If they persist, these cannibals,
In making heroes of us,
They'll soon learn that our bullets
Are for our own generals.
VI
THE WILL
It was not quite eight o'clock the next morning when Landri and his dragoons came in sight of Hugueville-en-Plaine, so named to distinguish it from Hugueville-en-Montagne. It is a large village, three leagues from Saint-Mihiel on the map and as the crow flies. The network of roads in those ramparts of the Forest of Argonne stretches the twelve kilometres to seventeen. An extensive wood bounds the village on the east, so that the sixty men of the little detachment were able to approach unseen.
It was another typical day of early autumn, with a pale blue sky, veiled by transparent clouds, like the preceding Monday, when Valentine Olier's lover stopped his automobile at the door of Saint-François-Xavier, to pay a surreptitious visit to his friend. In his black overcoat, with his helmet on his head, the officer, who had led his two platoons for the last two hours through clumps of elms and aspens at first, and then, as the ground rose higher and higher, through thickets of oak and beech, recalled with poignant sadness that other day, so near—only four times twenty-four hours—which seemed to him so far away! He had lived more in those four days than in his twenty-nine years of childhood, adolescence and youth.
The march was accomplished in a silence which demonstrated the troopers' lack of enthusiasm for the expedition in which they were taking part. Even the anarchistic Baudoin, still sheepish over the lesson of the day before, had not tried to proselytize his comrades. They rode in fours, closely wrapped, because of the nipping air of that rugged country, in their ample blue cloaks, against which gleamed the barrels of their carbines. The sappers were distinguishable by the axes hanging from the saddle-bows. Another lieutenant brought up the rear. There was no sound save that of the horses' shoes on the frozen ground and the clinking of the sabres against the stirrups.
Those sounds would not have sufficed to announce their approach. The people of Hugueville-en-Plaine and the neighboring villages had been warned, no doubt, by the swift and inexplicable circulation of news in the country districts, the most amazing example of which was the contagious terror of the summer of 1789, which spread in a few days from one end of France to the other. In the patois of the Centre it is still spoken of as "the great pourasse."
"Aha!" said Landri, between his teeth, "we are expected."
In truth, some three hundred people were on the lookout at the entrance to the main street, and they ran off at once toward the centre of the village, shouting: "The dragoons! The dragoons!" They were only the rearguard of a crowd assembled around the church on the square, a sketch of which was annexed to the "supplementary instructions." There were more than twelve hundred peasants there, men and women, who opposed a living barrier to the horses. It took the troopers nearly fifteen minutes to reach the square, forcing back the enthusiasts with the cautious consideration which was expressly enjoined upon them. Their greatest difficulty was to control their horses, excited as they were by that great crowd singing with its thousand voices the well-known chant: "Nous voulons Dieu!" Another quarter of an hour was required to execute the same operation in front of the church and to establish the lines as ordered.
About half-past eight the little square had the aspect of a veritable halt in war-time. The horses were collected in the centre, held by the troopers, each of whom had charge of two. The rest of the men formed barriers at the ends of the streets. Behind them one could see the heads of the peasants, close together and constantly moving. The steps leading to the church, which stood on a sort of platform of earth, were still filled with kneeling women, who had begun to recite, at the tops of their voices, the litanies of the Blessed Virgin. There was something at once heart-rending and grotesque, brutally ugly and no less idiotic, in that display of military force to subdue the possible resistance of those humble creatures who cast upon the peaceful air of the lovely morning such pious appeals as "Refuge of sinners! Consoler of the afflicted! Salvation of the infirm!" And the crowd replied, from the lanes barred by dragoons: "Pray for us!"