Out through the gate to the green belt which cried aloud in strident tones the transition from peace to war.
Here were the men of Paris!
The aged ragpicker worked with pick and shovel beside the wealthy exquisite, as irreproachably dressed in the ditch as in his luxurious home, necessarily so, for he had no old clothes to wear. The literary scholar had risen from his books to tear his hands in stretching barbed wire with the keeper of a dive for his companion. The consumptive carpenter had brought his tools, the still vigorous blacksmith, too old for military service, had loaded anvil, forge-frame and coal on a wagon and was sharpening pickaxe heads.
Here, too, were the women of Paris.
Frenchwomen of noble birth worked in extemporized kitchens beside the peasant mothers of the outer suburbs and the midinettes of Montmartre to feed this new-sprung army of workers.
One thing Horace saw, and saw that clearly—Germany might take Paris, but as long as one Frenchman or one Frenchwoman was left alive, the Germans would not take France. The boy dimly felt that France was not a territory, it was a soul.
He delivered his dispatch and waited.
A dirty, unshaved, mud-bespattered figure digging near by, spoke to him with a cultured voice and a gay laugh.
"It is nothing, my little one," he said to Horace, "what if they come? We shall bite their heads off. Those boches are going to put themselves in a guetapens, a veritable death-trap. We shall have them at last!"
It was the same gallant French spirit which had been demonstrated a few days before by Colonel Doury. When ordered to resist to the last gasp, he said to the dragoon who brought the order,