Thrifty Stock, and Other Stories

by Ben Ames Williams

There were three spies in the regiment during those four years. The first was suspected and killed before he had reached the rendezvous. The second was detected on the third day when he stiffened at a barked command in German. The third, alone, was clever; he deceived them, he lived among them, he learned their plans, and when the chance came, he brought down a German force upon the rendezvous when almost the full command was there.

But Jaques Fontaine had never grown careless; he had made it a rule from the beginning to post twenty guards in a wide circle about the Ravine of the Cold Tooth when the regiment was assembled. And one of these guards escaped the attempt to overcome him, and gave warning just in time. The regiment flung out of the ravine, broke boldly through the jaws of the German trap, left half its strength in German hands ...

But the remnant escaped, and lived.

In the winter of 1915, this regiment was reduced to twenty-seven men. The next winter, at the time of the great hunt, when the men were tracked through the snow, they were cut down to fifty-four. The fall of 1917 was the time of the spy; and some seventy men went through that winter like the beasts, some of them nursing wounds for months on end. They stirred from their hiding places only once, and that was when they cut off a German patrol in which the spy rode, and took him from his comrades and hanged him to the beams of a barn.

They had been forced to leave the Ravine of the Cold Tooth, since the Germans knew that spot; they hid now under the shoulder of one of the little mountains. And there, that winter and the next spring, their numbers grew again....

They had ninety men in March; and the friendly peasants brought to them by devious ways soldiers of England and of France who were cut off in the great offensive of that year, so that in May they numbered a hundred and fifty men; and in June, close to two hundred.... And the Germans were too much concerned with other matters to divert so much as a regiment to run them down....

When in due time the hour came for them to fulfil their destiny, my friends, this regiment which Jacques Fontaine had kept alive numbered three hundred and ninety men, with rifles for all, and two machine guns, and cartridges to feed those clamoring things.... And Jacques prepared to strike his blow for France.

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.