ed.

An hour later, when Henri recovered consciousness--for he had been
stunned by his fall--he found himself lying at the foot of the
stairway, his legs still resting on the last steps and his head on the
narrow railway. A man lay across his body--a huge, beefy individual of
extraordinary weight, who pressed him hard against the concrete. There
were other men lying all about him--dead men, no doubt, for they made
no movement--while the stairs themselves, what was left of the parapet
of bags which he and his comrades had erected, and the entrance to the
gun chamber above, were littered with soldiers, French and German.
Strangely enough, though the place had been sunk in darkness during
that last desperate attack, it was now illuminated, not brilliantly, it
is true, but sufficiently for him to be able to make out his
surroundings and to discern objects.

With a desperate effort, Henri contrived to throw off the dead weight
which lay across him, and, raising his head slowly, peered in all
directions, feeling dazed and shaken, and as yet hardly appreciating
what had happened. Then, little by little, he realized the situation,
realized that his band of noble _poilus_ had broken up, that many,
indeed, lay dead about him, and that the rest had scattered, perhaps
had been dragged off as prisoners, and perhaps--and how he hoped
it--had gained the open and had made their way back to the French lines.

"Better be careful. Better be a little cautious," he told himself,
beginning to peer over the broad back of a man who lay beside him.
"That's that hall in which the Brandenburgers had taken up their
quarters. Why, they've a fire burning, and are eating a meal round it.
And--and--who's that? I've seen that chap before; who is he?"

In his semi-dazed condition he was horribly puzzled, and, shading his
eyes with one trembling hand, peered round the corner of the entrance
to that hall at the group occupying its centre. There were perhaps a
hundred Brandenburgers seated in a wide straggling ring round a fire
which blazed in their midst, and which lit up their surroundings and
threw long shadows upon what was left of the concrete walls of the
fortress. The beams from those flickering flames fell too upon another
group--a group, it seemed, of officers--occupying a retired corner, and
upon two solitary individuals who stood near by under the eye of a
sentry squatting on a block of masonry not far from them. It gave, no
doubt,