“Get on,” 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, while at the same time I was nearly frozen, for it was terribly cold.

“Get on,” 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 traveling 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 wre going to do?  Our only arms were the captain’s whip, our uniforms, our peasants’ blouses, and our food our Gruyere cheese.  Our sole riches consisted in our ammunition, packets of cartridges which we had stowed away inside some of the huge cheeses.  We had about a thousand of them, just two hundred each, but then we wanted 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 table-land till within about ten miles of the walls, and then by 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 and more intense, and in spite of the numberless privations that awaited her, she persisted in accompanying her husband.  He was obliged to give way to her, and they all three, the captain, his wife, and our comrade, started on their expedition.

Going was nothing in comparison to returning.  They were obliged to travel by night, so as to avoid meeting anybody, as the possession of six rifles would have made them liable to suspicion.  But in spite of everything, a week after leaving us, the captain and his two men were back with us again.  The campaign was about to begin.