And so the night came on, and I still sat there, until a hand rested on my shoulder. I noticed its trembling pressure.
I raised my eyes. There stood near me the captain, Père Grandin and Père Antoine. It was the last who spoke:
"My son, Sebastien Quintado is no more!"
THE REPULSE
As the Germans crossed the border of France and the hordes of the Kaiser, like some whirlwind of devastation, crushed our villages, trampled down our gardens, smote our sons, France trembled with rage, a rage at first not unmixed with fears. But it was for a moment only. The fierce reaction followed, and with the steadfast poise of her faith, her endurance, her heroism, she resisted. That resistance was a sublime act of confidence in herself. It meant an endless self-sacrifice. It meant a solidarity of hearts. It meant a complete disenthrallment from the illusions of ease and indolence and impregnability. We were surprised. The enemy was at our gates. And Paris, the cynosure of our pride and of our affection banished its insouciance, and suddenly became strained with gravity, and a kind of, I know not what, absorption in a new life.
The German wedge moved on, and then our armies holding stiffly together fell back, prodding the sides of the huge leviathan, that sprawled over our fair land with its fierce talons extended, with a savage not-to-be-denied hunger reaching out for that paramount morsel—Paris—and spitting out of its ravenous mouth sprays of desecrating Uhlans and automobile excursionists, who were here and there, now hiding in a wood, now racing over the roads. It was these drops and waterings of saliva from its horrid living mass that spread terror and anxiety and a sickening dread. But we had not severed our lines, and the retreating army corps tightly kept their cordon intact, though falling back with a deep reentering swerve in the centre, where the enemy fought hard to break through. And not seldom it happened that those exudations from its vast throat were stamped out summarily, so that no spot of their defilement remained. And Joffre—Pater patriae—was not worried. That we knew; the plan was working. I learned that from a colonel who had been at the crossing of the Meuse, where, so he said, "the Germans spent their thousands to gain their end, squadrons upon squadrons, slaughtered like pigeons from a trap, coming on, stuck together like an army of termites, and beaten into death by the merciless fire from our guns. But they got over," he said, "and that was what they wanted to do. Why, living men were thrown into the gaps to be rained down with shot and shell, like so much earth and stone into a pit that must be crossed."