y were just angry through
and through. And it was all because of those seventy-five French
chasseurs who held the bridge. Some one called to her from the house.
She hobbled to the door. "Anyone can tell you about the seventy-five
chasseurs," she said, disappearing within.

I went on down the road and stood upon the bridge over the swift little
river. It was a narrow little bridge only wide enough for one wagon to
pass. Two roads from the town converged there, the one over which I had
passed and another which formed a letter "V" at the juncture with the
bridge. Across the river only one road led away from the bridge and it
ran straight up a hill, when it turned suddenly into the broad national
highway to Luneville about five miles away.

One house remained standing almost at the entrance to the bridge, at the
end nearest the town. Its roof was gone, and its walls bore the marks of
hundreds of bullets, but it was inhabited by a little old man of fifty,
who came out to talk with me. He was the village carpenter. His house
was burned, so he had taken refuge in the little house at the bridge.
During the time the Germans were there he had been a prisoner, but they
forgot him the morning the French army arrived. Everybody was in such a
hurry, he explained.

I asked him about the seventy-five chasseurs at the bridge. Ah, yes, we
were then standing on the site of their barricade. He would tell me
about it, for he had seen it all from his house half way up the hill.

The chasseurs were first posted across the river on the road to
Luneville, and when the Germans approached, early in the morning, they
fell back to the bridge, which they had barricaded the night before. It
was the only way into Gerbeviller, so the chasseurs determined to fight.
They had torn up the street and thrown great earthworks across one end
of the bridge. Additional barricades were thrown up on the two
converging streets, part way up the hill, behind which they had
mitrailleuses which could sweep the road at the other end of the bridge.

About a half mile to the south a narrow footbridge crossed the river,
only wide enough for one man. It was a little rustic affair that ran
through the grounds of the Chateau de Gerbeviller that faced the river
only a few hundred yards below the main bridge. It was a very ancient
chateau, built in the twelfth century and restored in the seventeenth
century. It was a royal chateau of the Bourbons. In it once lived the
grea