The siege of Thionville.
The engineer directing us made us throw up a gazoned cavalier for our guns; we drew a parallel open trench to place us below the cannon-balls. These earthworks took long in making, for we were all, young officers and old alike, unaccustomed to wield the mattock and spade. We had no wheelbarrows and carried the earth in our coats, which we used as sacks. Fire was opened on us from a lunette; it was the more irksome to us in that we were unable to reply: eight-pounders and a Cohorn howitzer, which was outranged, formed all our artillery. The first shell we fired fell outside the glacis and aroused the jeers of the garrison. A few days later, we were joined by some Austrian guns and gunners. One hundred infantry men and a picket of the naval cavalry were relieved at this battery every twenty-four hours. The besieged prepared to attack it; we could distinguish a movement on the rampart through the telescope. When night fell, we saw a column issue through a postern and reach the lunette under shelter of the covert way. My company was ordered up as a reinforcement.
At daybreak, five or six hundred patriots began operations in the village, on the high-road above the town; then, turning to the left, they came through the vineyards to take our battery in flank. The sailors charged bravely, but were overthrown and unmasked us. We were too badly armed to return the fire; we pushed forward with fixed bayonets. The attacking party retreated, I know not why; had they held their ground, they would have wiped us out.
We had several wounded and a few dead, among others the Chevalier de La Baronnais[91], captain of one of the Breton companies. I brought him ill-luck: the bullet which took his life ricochetted against the barrel of my musket and struck him with such force as to pierce both his temples; his brains were scattered over my face. Noble and unnecessary victim of a lost cause! When the Maréchal d'Aubeterre[92] held the States of Brittany, he went to M. de La Baronnais, the father, a poor nobleman, living at Dinard, near Saint-Malo. The Marshal, who had begged him to invite nobody, saw, on entering, a table laid for twenty-five, and scolded his host in friendly fashion.
"Monseigneur," said M. de La Baronnais, "I have only my children to dinner."
M. de La Baronnais had twenty-two boys and a girl, all by the same mother. The Revolution reaped this rich family harvest before it was ripe.
*
Waldeck's Austrian corps began operations. The attack became livelier on our side. It was a fine spectacle at night: fire-pots lit up the works of the place covered with soldiers; sudden gleams struck the clouds or the blue firmament when the guns were fired, and the bombs, crossing each other in the air, described a parabola of light. In the intervals between the reports, one heard drums rolling, gusts of military music, and the voices of the sentries on the ramparts of Thionville and at our own posts; unfortunately, they called out in French in both camps:
"Sentinelles, prenez garde à vous! All's well!"
When the fighting took place, at dawn, it would happen that the lark's morning hymn followed upon the sound of musketry, while the guns, which had ceased firing, silently stared at us, with gaping mouths, through the embrasures. The song of the bird, recalling the memories of pastoral life, seemed to utter a reproach to mankind. It was the same when I came across some dead bodies in the middle of fields of lucerne in flower, or by the edge of a stream of water which bathed the hair of the slain. In the woods, at a few steps from the stress of war, I found little statues of the Saints and the Virgin. A goat-herd, a neat-herd, a beggar carrying his wallet knelt beside these peace-makers, telling their beads to the distant sound of cannon. A whole township once came with its minister to present flowers to the patron of a neighbouring parish, whose image dwelt in a wood, opposite a spring. The curate was blind: a soldier in God's army, he had lost his sight in doing good works, like a grenadier on the battlefield. The vicar administered communion for his curate, because the latter could not have laid the consecrated wafer upon the lips of the communicants. During this ceremony, and from the depths of night, he blessed the light!