At dawn, Georges, sleeping by the road-side, was awakened to see a pathetic procession of refugees hurrying away to safety. Pathetic? It was tragic, comic, grotesque, sublime! Everyone was dressed in his best clothes; everyone carried bundles, carried hens, carried trunks, carried the Lord knows what—and the memories of 1870 to boot! Wagon after wagon passed, piled high with furniture, bags, boxes, baskets, and provisions, with women and children atop, and cows tied on behind. Whole families—three generations—trudged on foot, men and women and children, children, children, children, and weeping old grandmothers trundled along in wheelbarrows.
XII
It was a bitter sight for Georges, burning to defend his country. What was the French army good for, anyway, if it couldn’t protect this pretty, innocent little town, so charmingly scattered over the wooded heights of the Meuse? But Mouzon was doomed. Already the sappers with wires and sticks of melinite were blowing up the picturesque old stone bridge.
All next day Georges’s regiment, hidden in the woods, watched the shelling of the town; all next night, hungry, soaked with rain, enraged, they saw it burn, house by house, till at last the flames licked up the belfry of the church. That was the way they defended Mouzon.
Another day; another night of drenching rain in those wretched sopping woods, while the German guns boomed all about them. Georges and two other boys succeeded in building a dirty little shelter of branches covered with wet straw, and they crawled underneath. Water-soaked, the clumsy thing collapsed on top of them in the middle of the night; but, heavy with soldiers’ sleep, it took more than that to wake them. In the morning, however, a shell bursting only a few yards away did succeed in bringing them stumbling out from under the soggy mass—to find to their amazement that their regiment had already departed!
XIII
The shells began to fall thicker and faster; the Germans were indubitably near at hand. But where the devil was the regiment? There was no knowing, except that it was pretty sure to be getting away from those harrying shells. Chilled, the boys ran through the dripping woods till they came to a clearing. Here, looking down, they saw the Germans fording the Meuse! But not without trouble; a French battery had got their range, and was playing red havoc with them, slinging shell after shell of well-aimed shrapnel. By dozens they melted away under the fire, and the water was full of bobbing corpses drifting downstream.
“We just burst out laughing,” said Georges. “We couldn’t help it. Not that it was so funny to see men killed like that by the hundreds, but, after all we had gone through—after the ghastly way we had been butchered at Bertrix, it really did me good to see those ‘Bosches’ suffering themselves at last!”