Papa Laval ran out into the street and began to give what help he could to carry in the wounded British, when he heard a whistling screech and the crash of a shell on one of the outer houses of the town. He ran crouching in to the shadow of one of the houses, and presently his straining eyes caught the quick leaping flash of the German piece and another shell hurtled over and burst in a hail of shrapnel about the entrance to the town. Papa ran back, and in a side street found a young officer and a dozen men breaking in the door of a deserted house. Papa guessed their intention, and since the officer fortunately was able to speak French, Papa could tell him a better house to choose, one taller and with a better and more commanding outlook on the point of attack. He led the way to the house and to the upper rooms, and pointed out the best windows, and watched them pile bedding at the windows and break out loopholes in the wall. All the time shell after shell was smashing and crashing down somewhere outside, and now the Germans began to fire star-shells that floated down in a blaze of dazzling light, blinding the defenders and exposing them as visible targets to the hail of bullets that came drumming and rattling in from their unseen foes.
Then came another fierce rush against the barricaded streets and the rifle fire rose to a full deep-noted roar, punctuated by the crashing reports of the shells and the boom of a gun that began to fire back from somewhere in the town. Down in the street the attack pushed home again to the barricades, and men pulled and dragged at the overturned carts and leaped and scrambled to cross them, and fired in each other’s faces; and, where the barricade was gapped for a moment, thrust and stabbed with the bayonet and smashed with the butt and tore and beat at one another, until slowly the attack gave again and the barricade was made good. In the rooms upstairs where Papa Laval was, the men pumped bullets from the loopholes and the windows down on to the struggling mass that pushed in to the barricade, until a machine-gun was turned on the house and hailed a storm of bullets back and forward, across and across its front. The storm caught several of the men at the windows, and they fell back killed or badly wounded for the most part. A group of the enemy turned from the barricade, ran across and began beating at the door and the barred and shuttered windows. Half a dozen of the garrison, on a command from the officer, jumped from their loopholes and poured clattering down the stairs, just as a rifle thrust into the lock and fired blew it away and the door swung open. As the Germans rushed in they were met by the men plunging headlong down the stair, and in the passage and about the stair-foot commenced a wild and desperate hand-to-hand scrimmage. Somewhere outside a building had caught fire, and in the dim light reflected into the house-passage from the leaping flames the fighters scuffled and raged, scarcely seeing each other, stabbing and striking and singling friend from foe by blind instinct. The passage was a pandemonium of shouts and cries and oaths, of trampling scuffling feet, of clashing steel and thudding blows, with every now and then the thunderous report of the officer’s revolver reverberating in the confined space. The advantage of numbers was largely with the Germans, but the narrowness of doorway and passage made it difficult for this weight of numbers to come at the defenders and beat them down; and the British were not only holding their own but were even driving the invaders slowly backward, when the sound of rapid blows, the riving and crashing of woodwork, the clash and tinkle of breaking glass told that one of the shuttered windows had been forced.
‘Get back! Get back and hold the stair,’ the officer was yelling; and his men, with one last fierce rush, drove the Germans further along the passage, turned and made good their retreat to the stair-foot. Then when the position looked to be too desperate for hope, there came from outside a burst of rifle fire, a fresh clamour of fighting noises, a hoarse yell of English cheers. A mixed mob of the fighters swirled past the open doorway, and a rush of khaki swung past and licked in after it, followed closely by a line of British swarming across the width of the street and running forward with bayonets at the level. Inside the house the panting remnant of the defence slammed the door shut, piled a tangle of furniture—tables, chairs, chests of drawers—into the passage, busied themselves re-securing the broken window, wedging a big table and the heaviest articles of furniture they could find against it, and making all ready for a renewal of the attack.
But the attack was not again successful in reaching a point level with the house. Another attempt, made twenty minutes later, succeeded in coming almost level with the house, but it was too fiercely swept by the fire from the barricade, by a tempest of bullets from a couple of machine-guns placed in position in some of the houses commanding the approach, and had to fall back without any result beyond an increase in the piled bodies littered about the street, the wounded crawling and writhing away as best they could out of the line of fire.
The fighting continued throughout most of the night, but never reached again the savage ferocity of the first hour, never came within such measurable distance of success for the attack. And at dawn the enemy withdrew and left the defence time to collect its wounded and tally its dead, and make all ready for continuing the fight.
And when Papa Laval came back an hour after to his daughter’s house he found her busy making coffee for the corporal and one other man—the only ones left, as it turned out, from the six who had billeted there. The corporal’s head was tied up, his sleeve and shirt-sleeve were slit their full length and stained a dull brown from a wound, the red-wet bandage of which showed round his upper arm when the slit sleeve fell back from it.
But he was quite cheerful and turned triumphantly to Papa Laval when he came in. ‘Wot did I tell you, Daddy? Ici noos restey, eh?’
‘You ’ave spik true,’ said Papa warmly. ‘Ze Anglais—ah, zey are ze brav mans—mos’ brav—magnifique. I no tink it posseebl’—it was not posseebl’, but zey do heem, zis imposseebl’, and make ze victoire.’