had gained possession of a narrow stream, fringed with willows
and poplars, and were making preparations for storming the houses,
or rather fortresses, in the Place de l'Eglise. Their skirmishers had
fallen back with the same caution that characterized their advance, and
the wide grassy plain, dotted here and there with a black form where
some poor fellow had laid down his life, lay spread in the mellow,
slumbrous sunshine like a great cloth of gold. The lieutenant, knowing
that the street was now to be the scene of action, had evacuated the
courtyard of the dyehouse, leaving there only one man as guard. He
rapidly posted his men along the sidewalk with instructions, should the
enemy carry the position, to withdraw into the building, barricade the
first floor, and defend themselves there as long as they had a cartridge
left. The men fired at will, lying prone upon the ground, and sheltering
themselves as best they might behind posts and every little projection
of the walls, and the storm of lead, interspersed with tongues of flame
and puffs of smoke, that tore through that broad, deserted, sunny avenue
was like a downpour of hail beaten level by the fierce blast of winter.
A woman was seen to cross the roadway, running with wild, uncertain
steps, and she escaped uninjured. Next, an old man, a peasant, in
his blouse, who would not be satisfied until he saw his worthless nag
stabled, received a bullet square in his forehead, and the violence of
the impact was such that it hurled him into the middle of the street. A
shell had gone crashing through the roof of the church; two others fell
and set fire to houses, which burned with a pale flame in the intense
daylight, with a loud snapping and crackling of their timbers. And that
poor woman, who lay crushed and bleeding in the doorway of the house
where her sick boy was, that old man with a bullet in his brain, all
that work of ruin and devastation, maddened the few inhabitants who had
chosen to end their days in their native village rather than seek safety
in Belgium. Other bourgeois, and workingmen as well, the neatly attired
citizen alongside the man in overalls, had possessed themselves of
the weapons of dead soldiers, and were in the street defending their
firesides or firing vengefully from the windows.

"Ah!" suddenly said Weiss, "the scoundrels have got around to our rear.
I saw them sneaking along the railroad track. Hark! don't you hear them
off there to the left?"