Three times, four times, five times, as opportunities occur, he repeats this little game, and then goes off slowly, with the assured step of a good workman at peace with his conscience, to seek another wheelbarrow in the shed, which will soon meet the fate of its predecessors. Thanks to him the number of barrows diminishes rapidly. One day an inventory will show the disappearance of twenty or thirty of them. Where can they be? They are marked with the imperial arms and cannot have been stolen! Puzzle!
It is a devil’s trick that no one can explain. A stricter watch reveals nothing. The land has indeed been levelled for several days, and the sheds are already covering that cemetery of wheelbarrows.
I know, however, a certain delicate-looking Frenchman, of innocent aspect, who could teach much to the officer of many stars in charge of the supplies. Let the Boche rack his brains, let him be plunged in despair—the Frenchman will not speak and the authorities will only lose their time.
In the evening, on returning from work, our wag will say to himself, rubbing his hands with the satisfaction which is the right of a conscientious worker, “To-day I have given five wheelbarrows to France”; for it is quite just to say that what one has taken from Germany has been given to France.
In some thousands of years, excavations, undertaken by these horribly learned, spectacled Boches, will bring to light in a good state of preservation the frames of the wheelbarrows that a French prisoner made such good use of. The learned doctor, excited by such a find, will dress up in a Latin name these rediscovered objects, and, writing in that language a long and learned treatise, will prove that the wheelbarrow existed at the time of Cicero, and with fierce invective will denounce the Frenchman Pascal, who claimed the invention of this means of transport. He will make a gift of the least beautiful specimens to the museum of the province, and will send the rest to the Imperial Museum at Berlin, in recompense for which the eminent doctor will be admitted to the Boche Institute and be profoundly reverenced—unless between now and then the name of Germany will have taken its place in legend beside those of Troy and Carthage!
