wine glass.

"Bonne chance," he said, "and may you fight the devils as we did in 1870
and 1871, and with more success too."

"Enough of you and your 1870," said someone roughly. "We go out to win
where you lost; there will be no Woerth or Sedan in this war. We will
drive the Prussians back to Berlin; you let them march to Paris. We are
going to act, whereas you can only talk--you are much too old, you see,
Pere Lemaire."

The ex-sergeant put down his glass with a jerk as though he had been
struck. He looked around on the company that filled the front room of
the Faisan d'Or, and on the faces of the men who had looked up to him
for years as the hero of 1870 he now saw only the keenness to fight. He
was old, forgotten, and no longer respected, and the blow was a hard one
to bear.

The cloud of war was drifting up from the east, and the French Army was
mobilising for the Great War. The peasants of the village had just been
called up, and within half an hour they would be on their way to the
depots of their different regiments, while Jules Lemaire, sergeant of
the line, would be left at home with the cripples and the women and the
children.

"I will serve France as well as any of you," he said defiantly. "I will
find a way." But his voice was unheeded in the general bustle and noise,
and Madame Nolan, the only person who appeared to hear him, sniffed with
contempt.

Men destined for different regiments were saying good-bye to each other;
Georges Simon, the blacksmith, with his arm round his fiancee's waist,
was joking with Madame Nolan, who hurried about behind her little zinc
counter; the door slammed noisily at each departure--and Jules Lemaire
sat unheeded in the corner by the old clock.

And presently, when the front room was quiet and Madame Nolan was using
her dirty apron to wipe away her tears, the ex-sergeant crept out
quietly into the street and hobbled along to his cottage. He reached up
and took his old Chassepot rifle down from the wall where it had hung
these many years, and, while the other inhabitants thronged the road,
cheering, weeping, laughing, Jules Lemaire sat before his little wooden
table, with his rifle in his hands and a pile of cartridges before him.

"There will be a way," he murmured. "I will help my country; there will
be a way."

* * * * *

The grey invaders swept on through the village, and Jules Lemaire, from
his hiding-place on the church tower, wa