They went out. The air was sharp with frost. It was very still in the village. The sun, a red ball of fire, still glowed on the frosted trees; on the white and yellow walls of the cottages; on the white fields and white-cowled windmills; on the powdered cobbles of the street. A segment of moon, strangely like a pierrot head, thrust through curtains of cloud, its mouth whimsically awry, peered down sideways at the earth—at the white earth, where legions of tiny men, like ants, hurried to kill or be killed in their bewildering quarrels. The distances were blue—the shimmering steel-blue of winter distances. Here and there a column of black smoke, shot through again and again with tongues of fire, went up to heaven; the smoke of burning villages; little sacrifices France offered for her folly to gods not yet appeased.
“To the bridge,” said Tuck-of-Drum. They marched in silence. The drum was silent. At the end of the long, straggling street a tiny bridge spanned a frozen stream which the enemy must cross. By the side of it was a clump of bushes, so thick that, even leafless, they formed a screen behind which the veterans and the boy crouched down.
“They might have broken down the bridge at least,” grumbled Dufour. “Menitz was frozen, and the Emperor——”
“They are coming!” whispered Pierre.
His sharp ears, close to the ground, had caught the clip-clop of approaching hoofs.
Tuck-of-Drum drew his sword and rested its hilt on the rough wooden parapet of the bridge. “Fix bayonets!” he growled.
Sergeant Bergeret should have given the word, but he carried out the order placidly, drawing the sword from its scabbard and fixing it with his fumbling fingers. “Put it in for me,” muttered Dufour, handing his bayonet to Pierre. “Now give me the musket—so—and run home, good lad. Embrace me and then run home.”
He sat on the ground, his wooden leg stiff and straight in front of him, and clutched the bayonet. Pierre’s lips tightened; he did not move. “Go home, I say!”
“Hush, they come!” whispered Tuck-of-Drum.
Peering through the brushwood, they could see, on the road ahead, the pennoned lances of German Uhlans, rising and falling with the jolting of the horses. The hoofs clicked louder and louder on the frozen road.