either officers nor men could make it out.

"Get up," the captain said to the horses, as he cracked his whip, while
our three men quietly smoked their pipes. I was half suffocated in my
box, which only admitted the air through those holes in front, and at
the same time I was nearly frozen, for it was terribly cold.

"Get up," the captain said again, and the wagon loaded with Gruyere
cheese entered France.

The Prussian lines were very badly guarded, as the enemy trusted to the
watchfulness of the Swiss. The sergeant spoke North German, while our
captain spoke the bad German of the Four Cantons, and so they could
not understand each other. The sergeant, however, pretended to be very
intelligent; and, in order to make us believe that he understood us,
they allowed us to continue our journey; and, after travelling for seven
hours, being continually stopped in the same manner, we arrived at a
small village of the Jura in ruins, at nightfall.

What were we going to do? Our only arms were the captain's whip, our
uniforms our peasants' blouses, and our food the Gruyere cheese. Our
sole wealth consisted in our ammunition, packages of cartridges which
we had stowed away inside some of the large cheeses. We had about a
thousand of them, just two hundred each, but we needed rifles, and they
must be chassepots. Luckily, however, the captain was a bold man of an
inventive mind, and this was the plan that he hit upon:

While three of us remained hidden in a cellar in the abandoned village,
he continued his journey as far as Besancon with the empty wagon and
one man. The town was invested, but one can always make one's way into
a town among the hills by crossing the tableland till within about ten
miles of the walls, and then following paths and ravines on foot. They
left their wagon at Omans, among the Germans, and escaped out of it at
night on foot; so as to gain the heights which border the River
Doubs; the next day they entered Besancon, where there were plenty
of chassepots. There were nearly forty thousand of them left in the
arsenal, and General Roland, a brave marine, laughed at the captain's
daring project, but let him have six rifles and wished him "good luck."
There he had also found his wife, who had been through all the war with
us before the campaign in the East, and who had been only prevented
by illness from continuing with Bourbaki's army. She had recovered,
however, in spite of the cold, which was growing more an