I asked him about the seventy-five chasseurs at the bridge.  Ah, yes, we were then standing on the site of their barricade.  He would tell me about it, for he had seen it all from his house half way up the hill.

The chasseurs were first posted across the river on the road to Luneville, and when the Germans approached, early in the morning, they fell back to the bridge, which they had barricaded the night before.  It was the only way into Gerbeviller, so the chasseurs determined to fight.  They had torn up the street and thrown great earthworks across one end of the bridge.  Additional barricades were thrown up on the two converging streets, part way up the hill, behind which they had mitrailleuses which could sweep the road at the other end of the bridge.

About a half mile to the south a narrow footbridge crossed the river, only wide enough for one man.  It was a little rustic affair that ran through the grounds of the Chateau de Gerbeviller that faced the river only a few hundred yards below the main bridge.  It was a very ancient chateau, built in the twelfth century and restored in the seventeenth century.  It was a royal chateau of the Bourbons.  In it once lived the great Francois de Montmorency, Duc de Luxembourg and Marshal of France.  Now it belonged to the Marquise de Lamberty, a cousin of the King of Spain.

I interrupted, for I wanted to hear about the chasseurs.  I gave the little old man a cigarette.  He seized it eagerly—­so eagerly that I also handed him a cigar.  He just sort of fondled that cigar for a moment and then placed it in an inside pocket.  It was a very cheap and very bad French cigar, for I was in a part of the country that has never heard of Havanas, but to the little old man it was something precious.  “I will keep it for Sunday,” he said.

I then got him back to the seventy-five chasseurs.  It was just eight o’clock in the morning—­a beautiful sunshiny morning—­when the German column appeared around the bend in the road which we could see across the bridge, and which joined the highway from Luneville.  There were twelve thousand in that first column.  One hundred and fifty thousand more came later.  A band was playing “Deutschland ueber alles” and the men were singing.  The closely packed front ranks of infantry broke into the goose step as they came in sight of the town.  It was a wonderful sight; the sun glistened on their helmets; they marched as though on parade right down almost to the opposite end of the bridge.

Then came the command to halt.  For a moment there was a complete silence.  The Germans, only a couple of hundred yards from the barricade, seemed slowly to consider the situation.  The Captain of the chasseurs, from a shelter behind the very little house that is still standing—­and where his men up the two roads could see him—­softly waved his hand.

Crack-crack-crack—­crack-crack-crack-crack&mdas
h;­crack-crack-crack!  The bullets from the mitrailleuses whistled across the bridge into the front ranks of the “Deutchland ueber alles” singers, while the men behind the bridge barricade began a deadly rifle fire.