Thrifty Stock, and Other Stories

by Ben Ames Williams

Their commissioned officers were dead, gentlemen; but there was an under officer in that regiment named Jacques Fontaine. He was a big man, a farmer; and he was a very serious and practical and thrifty man. Also, he knew that country, and many of the men of the regiment were his neighbors, and all of them knew him for what he was.

Therefore it seemed natural that he should take the command that night. He called to a man named Lupec, and spoke with him. This Lupec was a little, wry-necked man, as shrewd as a fox. And Lupec advised Jacques Fontaine, and the big farmer shouted aloud to the panting men of the regiment, where they stood about him in the red trousers and the blue coats that had made our army so vulnerable in that first rush of war. He looked about him, and he shouted to them....

He bade them strip cartridges and rifles from the dead; and he told them to take what provisions they could find. And when this was done, they were to scatter, and rendezvous the next night but one in a certain ravine which all that country knew.

This ravine was in the heart of the forest. It was well hidden; it might be defended. There was water in it; and there were farms upon the borders of the forest where food might be had.

When, a little before dawn, a German force came back and descended upon them, the men melted before it like the morning mists before the sun; and the Germans did not know what to do, so they made camp, and cooked, and ate, and slept. And the men of the regiment made their way, singly, and by twos and threes, through the forest toward the ravine that was the rendezvous.

This spot was called in your tongue, gentlemen, the Ravine of the Cold Tooth.

III

Now modern warfare, gentlemen, is a curious and inconsistent thing. It is vast, and yet it is minute.

This battered regiment, added to the French armies at that moment, would have been of small account. A burst of shrapnel, a mine, an unimportant counter thrust might have accounted for them all. Their weight in an attack would have been inconsiderable.

But this regiment which did not know how to surrender, and which was at large behind the German lines, was another matter, my friends. It was worth well nigh a division to France. For an army is as vulnerable as it is vast, gentlemen; and it can do only one thing at a time.