in a whirl, and his
pulses beating in his ears till he was deafened. It was just at the
moment when Sergeant Huefer, undisturbed by the task allotted to him,
in fact, eager to finish off the prisoner and get back to his meal,
gave a short, sharp order and set his firing-squad in motion, that
Henri's outstretched fingers came into contact with another object--a
round, cylindrical object attached to a short stick, a hand-grenade,
one of those bombs which had helped to blow in the barricade which he
and his gallant _poilus_ had erected at the top of the stairway.

With an effort he pulled himself together, and, gripping the stick,
felt for the safety-pin, removal of which would allow explosion of the
grenade once it came into contact with any body. Then, rising to his
knees, and unsteadily to his feet, he stretched out his left hand to
the wall, while with his right he swung the hand-grenade backwards and
forwards. By then the firing-party had been halted in front of Jules,
who, head in air and arms folded, stood against the far wall.

"Load!" he heard the command ring out and echo down the gallery.
"Present!"

Up went the rifles to the shoulders.

Henri gave a sharp jerk to the handle of the grenade as he loosened his
hold of it, and sent it flying forward into the hall, where it landed a
moment later--landed, indeed, within a foot of the fire which the men
had built in the centre of this big place, and about which they had
been seated. There followed a blinding flash, a thundering detonation,
and then shouts and shrieks and groans, and clouds of dust and falling
debris. An instant later, Henri had fallen backward into the gallery,
and lay, much as he had lain before, among the bodies of those who had
taken part in the fight on the stairway.

[Illustration: "THE GRENADE LANDED WITHIN A FOOT OF THE FIRE ABOUT
WHICH THE MEN HAD BEEN SEATED"]

CHAPTER XVII

Charge of the Gallant Bretons

Let us for the moment leave Henri and Jules in the centre of the ruins
of Fort Douaumont, and return for a few brief seconds to that gallant
yet dangerously small force of Frenchmen, who, until this moment, had
been fighting to check the advance of the Germans about the town of
Verdun.

Five days of the most terrific fighting had passed. Five days of
incessant bombardment from massed German guns, which had literally
blown the defenders out of their trenches. And during those few days,
when the French lines to the no