The first night of his arrival he began it himself, and, under pretext
of examining the surrounding country, he went along the high road.
I must tell you that the little village which served as our fortress was
a small collection of poor, badly built houses, which had been deserted
long before. It lay on a steep slope, which terminated in a wooded
plain. The country people sell the wood; they send it down the slopes,
which are called coulees, locally, and which lead down to the plain,
and there they stack it into piles, which they sell thrice a year to the
wood merchants. The spot where this market is held in indicated by two
small houses by the side of the highroad, which serve for public houses.
The captain had gone down there by way of one of these coulees.
He had been gone about half an hour, and we were on the lookout at the
top of the ravine, when we heard a shot. The captain had ordered us not
to stir, and only to come to him when we heard him blow his trumpet. It
was made of a goat's horn, and could be heard a league off; but it gave
no sound, and, in spite of our cruel anxiety, we were obliged to wait in
silence, with our rifles by our side.
It is nothing to go down these coulees; one just lets one's self slide
down; but it is more difficult to get up again; one has to scramble up
by catching hold of the hanging branches of the trees, and sometimes on
all fours, by sheer strength. A whole mortal hour passed, and he did not
come; nothing moved in the brushwood. The captain's wife began to grow
impatient. What could he be doing? Why did he not call us? Did the shot
that we had heard proceed from an enemy, and had he killed or wounded
our leader, her husband? They did not know what to think, but I myself
fancied either that he was dead or that his enterprise was successful;
and I was merely anxious and curious to know what he had done.
Suddenly we heard the sound of his trumpet, and we were much surprised
that instead of coming from below, as we had expected, it came from the
village behind us. What did that mean? It was a mystery to us, but the
same idea struck us all, that he had been killed, and that the Prussians
were blowing the trumpet to draw us into an ambush. We therefore
returned to the cottage, keeping a careful lookout with our fingers on
the trigger, and hiding under the branches; but his wife, in spite of
our entreaties, rushed on, leaping like a tigress. She thought that she
had to avenge her husband, and had fixed the bayonet to her rifle, and
we lost sight of her at the moment that we heard the trumpet again; and,
a few moments later, we heard her calling out to us:
“Come on! come on! He is alive! It is he!”
We hastened on, and saw the captain smoking his pipe at the entrance of
the village, but strangely enough, he was on horseback.
“Ah! ah!” he said to us, “you see that there is something to be done
here. Here I am on horseback already; I knocked over an uhlan yonder,
and took his horse; I suppose they were guarding the wood, but it was
by drinking and swilling in clover. One of them, the sentry at the door,
had not time to see me before I gave him a sugarplum in his stomach, and
then, before the others could come out, I jumped on the horse and was
off like a shot. Eight or ten of them followed me, I think; but I took
the crossroads through the woods. I have got scratched and torn a bit,
but here I am, and now, my good fellows, attention, and take care! Those
brigands will not rest until they have caught us, and we must receive
them with rifle bullets. Come along; let us take up our posts!”
We set out. One of us took up his position a good way from the village
on the crossroads; I was posted at the entrance of the main street,
where the road from the level country enters the village, while the two
others, the captain and his wife, were in the middle of the village,
near the church, whose tower-served for an observatory and citadel.
We had not been in our places long before we heard a shot, followed by
another, and then two, then three. The first was evidently a chassepot
--one recognized it by the sharp report, which sounds like the crack of
a whip--while the other three came from the lancers' carbines.
The captain was furious. He had given orders to the outpost to let
the enemy pass and merely to follow them at a distance if they marched
toward the village, and to join me when they had gone well between the
houses. Then they were to appear suddenly, take the patrol between two
fires, and not allow a single man to escape; for, posted as we were, the
six of us could have hemmed in ten Prussians, if needful.
“That confounded Piedelot has roused them,” the captain said, “and they
will not venture to come on blindfolded any longer. And then I am quite
sure that he has managed to get a shot into himself somewhere or other,
for we hear nothing of him. It serves him right; why did he not obey
orders?” And then, after a moment, he grumbled in his beard: “After all
I am sorry for the poor fellow; he is so brave, and shoots so well!”
The captain was right in his conjectures. We waited until evening,
without seeing the uhlans; they had retreated after the first attack;
but unfortunately we had not seen Piedelot, either. Was he dead or a
prisoner? When night came, the captain proposed that we should go out
and look for him, and so the three of us started. At the crossroads we
found a broken rifle and some blood, while the ground was trampled down;
but we did not find either a wounded man or a dead body, although we
searched every thicket, and at midnight we returned without having
discovered anything of our unfortunate comrade.
“It is very strange,” the captain growled. “They must have killed him
and thrown him into the bushes somewhere; they cannot possibly have
taken him prisoner, as he would have called out for help. I cannot
understand it at all.” Just as he said that, bright flames shot up in
the direction of the inn on the high road, which illuminated the sky.
“Scoundrels! cowards!” he shouted. “I will bet that they have set fire
to the two houses on the marketplace, in order to have their revenge,
and then they will scuttle off without saying a word. They will be
satisfied with having killed a man and set fire to two houses. All
right. It shall not pass over like that. We must go for them; they will
not like to leave their illuminations in order to fight.”
“It would be a great stroke of luck if we could set Piedelot free at the
same time,” some one said.
The five of us set off, full of rage and hope. In twenty minutes we had
got to the bottom of the coulee, and had not yet seen any one when we
were within a hundred yards of the inn. The fire was behind the house,
and all we saw of it was the reflection above the roof. However, we were
walking rather slowly, as we were afraid of an ambush, when suddenly we
heard Piedelot's well-known voice. It had a strange sound, however; for
it was at the same time--dull and vibrating, stifled and clear, as if he
were calling out as loud as he could with a bit of rag stuffed into his
mouth. He seemed to be hoarse and gasping, and the unlucky fellow kept
exclaiming: “Help! Help!”
We sent all thoughts of prudence to the devil, and in two bounds we were
at the back of the inn, where a terrible sight met our eyes.