!”
“But the ladder has gone!” gasped Pauline.
It was true. Jean shouted to his father again, but the scream of a
belated shell overhead drowned his young voice. Someone had removed the
ladder. Before he could call again his father had passed out and the
sentry, under the officer’s instructions, was barring the gate.