The Works of Guy de Maupassant Volume III Part 28

I

It was after Bourbaki's defeat in the East of France. The army, broken up, decimated and worn out, had been obliged to retreat into Switzerland, after that terrible campaign, and it was only the short time that it lasted, which saved a hundred and fifty thousand men from certain death. Hunger, the terrible cold, forced marches in the snow without boots, over bad mountainous roads, had caused us _francs-tireurs_ especially the greatest sufferings, for we were without tents and almost without food, always in front when we were marching towards Belfort, and in the rear, when returning by the Jura. Of our little band that had numbered twelve hundred men on the first of January, there remained only twenty-two pale, thin, ragged wretches, when we at length succeeded in reaching Swiss territory.

There we were safe and could rest. Everybody knows what sympathy was shown to the unfortunate French army, and how well it was cared for. We all gained fresh life, and those who had been rich and happy before the war, declared that they had never experienced a greater feeling of comfort than they did then. Just think. We actually had something to eat every day, and could sleep every night.

Meanwhile, the war continued in the East of France, which had been excluded from the armistice. Besancon still kept the enemy in check, and the latter had their revenge by ravaging the _Franche Comte_. Sometimes we heard that they had approached quite close to the frontier, and we saw Swiss troops, who were to form a line of observation between us and them, set out on their march.

That pained us in the end, and as we regained health and strength the longing for fighting laid hold of us. It was disgraceful and irritating to know that within two or three leagues of us, the Germans were victorious and insolent, to feel that we were protected by our captivity, and to feel that on that account we were powerless against them.

One day, our captain took five or six of us aside, and spoke to us about it, long and furiously. He was a fine fellow that captain. He had been a sub-lieutenant in the Zouaves, was tall and thin, and as hard as steel, and during the whole campaign he had cut out their work for the Germans.

He fretted in inactivity and could not accustom himself to the idea of being a prisoner and of doing nothing.

"Confound it!" he said to us, "does it not pain you to know that there is a number of Uhlans within two hours of us? Does it not almost drive you mad to know that those beggarly wretches are walking about as masters in our mountains, where six determined men might kill a whole spitful any day? I cannot endure it any longer, and I must go there."

"But how can you manage it, Captain?"

"How? It is not very difficult! Just as if we had not done a thing or two within the last six months, and got out of woods that were guarded by very different men from the Swiss. The day that you wish to cross over into France, I will undertake to get you there."

"That may be; but what shall we do in France without any arms?"

"Without arms? We will get them over yonder, by Jove!"

"You are forgetting the treaty," another soldier said; "we shall run the risk of doing the Swiss an injury, if Manteuffel learns that they have allowed prisoners to return to France."

"Come," said the captain, "those are all bad reasons. I mean to go and kill some Prussians; that is all I care about. If you do not wish to do as I do, well and good; only say so at once. I can quite well go by myself; I do not require anybody's company."

Naturally we all protested and as it was quite impossible to make the captain alter his mind, we felt obliged to promise to go with him. We liked him too much to leave him in the lurch, as he never failed us in any extremity; and so the expedition was decided on.

II

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 Gruyere 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 Gruyere 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 Gruyere 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 Cha.s.sepots; 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 Besancon 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 Besancon, where there were plenty of Cha.s.sepots. There were nearly forty thousand of them left in the a.r.s.enal, 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.

III

The first night of his arrival, he began it himself, and, under the pretext of examining the country round, 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 ravines, 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, is indicated by two small houses by the side of the high road, and which serve for public-houses. The captain had gone down there by one of these _coulees_.

He had been gone about half-an-hour, and we were on the look-out 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 out rifles by our side.

It is nothing to go down these _coulees_; one need only let oneself glide 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 pa.s.sed 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 look out, 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 a 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 sugar plum in his stomach, and then, before the others could come out, I jumped on to the horse and was off like a shot. Eight or ten of them followed me, I think, but I took the cross-roads 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 of the cross-roads; 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 cha.s.sepot; 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 pa.s.s and merely to follow them at a distance, if they marched towards 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 blindfold 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 cross-roads 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 all." Just as he said that, bright, red flames shot up in the direction of the inn on the high road, which illuminated the sky.

"Scoundrels! cowards!" he shouted. "I will bet they have set fire to the two houses on the market-place, 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 setting fire to two houses. All right. It shall not pa.s.s 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 we had not yet seen anyone, when we had got within a hundred yards of the inn. The fire was behind the house, and so all that we saw of it was the reflection above the roof.

However, we were walking rather slowly, as we were afraid of a trap, 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 was calling out as loud as he could with a bit of rag stuffed into his mouth. He seemed to be hoa.r.s.e and panting, 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.

IV

Piedelot was being burnt alive. He was writhing in the middle of a heap of f.a.gots, against a stake to which they had fastened him, and the flames were licking him with their sharp tongues. When he saw us, his tongue seemed to stick in his throat, he drooped his head, and seemed as if he were going to die. It was only the affair of a moment to upset the burning pile, to scatter the embers, and to cut the ropes that fastened him.

Poor fellow! In what a terrible state we found him. The evening before, he had had his left arm broken, and it seemed as if he had been badly beaten since then, for his whole body was covered with wounds, bruises, and blood. The flames had also begun their work on him, and he had two large burns, one on his loins, and the other on his right thigh, and his beard and his hair were scorched. Poor Piedelot!

n.o.body knows the terrible rage we felt at this sight! We would have rushed headlong at a hundred thousand Prussians. Our thirst for vengeance was intense but the cowards had run away, leaving their crime behind them. Where could we find them now? Meanwhile, however, the captain's wife was looking after Piedelot, and dressing his wounds as best she could, while the captain himself shook hands with him excitedly and in a few minutes he came to himself.