With Joffre at Verdun: A Story of the Western Front

by F. S. Brereton

"And in any case one needn't fire into our fellows," responded Jules, his face still smarting from the blow that Max had dealt him. "But listen, Henri; if I get a chance I'll kill that fellow. Better still, if I get a chance I'll capture the brute, and carry him back to our lines, where he can be tried for offering violence to prisoners. Crikey! How wobbly a fellow feels! My feet are too big and too clumsy for anything."

It was a sorry band which obeyed the peremptory order of the bullying German. Men staggered across the littered floor of that hall, steering their way between fallen blocks of masonry and wounded men damaged by the explosion of Henri's making. Passing through the exit, they clambered over the bodies of the fallen Germans who lay thickly at the foot of the stairway, and across the bodies, too, of many a gallant Frenchman. Then, directed by the bullying Max, they climbed the stairway or went along the gallery, and presently were manning the embrasures through which the guns of the fortress of Douaumont—when it was indeed a fortress—commanded the surrounding country. Flashes could be seen through those embrasures—flashes close at hand, and others farther distant—while the air was torn and rent by the crash of distant guns, by the detonation of exploding shells, and by the sharp snap and rattle of musketry. There were yells, too—shouts of terror from the Brandenburgers, now being driven back towards the fortress, and the bellows of excited and triumphant men wresting ground from them.

"Keep an eye round you," Henri told Jules, for the two were posted at one embrasure, and no one else was in the chamber. "What's to prevent a fellow lowering himself from this point and joining our fellows? A rope is what is wanted, but it's a plaguey thing to find in such a place and at such a moment. Hold on here, Jules, while I go skirmishing."

Staggering away from his comrade, Henri reached the head of the stairway and clambered down it, leaning against the side wall with both hands, for his feet were terribly uncertain. Then, reaching the gallery below, he turned along it, and in a little while, was within easy reach of the hall in which he and Jules had been lying, when suddenly the noise outside increased. There was a rush of steps somewhere near at hand, a crashing explosion as a bomb was thrown through an embrasure somewhere beyond him, and then a torrent of figures poured into the place—a torrent of gesticulating, shouting Frenchmen, of gallant Bretons, who had won their way to the western edge of the fortress. Lamps appeared, and flaring torches too were brought in by the soldiers, who at once proceeded to search that part of Douaumont.

In a dream, as it were, shaken by what he had gone through, and overcome somewhat by the sight and sound of friends, Henri had tumbled to the floor again, as he heard an officer give vent to a sharp order.

"Drive the fellows on before you as far as you can," he shouted, "then build up barricades across every corridor and gallery, and hold them off till we can get more men in here and drive them out of the fortress altogether. Bomb them, mes enfants! Blow them out of the place! Douaumont belongs to France, and not to the Kaiser."

Yes, in a dream, Henri heard the words, and tried to raise his shaken figure, tried his utmost to join them; and in a dream, too, he watched the Bretons as they moved rapidly about and obeyed those orders. It was perhaps a quarter of an hour later, perhaps only a few minutes, but more likely half an hour after their first appearance, that, still in the same hazy sort of way, still somewhat in dreamland, his head whirling and his ears singing, Henri became aware of a strange fact, a fact, however, which hardly struck him as peculiar at that moment, that a man not far from him—one of those corpses stretched in the gallery and illuminated by a torch thrust into a crevice of the masonry not far away—was moving, was lifting his head craftily, was creeping along over other bodies, and was peering round corners and watching the Bretons.

"Strange!" thought Henri. "What on earth can the fellow be doing? And—Christopher! He's not a Frenchman!"

That indeed was a peculiar thing; and, still in the same dazed sort of way, Henri watched and wondered.

"Not a Frenchman," he was telling himself, "then a German, and I don't know—yes, I do believe I know—the figure. Small, eh? Dressed in field-grey, yet not the usual sort of uniform. Who is he? What is the fellow? Well, I never!"