It was a verbal message which he gave me, and I was to deliver it in person to the commandant of the battery at Raincy. It bore its fruit upon the 27th, when the cross-fire from Raincy and Noisy-le-Grand destroyed the new French fort upon Mount Avron in a snowstorm.
"There is a horse ready for you at the stables," said the Colonel, and with a nod he turned again to his scrap of paper. I saluted and walked to the door. As my hand was on the knob he called me back.
"What do you make of it?" he asked, holding the paper out to me. "It was picked out of the Marne in a sealed wine-bottle."
I took the paper, and saw that a single sentence was written upon it in a round and laborious hand with the words mis-spelt. The meaning of the sentence seemed simple enough. It was apparently a message from a M. Bonnet to his son in the Mobiles at Paris, and it stated that the big black sow had had a litter of fifteen.
"What do you make of it?" repeated the Colonel.
"Why, that M. Bonnet's black sow has farrowed fifteen," said I.
I handed the paper back. The Colonel looked at it again, shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.
"Well, after all, perhaps it does mean no more than that," said he.
But for the Colonel's suspicions I should not have given another thought to that mis-spelt scrawl. M. Bonnet was probably some little farmer engrossed in his pigs and cows, who thought that no message could be more consoling to his son locked up in Paris than this great news about the black sow. The Colonel's anxiety, however, fixed it for awhile in my mind.
The wildest rumours were flying about our camp at that time, as I think will always happen when you have a large body of men living under a great strain of cold and privation and peril. They perplexed the seasoned officers and they were readily swallowed by the youngsters, of whom I was one. Now, this scrap of paper happened to fit in with the rumour which most of all exercised our imaginations.