After these moments of excitement he would fall exhausted against the wall of the tower, and murmur—"Some bread; oh, only a morsel of bread!"
Materne's two sons, crouched in the brushwood, their carbines at their shoulders, seemed to expect the passage of some game which never arrived. Their ceaseless watching alone sustained their expiring strength.
Others, bent double with pain, were shivering with cold, and yet were burning with fever: they reproached Jean-Claude with having brought them to the Falkenstein.
Hullin, with a superhuman force of character, still went and came, observing what took place in the neighboring valleys, but without saying anything.
Occasionally he would advance to the edge of the rock, and with his massive jaws clinched and shining eyes, looked at Yégof, seated before a large fire, on the plains of Bois-de-Chênes, in the midst of a band of Cossacks. Since the arrival of the Germans in the valley of the Charmes, the madman had never quitted his post, but appeared to be watching the agony of his victims.
Such was the position of these unfortunate people beneath the open heaven.
In the gloom of a prison the torture of hunger is doubtless frightful, but in the broad light of day, in the eyes of a whole country, in face of all the resources of nature, its sufferings are beyond all description.
At the close of the nineteenth day, between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, the weather was gloomy; large gray clouds rose behind the snowy summit of the Grosmann; the red sun, like a ball of fire, threw a few last rays into the misty horizon. The silence on the rock was unbroken. Louise no longer gave signs of life; Kasper and Frantz remained among the bushes immovable as stones; Catherine Lefèvre, crouching on the earth, her skinny arms clasped round her pointed knees, with hard, rigid features, her hair hanging over her clammy cheeks, looked like some old sibyl seated in the heather. She had ceased speaking. That evening, Hullin, Jérome, old Materne, and Doctor Lorquin gathered themselves around the old farm-mistress to die. They were silent, and the last rays of twilight fell upon the wretched group. To the right, behind a jutting rock, a few German watch-fires sparkled in the abyss. Suddenly the old dame, rousing from her dreams, began to murmur some unintelligible words.
"Divès is coming," said she, in a low voice. "I see him. He goes out from the door to the right of the arsenal. Gaspard follows him, and——"
Then she began to count.