It was a bitter sight for Georges, burning to defend his country. What
was the French army good for, anyway, if it couldn’t protect this
pretty, innocent little town, so charmingly scattered over the wooded
heights of the Meuse? But Mouzon was doomed. Already the sappers with
wires and sticks of melinite were blowing up the picturesque old stone
bridge.
All next day Georges’s regiment, hidden in the woods, watched the
shelling of the town; all next night, hungry, soaked with rain,
enraged, they saw it burn, house by house, till at last the flames
licked up the belfry of the church. That was the way they defended
Mouzon.
Another day; another night of drenching rain in those wretched sopping
woods, while the German guns boomed all about them. Georges and two
other boys succeeded in building a dirty little shelter of branches
covered with wet straw, and they crawled underneath. Water-soaked, the
clumsy thing collapsed on top of them in the middle of the night; but,
heavy with soldiers’ sleep, it took more than that to wake them. In the
morning, however, a shell bursting only a few yards away did succeed in
bringing them stumbling out from under the soggy mass—to find to their
amazement that their regiment had already departed!