IV
The ladder which alone could help them to descend rested against the curtain of the gate, some two dozen yards away. Why it had been carried off to be planted there, or by whom, there was no guessing. Someone, maybe, had done it in a panic. For a moment it rested there idly: yet, as events proved, it had a purpose to serve.
A lull of twenty minutes ensued on the baffled first assault. But the French tirailleurs, beaten back from their direct attack on the wood, collected themselves on the edges of it, and began to play a new and more deadly game, creeping singly along the hedges and by the sunken ways, halting, gathering, pushing on again, gradually enclosing three sides of the walled enceinte. Against the abattis on the high-road they made a small demonstration as a feint. But the main rush came again through the wood and across an orchard to the left of it.
This time, for some reason, the deadly howitzers were silent. This time, after another roar of artillery fire, the defenders in the grove came pouring back with the black-gaitered men close upon them, intercepting and shooting them down by scores.
Then followed half an hour’s horrible work all along the garden wall; work of which (and they should have thanked Heaven for it) the children missed the worst, seeing only the red-coats jabbing across the wall and downwards with their bayonets; the riflemen at the loopholes firing, drawing back, pausing to re-load. The small door had been shut fast, and a dozen men held their weight against it.
Yells and firing sounded all the while from the orchard to the loft. But what was happening there the children could not see. An angle of the house cut off their view in that direction—cut off in fact, their view of the main field of battle, where charge after charge of cavalry was being launched against the few regiments holding a ridge to the left, close under which the château stood.
But for Jean and Pauline the whole fight was for the château—their home, and especially just now for the garden. It seemed incredible that a thin line of red-coats could hold the wall against such numbers as kept pouring up between the beech-boles. Yet minute after minute passed, and the wall was not carried.
Someone shouted close at hand from the gate. They turned that way, each choosing a peephole. A score of blue-coats had actually burst the gate open, and were carrying the courtyard with a rush. But, half-way, as many red-coats met them and swept them out at point of bayonet, forcing the double gate on their backs. Half a dozen others ran with beams to barricade it. Close beside it to the left a man topped the wall and straddled it with a shout of triumph; a red-coat fired slantwise from the pigeon-house ladder and he pitched writhing upon the cobbles. Shakos and heads bobbed up behind the coping whence he had dropped; but the yard now was full of soldiers (Heaven knew whence they had sprung) and so this assault too was driven back.
Shouts arose from the left of the house. Gradually, the assault here being baffled, the men drained off in that direction. The attack upon the wall, too, seemed to have eased. Then came another lull. Then the enemy’s artillery opened fire again, this time with shell. A tall officer stood against the wall, shouting an order, when the first shell dropped. When the smoke of the explosion cleared he was there no longer. There remained only what seemed to be his shadow. It was actually the streak of him beaten in blood upon the stucco.
This new cannonade was designed to set fire to the obstinate buildings, and very soon the roof broke into a blaze in two places. That of the chapel was the first to catch, at the western end. Many of the wounded had been carried there.
The pigeon-house stood intact. Not even a stray bullet had struck it. But now a new danger threatened the children and a surer one even than the fast dropping shells. Smoke from the blazing roof of the main building poured into every aperture of their hiding-place. They fought with it, striving to push it from them with hands that still grew feebler. Of a sudden it blotted out, not the battle only, but life itself for them.