le closer. It was the Herr Pfarrer, praying volubly but inaudibly. He
scrambled to his feet as Ulrich touched him, and his first astonishment
over, poured forth his tale of woe.
There had been trouble since Ulrich's departure. A French corps of
observation had been camped upon the hill, and twice within the month
had a French soldier been found murdered in the woods. Heavy had been
the penalties exacted from the village, and terrible had been the
Colonel's threats of vengeance. Now, for a third time, a soldier stabbed
in the back had been borne into camp by his raging comrades, and this
very afternoon the Colonel had sworn that if the murderer were not
handed over to him within an hour from dawn, when the camp was to break
up, he would before marching burn the village to the ground. The Herr
Pfarrer was on his way back from the camp where he had been to plead for
mercy, but it had been in vain.
"Such are foul deeds!" said Ulrich.
"The people are mad with hatred of the French," answered the Herr
Pastor. "It may be one, it may be a dozen who have taken vengeance into
their own hands. May God forgive them."
"They will not come forward--not to save the village?"
"Can you expect it of them! There is no hope for us; the village will
burn as a hundred others have burned."
Aye, that was true; Ulrich had seen their blackened ruins; the old
sitting with white faces among the wreckage of their homes, the little
children wailing round their knees, the tiny broods burned in their
nests. He had picked their corpses from beneath the charred trunks of
the dead elms.
The Herr Pfarrer had gone forward on his melancholy mission to prepare
the people for their doom.
Ulrich stood alone, looking down upon Alt Waldnitz bathed in moonlight.
And there came to him the words of the old pastor: "She will be dearer
to you than yourself. For her you would lay down your life." And Ulrich
knew that his love was the village of Alt Waldnitz, where dwelt his
people, the old and wrinkled, the laughing "little ones," where dwelt
the helpless dumb things with their deep pathetic eyes, where the bees
hummed drowsily, and the thousand tiny creatures of the day.
They hanged him high upon a withered elm, with his face towards Alt
Waldnitz, that all the village, old and young, might see; and then to
the beat of drum and scream of fife they marched away; and forest-hidden
Waldnitz gathered up once more its many threads of quiet life and wove
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