Downstairs in the hall Sir William, with a very grave face, was reading to his son and daughter, out of the newspaper which he had brought over from Bury, the belated and scanty news of the irretrievable disaster which had overtaken the Vendean army at Le Mans twelve days before.
“Practically cut to pieces,” he summed up, finishing. “Good God, how shall we tell them!”
CHAPTER XLV
THERMOPYLÆ
“Ah, not in vain, although in vain.
. . . . . .
The hours ebb fast of this one day
When blood may yet be nobly shed.”
—A. H. Clough, Peschiera.
It was not yet dawn. In the darkness of the Bois des Amourettes (the name held a horrible irony), huddled together for warmth, wet to the skin with the frozen rain, worn out with hunger and with the long retreat from Normandy, all that the terrible catastrophe at Le Mans had left of the Vendean host waited for the dawn and death. Eighty thousand souls, men, women, and children, they had crossed the Loire sixty-five days ago; a bare six thousand now remained to die in this corner of Brittany, hemmed in between two rivers and the sea.
To-morrow, which they should never see, was Christmas Eve. Yesterday morning, with the Republicans on their heels, they had marched into the little town of Savenay; last night they had taken up their stand on the rising ground above it, and all through the hours of darkness, like birds of prey, the legions of the Republic had gathered, twenty thousand strong, under great names, Marceau, Tilly, Westermann, Kléber, to exterminate the forlorn remnant of a once victorious foe. And they, too, waited for the dawn. . . .