For the last time he exchanged a password with a French sentinel, and tramped out into the belt of ground between the French outposts and the Prussian field-watch.  Now in this belt there stood a little village which Fevrier had held with skill and honour all the two days of the battle of Noisseville.  Doubtless that recollection had something to do with his choice of the village.  For in his martyrdom of shame he had fallen to wonder whether after all he had not deserved it, and any reassurance such as the gaping house-walls of Vaudere would bring to him, was eagerly welcomed.  There was another reason, however, in the position of the village.

It stood in an abrupt valley at the foot of a steep vine-hill on the summit, and which was the Prussian forepost.  The Prussian field-watch would be even nearer to Vaudere and dispersed amongst the vines.  So he could get his ignominious work over quickly in the morning.  The village would provide, too, safe quarters for the night, since it was well within range of the heavy guns in Fort St. Julien, and the Prussians on that account were unable to hold it.

He led his fifty soldiers then northwestward from his camp, skirted the Bois de Grimont, and marched into the village.  The night was dark, and the sky so overhung with clouds that not a star was visible.  The one street of Vaudere was absolutely silent.  The glimmering white cottages showed their black rents on either side, but never the light of a candle behind any shutter.  Lieutenant Fevrier left his men at the western or Frenchward end of the street, and went forward alone.

The doors of the houses stood open.  The path was encumbered with the wreckage of their contents, and every now and then he smelt a whiff of paraffin, as though lamps had been broken or cans overset.  Vaudere had been looted, but there were no Prussians now in the village.

He made sure of this by walking as far as the large house at the head of the village.  Then he went back to his men and led them forward until he reached the general shop which every village has.

“It is not likely,” he said, “that we shall find even the makeshift of a supper.  But courage, my friends, let us try!”

He could not have eaten a crust himself, but it had become an instinct with him to anticipate the needs of his privates, and he acted from habit.  They crowded into the shop; one man shut the door, Fevrier lighted a match and disclosed by its light staved-in barrels, empty cannisters, broken boxes, fragments of lemonade bottles, but of food not so much as a stale biscuit.

“Go upstairs and search.”

They went and returned empty-handed.

“We have found nothing, monsieur,” said they.

“But I have,” replied Fevrier, and striking another match he held up what he had found, dirty and crumpled, in a corner of the shop.  It was a little tricolour flag of painted linen upon a bamboo stick, a child’s cheap and gaudy toy.  But Fevrier held it up solemnly, and of the fifty deserters no one laughed.