Thrifty Stock, and Other Stories

by Ben Ames Williams

VI

It is certain, my friends, that I have failed to give you any comprehensive picture of the life of this poor regiment during the years of its isolation. It is impossible for you, who have always been well fed and comfortable, to imagine the hunger, the cold, the loneliness, the misery. Some of you have faced peril, perhaps for hours on end. But these men, gentlemen, faced death for years on end. There was never a moment when their lives were secure. They were like the animals in the forest about them; they slept fitfully; they squatted on their haunches while they ate, and were alert to spring to their feet at the least alarm. They subsisted on berries, on nuts, on uncooked grain pilfered from the fields which the Germans forced the peasants to cultivate; they snared rabbits, they were able, now and then, to kill larger game. And when desperation drove them, they attacked the Germans and wrested food from them at price of blood.

This existence was at best an ordeal; and when the Germans found time to try to hunt them down, it became torment. Regiments encircled them, beating through the woods, searching every brake and gully and ravine. Dogs tracked them, baying on their trails; their footprints in the snow, bloody and stumbling, led their pursuers through the forest. At one time, one of the little German princelings gave great sport to his friends by organizing a hunt for these men as he would have organized a hunt for the wild boars. When the beaters overcame a Frenchman, they took his weapons and let him go, and then the princeling and his friends charged the unarmed man with levelled lance, and ran him through.

The Frenchmen spoiled this sport by a stubborn refusal to run before the horses. Robbed of their weapons, they stood erect and faced their foe and took the steel in their breasts, so that the princeling was furious, and those with him were shamed, and the sport was broken off....

Of such things as this was existence for these men....

But I have been unjust in failing, before this, to speak of the peasants who helped them. Word of this regiment had gone abroad through the forest and the mountains. And wherever they went, they were welcomed, and given food, and shelter, and clothed.... And the peasants brought recruits to them, and brought them warnings, and information. They made endurance possible....

It was the peasants, in the end, who brought the word to Jacques Fontaine that told him his hour had come to strike. They came and they said the great battle to the southward was rolling nearer every day. This was at the time, you understand, when we had begun to push the German back; it was at the time when he was giving way each time a little more easily than the time before. We advanced one mile today, two miles tomorrow, three the day after....

And the word of this was abroad among the peasants in that part of France and of Belgium which the German still held. They were fermenting, as though these rumors of approaching liberation had been yeast cast among them....

They came, and they told Jacques Fontaine. And Jacques Fontaine, and wry-necked Lupec, cast about them to find a task for their hands.

The Germans were making up their mind, at this time, to draw back to a new defensive line, where, they counted on being able to hold us at last. And they were withdrawing slowly, a little here, and a little there, and a little yonder, day by day. Behind them they left a ruined country, every house destroyed, every fruit tree cut off at the roots.... But they were going back and back....

There was one line of railroad, along which the trains were pounding, day by day; and this line ran north and south past the fringe of the forest and the mountains where Jacques Fontaine and his regiment were hiding. The regiment was scattered, groups of four men and five and six dwelt here and there among the ravines. But when Jacques Fontaine and Lupec had considered, and had secretly scouted back and forth, and had decided upon what they wished to do, they sent runners to gather the regiment together.

There was a spot where the railroad line which the Germans were burdening so heavily crossed a little stream. On the north bank of this stream, and overlooking the bridge which spanned it, there rose a rocky hillock; and this hillock was topped by one of those ancient, ruined chateaus which were the chief beauty of France before the war. On three sides, sheer precipices fell away from the walls of this old chateau; on the other side, the way of ascent was steep and hard.

A dozen men could hold this spot against an army, so long as cannon were not concerned in the affair. And Jacques Fontaine believed the Germans had other uses for their cannon at this time.

So he gathered his regiment, and drew them near the spot he had chosen, and waited his time to strike.

There was, you understand, a guard set about this bridge. But the guard was not strong, for a strong guard was not considered necessary. There were soldiers passing constantly, working slowly northward in the great retreat; and the long trains of stores and supplies crossed one after another, through every day.

It was like a river of men and of supplies; one of the rivers of war. And on a certain night, Jacques Fontaine dammed that river. His men swept down, they overwhelmed the guard upon the bridge.... And they fired the petard which the Germans had themselves laid, to destroy that bridge when their forces should be across. They fired the petard, and the bridge disappeared in a great flame of orange fire; and Jacques Fontaine and his men fell back swiftly into the night. When dawn came, they were all within the walls of the old chateau, high above the bridge, commanding it. And when the German pioneers swarmed out to repair the bridge, Jacques and his men began to fire.

They swept the pioneers away, for they were marksmen, all. They had been trained for four years never to waste a cartridge; that was the thrift of Jacques Fontaine. And they wasted none now. They did not use the two machine guns. Those were reserved to repel the attack that was sure to come. They used their rifles, and they strove to make every bullet take its toll.

A troop train came north in the morning, and the Germans flung the men against the old chateau, up the steep path. The Frenchmen slaughtered them; they built a barricade of German bodies before the very muzzles of their guns. And more trains came, and were held up by the destroyed bridge. The dammed river began to rise, and grumble, and fret and fume.... The pioneers, down by the ruined bridge, strove fruitlessly under the hail of balls.

The second day, the Germans brought guns to bear. At first, there was only shrapnel, and it spattered harmlessly. But after that came high explosive; and each great shell, detonating amid the ruined walls of the chateau, turned every stone and pebble into a missile that swept to right and left and all about in a storm of death.

When three hundred men are huddled in a narrow area, a single shell will kill half of them. This happened, on that day. An hour after the bombardment began, not a hundred men remained alive upon the top of the little peak; an hour after that, scarce fifty remained, ...

But while it was easy to kill the first hundred, and while it was not difficult to kill the second hundred, it was very hard indeed to complete the extermination of the force. A dozen men may live where a hundred would perish; and at noon, the riflemen in the ruins of the old chateau still kept the ruined bridge cleared of men and none could toil there.

By that time, the congestion on the southern bank of the river had become so great that that tide overflowed. And Jacques Fontaine, with a scarf bound around his chest to crush back the blood that was leaking from his great body, could see and hear the roar of the French guns, ten miles away, harassing the fleeing enemy....

By mid-afternoon, French shells began to fall amid the huddle on the southern bank of the river; and at nightfall, the Germans broke, there....

They broke; they poured across the stream, wading, swimming, drowning. They broke in flight to escape the merciless guns. And the French planes overhead till dark was fully fallen marked their going, and signalled the guns that harassed the fleeing men.

Before that, the Frenchmen had been silenced; the Frenchmen of Jacques Fontaine, in the old chateau. There were some few of them still unwounded; there were others who breathed and groaned as they slowly died. There were not enough of them to keep the bridge clear; but that duty no longer was required of them. They had held up a division, till the French armies could come up and rout it. And the Germans, flinging one last charge against the old chateau, drew off to the north and left Jacques Fontaine and his men, masters of the field.