III

The first night of his arrival he began it himself, and, under pretext of examining the surrounding country, he went along the high road.

I must tell you that the little village which served as our fortress was a small collection of poor, badly built houses, which had been deserted long before.  It lay on a steep slope, which terminated in a wooded plain.  The country people sell the wood; they send it down the slopes, which are called coulees, locally, and which lead down to the plain, and there they stack it into piles, which they sell thrice a year to the wood merchants.  The spot where this market is held in indicated by two small houses by the side of the highroad, which serve for public houses.  The captain had gone down there by way of one of these coulees.

He had been gone about half an hour, and we were on the lookout at the top of the ravine, when we heard a shot.  The captain had ordered us not to stir, and only to come to him when we heard him blow his trumpet.  It was made of a goat’s horn, and could be heard a league off; but it gave no sound, and, in spite of our cruel anxiety, we were obliged to wait in silence, with our rifles by our side.

It is nothing to go down these coulees; one just lets one’s self slide down; but it is more difficult to get up again; one has to scramble up by catching hold of the hanging branches of the trees, and sometimes on all fours, by sheer strength.  A whole mortal hour passed, and he did not come; nothing moved in the brushwood.  The captain’s wife began to grow impatient.  What could he be doing?  Why did he not call us?  Did the shot that we had heard proceed from an enemy, and had he killed or wounded our leader, her husband?  They did not know what to think, but I myself fancied either that he was dead or that his enterprise was successful; and I was merely anxious and curious to know what he had done.

Suddenly we heard the sound of his trumpet, and we were much surprised that instead of coming from below, as we had expected, it came from the village behind us.  What did that mean?  It was a mystery to us, but the same idea struck us all, that he had been killed, and that the Prussians were blowing the trumpet to draw us into an ambush.  We therefore returned to the cottage, keeping a careful lookout with our fingers on the trigger, and hiding under the branches; but his wife, in spite of our entreaties, rushed on, leaping like a tigress.  She thought that she had to avenge her husband, and had fixed the bayonet to her rifle, and we lost sight of her at the moment that we heard the trumpet again; and, a few moments later, we heard her calling out to us: 

“Come on! come on!  He is alive!  It is he!”

We hastened on, and saw the captain smoking his pipe at the entrance of the village, but strangely enough, he was on horseback.