Suddenly Tuck-of-Drum sprang up.
“The Guard will advance,” he growled, with a little hoarse laugh, the faint echo of one that men now dead had heard and talked of, long since. Joy, fierce, savage joy of fighting, dormant so long but not extinct, flared up and flashed in his faded eyes. And yet, with the joy, a rage terrible and righteous shook him as he saw the glitter of the steel, the fluttering pennons, the casques and foreign uniforms—the foes of France, violating the sacred soil of which the dust of his race had made.
His trembling hands clutching the drumsticks, he advanced to the centre of the bridge. Bergeret stood on his right, his bayonet extended. Dufour grasped the parapet, dragged himself up, groaning in spite of clenched teeth, planted his wooden leg firmly, and, leaning against the woodwork of the bridge, rested the butt of his weapon on the ground, the tremulous steel pointed toward the enemy. Pierre came to help him. “Go back! go back!” he growled, pushing the boy aside with all his feeble strength. Pierre slipped on the frozen earth and fell, clutching at the bushes. Suddenly Dominique Laplume sounded the pas de charge.
A strange, pitiful defiance this, echoing back through the deserted village street, floating mournfully out to the white, empty fields, sending its arrogant, useless challenge to the ribbon of white road ahead. “Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!” The old drum, that had sent a hundred men flocking like sheep before it—the old drum that Jules, who fell at Solferino, that Dominique, who fell at Gravelotte, had beaten on winter mornings of their boyhood—answered nobly to this last great effort, and seemed a living, sentient thing, entering into the brave spirit of the challenge.
There was a startled shout, a clatter of stones, as the Uhlans reined in their horses.
“They fly!” shrieked Tuck-of-Drum; “they—ah!”
Half a dozen carbines shot up and flashed fire. There was a hoarse cry in German; an officer struck aside the stock of a man’s weapon.
Dufour’s bayonet clattered down; he slid into the thicket, his wooden leg scoring a long, jagged line in the frosty road. Bergeret was on his knees, a light of strange intelligence dawning in his smooth, foolish face; quite suddenly he fell sideways on to his fallen bearskin, matted already with his blood.
Tuck-of-Drum still stood in the centre of the bridge. The drumsticks descended on a drum pierced and soundless—then dropped, one after the other, slowly, from his nerveless grasp. The world swung around him. The poplars down the roadway on which his glazing eyes were fixed marched, doubled, moved into echelon and square. “La Grande Armée! La Grande Armée!”
Was it the cry of the Germans, in wonder, in derision, in pity? Or did his quivering lips frame the words? Ghosts formed round him; the ghosts of the old battalions who had marched, long back, into silence. They swayed, they heaved, in countless numbers; file after file, rank after rank, regiment after regiment, formed up, doubled into place, and passed him by. He saw the flash of breastplates, the crimson fronts of the Polish lancers, the red plumes of the line, the bearskins of the Guards, the glittering eagles of France.