"Poor dear women! You want bread, and how do you expect me to give you any? There is not a single grain of wheat in the city granary. But we are hourly expecting Captain Mirant's brigantines. They bring from England a cargo of powder, and from Brittany a cargo of wheat. They are anchored only eight leagues from here, near the coast, at the port of Redon. They cannot, in the absence of a favorable wind, run into La Rochelle. The chances are a hundred to one that the adverse wind, which has been blowing all these days, will change. It may change almost at any moment. It may be changing now. If it does, the city will again be supplied for several months. For the present, there is left to us a precious resource, so far neglected—the clams and oysters. We must turn our hands to that. You understand me?"
"Mayor! Do you know that it is now as dangerous to go out for clams as to march upon a battery?" answered the Bombarde. "To go out for clams is to run into the jaws of death!"
"I know it—and if the brigantines of Captain Mirant do not run into port to-day, my wife and two daughters will go out with you to-night, at one in the morning, when the tide will be low, and dig for clams," was Morrisson's stoic reply.
"It will be done! Count upon us, Mayor!" replied the Bombarde. "If the brigantines of Captain Mirant do not arrive before night, we shall put up with hunger until night—and then we shall go out and dig for clams. Those of us who will be killed on the banks will no longer need anything. That is agreed upon, in God's name!"
As the Bombarde was uttering these last words, the detonations of several discharges of artillery that shattered the window panes in the City Hall announced the enemy was about to renew the cannonade which it had suspended in the morning. Almost at the same instant the sonorous sound of clarion blasts was heard drawing nearer and nearer, and presently a large number of women of all conditions, marching at the heels of a pastor on a white horse, ahead of which marched the clarion-blower, turned into Caille Square.
"To the ramparts, my sisters! To the ramparts!" shouted the pastor with martial exaltation. "The Lord of Hosts will steel your arms! Your husbands, your fathers, your brothers and your sons are battling for the triumph of liberty. Come to their help! To the ramparts! To the ramparts! The enemy is about to storm the Bastion of the Evangelium! Long live the Commune!"
"To the ramparts, my brave women! And to-night, after clams on the banks, as perilous an expedition as battle itself!" cried Morrisson, while the Bombarde and her companions, joining the other crowd of Rochelois women, repeated in chorus the following psalm, led by the pastor:
| "O, Lord do guide these feeble women, |
| With souls ablaze, inflamed as strong men! |
| Break our foes like Oreb! |
| Break them like proud Zeeb! |
| Throw down those wicked kings and princes, |
| Who in their fury, and their ire, |
| Laugh at our tears and distress dire, |
| Who devastate our glad provinces! |
| Who are as a torrent wildly boiling, |
| A tempest, wildly rushing, rolling, |
| A hurricane, impetuous driven, |
| The tops of haughty mountains lashes, |
| A hellish flame that turns to ashes, |
| The rooks by lightning struck and riven! |
| "May, Oh, Lord! the storm of Thy wrath |
| Strew Thy foes away from our path! |
| May, Oh, Lord! Thy thunders and fire, |
| Smite Thy foes! Oh, smite with Thy ire!" |
The Bastion of the Evangelium, upon which the enemy had long been concentrating all their forces, formed a sharply protruding angle. Its flanks were not sufficiently protected by other works of defense. Accordingly, by directing against the left flank of the bastion the fire of their principal batteries, the enemy had opened a breach in the rampart by the repeated pounding of their shots. At the place where the breach was effected, the upper part of the earthworks, to a width of about fifty feet, crumbled down into the moat, filling it up so fully as to render an assault practicable. Thanks to this mass of debris which answered the purpose of a bridge, the assailants could cross the fosse on a run, could scale the last steps of the last wall already laid in ruins, and could enter the city, provided they could bear down the defenders who stood in the breach. From the top of the bastion the eye swept the plain far and wide. A cannon-shot off, the long line of the enemy's trenches could be seen, stretching from the suburb of St. Eloi on the edge of the salt marshes, to the suburb of Colombier. That line bounded the field from end to end; it intercepted the roads to Limoges and Nantes at the crossings of which the batteries were erected which broke a breach through the bastion. The whole stretch between the trenches of the besiegers and the fortifications of the city—one time covered with trees and houses—now lay bare, exposed, devastated, and deeply furrowed by the projectiles. Beyond the desert waste, lay the enemy's entrenchments—earthworks strengthened with gabions and trunks of trees, and here and there crenelated with the embrasures for their batteries. Behind that line of earthworks, the tops of the officers' tents, surmounted with bannerets and floating pennants, could be seen. Finally, on the extreme horizon rose the undulating and woody hills. The breach once made, the Catholics suspended their fire in order to open it again shortly before marching to the assault. It was in answer to the thunder of the cannonade, which announced an imminent and decisive attack, that the old pastor crossed the square of the City Hall at the head of his bevy of Rochelois women, recruited the Bombarde and her companions, and wended his course to the Bastion of the Evangelium. At that place about one-half of the defenders of La Rochelle were gathered, ready for a stubborn conflict. The other troops, distributed in other places, were to be on the alert to repel other attacks. The Council of defense foresaw that the enemy, while hurling one column against the breach, would undoubtedly attempt a simultaneous assault upon other places; consequently women were commissioned to close up the breach as best they might with logs of wood and other material. Colonel Plouernel, upon whom the defense of the bastion that day devolved, and Captain Gargouillaud, in charge of the artillery, gave their last orders. The bourgeois cannoniers were pointing their pieces in advance upon the open and absolutely exposed ground which the royalists had to cross when they sallied from their trenches in order to reach the opposite side of the fosse where the breach was effected. The breach was wide; nevertheless, before they could reach the parapet, the besiegers would have to clamber over a heap of debris ten or eleven feet high, on the top of which a redoubtable engine of defense was mounted, and placed in charge of the women of La Rochelle. This engine of war, an invention of Master Barbot the boilermaker, received the name of the censer. It consisted of a huge copper basin, holding a ton, suspended from iron chains at the end of a long beam that revolved upon an axis, and was so adjusted to a post firmly set in the ground, that by means of a slight motion imparted to the beam, the huge caldron would empty upon the heads of the assailants the deadly fluid that it was filled with, to wit, a mixture of boiling tar, sulphur and oil. A number of Rochelois women, Theresa Rennepont and Cornelia my betrothed among them, were busy either keeping up the fire under the copper basin, or pouring into it the oil, tar and sulphur from little kegs that lay near at hand. With her sleeves rolled back above her elbows, and leaving her strong white arms exposed, Cornelia stirred the steaming mixture with an iron rod supplied with a wooden handle. Master Barbot—his head covered with an iron morion, his chest protected with a brigandine, and his cutlass and dagger by his side—leaned upon the barrel of his arquebus and smiled complacently upon his invention. From time to time he would address the women and girls at work.
"Courage, my brave girl!" he said to Cornelia. "Mix up the oil well with the tar and sulphur. Make the mixture thick, soft, and toothsome, like those omelettes made of eggs, flour and cheese that you are so skilled in dishing up, and which your good father and myself relish so much! But the devil take those dainty thoughts! In these days of dearth one may deem himself happy if he but have a handful of beans. By the way of famine and of your father—the heavy clouds that are rising yonder in the south almost always announce a change of wind. Mayhap we shall see this very day the brigantines of Captain Mirant, loaded with wheat and powder, sailing before the wind into port, every inch of sail spread to the breeze, and successfully running the gauntlet of the royalist guns. Long live the Commune!"