standing, thanks to the fierceness of the assailants and
the resolution of the defenders. And so the poor creatures went on, with
trembling, affrighted gestures, evoking the horrid sights their eyes had
seen and telling their dreadful tale of slaughter and conflagration and
corpses lying in heaps upon the ground.

"But my husband?" Henriette asked again.

They made no answer, only continued to cover their face with their hands
and sob. Her cruel anxiety, as she stood there erect, with no outward
sign of weakness, was only evinced by a slight quivering of the lips.
What was she to believe? Vainly she told herself the child was mistaken;
her mental vision pictured her husband lying there dead before her
in the street with a bullet wound in the head. Again, that house, so
securely locked and bolted, was another source of alarm; why was it
so? was he no longer in it? The conviction that he was dead sent an
icy chill to her heart; but perhaps he was only wounded, perhaps he was
breathing still; and so sudden and imperious was the need she felt of
flying to his side that she would again have attempted to force her
passage through the troops had not the bugles just then sounded the
order for them to advance.

The regiment was largely composed of raw, half-drilled recruits from
Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, men who had never fired a shot, but all
that morning they had fought with a bravery and firmness that would
not have disgraced veteran troops. They had not shown much aptitude for
marching on the road from Rheims to Mouzon, weighted as they were with
their unaccustomed burdens, but when they came to face the enemy their
discipline and sense of duty made themselves felt, and notwithstanding
the righteous anger that was in their hearts, the bugle had but to sound
and they returned to brave the fire and encounter the foe. Three several
times they had been promised a division to support them; it never came.
They felt that they were deserted, sacrificed; it was the offering of
their life that was demanded of them by those who, having first made
them evacuate the place, were now sending them back into the fiery
furnace of Bazeilles. And they knew it, and they gave their life,
freely, without a murmur, closing up their ranks and leaving the shelter
of the trees to meet afresh the storm of shell and bullets.

Henriette gave a deep sigh of relief; at last they were about to move!
She followed them, with the hope that she might ent