And she, turning her head cried:

"Joseph! Do you know me?"

"Yes," I replied, holding out my hand.

She approached, trembling and sobbing, when again and again the cannon
thundered.

"What are those shots I hear?" I cried.

"The guns of Phalsbourg," she answered. "The city is besieged."

"Phalsbourg besieged! The enemy in France!"

I could speak no more. Thus had so much suffering, so many tears, so
many thousands of lives gone for nothing, ay, worse than nothing, for
the foe was at our homes. For an hour I could think of nothing else;
and now, old and gray-haired as I am, the thought fills me with
bitterness. Yes, we old men have seen the German, the Russian, the
Swede, the Spaniard, the Englishman, masters of France, garrisoning our
cities, taking whatever suited them from our fortresses, insulting our
soldiers, changing our flag, and dividing among themselves, not only
our conquests since 1804, but even those of the Republic. These were
the fruits of ten years of glory!

But let us not speak of these things, the future will pass upon them.
They will tell us that after Lutzen and Bautzen, the enemy offered to
leave us Belgium, part of Holland, all the left bank of the Rhine as
far as Bale, with Savoy and the kingdom of Italy; and that the Emperor
refused to accept these conditions, brilliant as they were, because he
placed the satisfaction of his own pride before the happiness of France!

But to return to my story. For two weeks after the battle of Hanau,
thousands of wagons, filled with wounded, crowded the road from
Strasbourg to Nancy, and passed through Phalsbourg.

They stretched in one long line through all Alsace to Lorraine.

Not one in the sad _cortege_ escaped the eyes of Aunt Gredel and
Catharine. What their thoughts were, I need not say. More than twelve
hundred wagons had passed;--I was in none of them. Thousands of
fathers and mothers sought among them for their children. How many
returned without them!

The third day Catharine found me among a heap of other wretches, in
basket wagons from Mayence, with sunken cheeks and glaring eyes--dying
of hunger. She knew me at once, but Aunt Gredel gazed long before she
cried:

"Yes! it is he! It is Joseph!"

She took me home, and watched over me night and day. I wanted only
water, for which I constantly shrieked. No one in the village believed
that I would ever recover, but the happiness of breathing my native air
and of once mor