ard to repel them, and there was a fierce
hand-to-hand struggle with the bayonet. There was one zouave, a big,
handsome, brown-bearded man, bare-headed and with his jacket hanging
in tatters from his shoulders, who did his work with appalling
thoroughness, driving his reeking bayonet home through splintering bones
and yielding tissues, cleansing it of the gore that it had contracted
from one man by plunging it into the flesh of another; and when it broke
he laid about him, smashing many a skull, with the butt of his musket;
and when finally he made a misstep and lost his weapon he sprung,
bare-handed, for the throat of a burly Prussian, with such tigerish
fierceness that both men rolled over and over on the gravel to the
shattered kitchen door, clasped in a mortal embrace. The trees of the
park looked down on many such scenes of slaughter, and the green lawn
was piled with corpses. But it was before the stoop, around the sky-blue
sofa and fauteuils, that the conflict raged with greatest fury; a
maddened mob of savages, firing at one another at point-blank range, so
that hair and beards were set on fire, tearing one another with teeth
and nails when a knife was wanting to slash the adversary's throat.

Then Gaude, with his sorrowful face, the face of a man who has had his
troubles of which he does not care to speak, was seized with a sort of
sudden heroic madness. At that moment of irretrievable defeat, when he
must have known that the company was annihilated and that there was not
a man left to answer his summons, he grasped his bugle, carried it
to his lips and sounded the general, in so tempestuous, ear-splitting
strains that one would have said he wished to wake the dead. Nearer and
nearer came the Prussians, but he never stirred, only sounding the call
the louder, with all the strength of his lungs. He fell, pierced with
many bullets, and his spirit passed in one long-drawn, parting wail that
died away and was lost upon the shuddering air.

Rochas made no attempt to fly; he seemed unable to comprehend. Even more
erect than usual, he waited the end, stammering:

"Well, what's the matter? what's the matter?"

Such a possibility had never entered his head as that they could be
defeated. They were changing everything in these degenerate days, even
to the manner of fighting; had not those fellows a right to remain on
their own side of the valley and wait for the French to go and attack
them? There was no use killing t