III
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.
“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.