Outside, nearby, a high-pitched strained voice gave an order, and past the window openings soldiers began to pass, some shrilly cheering, some singing the song of France, the Marseillaise Hymn. Their trunks were not visible. From the cellar could be seen only their legs from the knees down, with stained leather leggings on each pair of shanks, and their feet, in heavy military boots, sliding and slithering over the cinders and the shards of broken tiling alongside the wrecked factory wall.
Peering upward, trying vainly at his angled range of vision to see the bodies of those who passed, the palsied man reached out and grasped the arm of his mate in a hard grip, uttering meaningless sounds. It was as though he sought to tell of some astounding discovery he had just made.
“Yes, yes, brother; I understand,” said the blind man. “I cannot see, but I can hear. There is no swing to their step, eh? Their feet scuffle inside their boots, eh? Yes, yes, I know—they are very weary. They have come far to-day to fight these Huns. And how feebly they sing the song as they go past us here! They must be very tired—that is it, eh? But, tired or not, they are Frenchmen, and they can fight. Oh, if only the good God for one little hour, for one little minute, would give me back my eyes, to see the men of France fighting for France!”
The last straggling pair of legs went shambling awkwardly past the portholes. To the Breton, watching, it appeared that the owner of those legs scarcely could lift the weight of the thick-soled boots.
Beyond the cellar, to the left, whither the marchers had defiled, the firing became general. It rose in volume, sank to a broken and individual sequence of crashes, rose again in a chorus, grew thin and thready again. There was nothing workmanlike, nothing soldierlike about it; nothing steadfastly sustained. It was intermittent, irregular, uncertain. Listening, the blind man waggled his head in a puzzled, irritated fashion, and shook off the grasp of his comrade, who still appeared bent on trying to make something clear to him.
With a movement like that of a startled horse the old leader-woman threw up her head. With her fingers she clawed the matted grey hair out of her ears.
“Hark! Hark!” she cried, imposing silence upon all of them by her hoarse intensity. “Hark, all of you! What is that?”
The others heard it too, then. It was a whining, gagging, thin cry from outside, dose up against the southerly wall of their underground refuge—the distressful cry of an un-happy child, very frightened and very sick. There was no mistaking it—the sobbing intake of the breath; the choked note of nausea which followed.
“It is a little one!” bleated one woman.
“What child is missing?” screeched another in a panic. “What babe has been overlooked?”