“Order your men to charge them with the bayonet, lieutenant.”

The waxen pallor of death was on the poor boy-officer’s face; yet he had strength to murmur in feeble accents: 

“You hear, my children; give them the bayonet!”

It was his last utterance; his spirit passed, his ingenuous, resolute face and his wide open eyes still turned on the battle.  The flies already were beginning to buzz about Francoise’s head and settle there, while lying on his bed little Charles, in an access of delirium, was calling on his mother in pitiful, beseeching tones to give him something to quench his thirst.

“Mother, mother, awake; get up—­I am thirsty, I am so thirsty.”

But the instructions of the new chief were imperative, and the officers, vexed and grieved to see the successes they had achieved thus rendered nugatory, had nothing for it but to give orders for the retreat.  It was plain that the commander-in-chief, possessed by a haunting dread of the enemy’s turning movement, was determined to sacrifice everything in order to escape from the toils.  The Place de l’Eglise was evacuated, the troops fell back from street to street; soon the broad avenue was emptied of its defenders.  Women shrieked and sobbed, men swore and shook their fists at the retiring troops, furious to see themselves abandoned thus.  Many shut themselves in their houses, resolved to die in their defense.

“Well, I am not going to give up the ship!” shouted Weiss, beside himself with rage.  “No!  I will leave my skin here first.  Let them come on! let them come and smash my furniture and drink my wine!”

Wrath filled his mind to the exclusion of all else, a wild, fierce desire to fight, to kill, at the thought that the hated foreigner should enter his house, sit in his chair, drink from his glass.  It wrought a change in all his nature; everything that went to make up his daily life—­wife, business, the methodical prudence of the small bourgeois—­seemed suddenly to become unstable and drift away from him.  And he shut himself up in his house and barricaded it, he paced the empty apartments with the restless impatience of a caged wild beast, going from room to room to make sure that all the doors and windows were securely fastened.  He counted his cartridges and found he had forty left, then, as he was about to give a final look to the meadows to see whether any attack was to be apprehended from that quarter, the sight of the hills on the left bank arrested his attention for a moment.  The smoke-wreaths indicated distinctly the position of the Prussian batteries, and at the corner of a little wood on la Marfee, over the powerful battery at Frenois, he again beheld the group of uniforms, more numerous than before, and so distinct in the bright sunlight that by supplementing his spectacles with his binocle he could make out the gold of their epaulettes and helmets.

“You dirty scoundrels, you dirty scoundrels!” he twice repeated, extending his clenched fist in impotent menace.