The man staggered. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothing torn and tattered after the explosion, with one arm swinging loose in its sleeve. He looked at this peremptory officer in dazed fashion. Indeed, like Henri and Jules, he had been more than half stunned, and his wits were still wool-gathering.
"Seize a rifle! Go to a loophole, eh?" he ejaculated.
"Fool! Yes! Fight—fight for your life; fight for your Fatherland!" Max shouted at him. "Here—here's a rifle," he went on, tearing one from beneath the body of a fallen soldier, and handing it to him. "Now off with you, at once!"
"At once? Fight at once?" the man stammered, while those who watched, even in that fitful light—for the fire built by the officer in the far corner was still burning—noticed that a dribble of blood was oozing from the corner of his lips, "but, sir——" he began.
"No 'buts'!" bellowed Max at him; "to your duty!"
The man gripped weakly at the rifle, turned obediently to carry out the order, and then, staggering a pace or two, fell full length on the floor.
"Bah! A bad choice then! Well, one makes mistakes," Max said, a grim smile on his face. "But you," he called, selecting another individual seated on the ground, his back resting against the wall—a man whose pallid face told that he was suffering—"you get up and go about your duty."
As if determined that there should be no error and no backsliding, no hesitation in this case, he applied his boot to the unfortunate individual, and drove him from his position. "Now, you, and you, and you! About your business! Get to your duty!"
Henri and Jules came in for his attentions, for they had crept away from that hideous row of dead, and both gaped at him for a while in open-mouthed amazement, wondering, indeed, whether they were discovered, wondering in a half-bewildered sort of way what they ought to do. For still Henri's ears buzzed, and still his brain reeled; not so much from the explosion—for the wall separating the hall from the corridor outside had sheltered him not a little, but reeling from the effects of his tumble downstairs and the mad mêlée which had taken place there. As for Jules, the fellow was quite light-headed, for the bomb had sent him backward against the wall with a crash, and he too had taken his share in that desperate fight at the top of the stairway. He began to giggle, which was a way Jules had, and Max, happening to catch sight of him at the moment, and stung to fury by such mirth on the part of one of his men, by such a sign of insubordination, smote him across the face, little realizing that the one he struck was the same man, that very prisoner, whom he had struck not so long before, and whom he would willingly have executed.
"Come along!" Henri managed to whisper to his chum. "Better to be taken for Germans than to be discovered in our disguises. Let's get hold of rifles and take our post at some loophole. Those were French shouts we heard, and it may be that we shall have an opportunity of joining our people."