t Francois de Montmorency, Duc de Luxembourg and Marshal of France.
Now it belonged to the Marquise de Lamberty, a cousin of the King of
Spain.

I interrupted, for I wanted to hear about the chasseurs. I gave the
little old man a cigarette. He seized it eagerly--so eagerly that I also
handed him a cigar. He just sort of fondled that cigar for a moment and
then placed it in an inside pocket. It was a very cheap and very bad
French cigar, for I was in a part of the country that has never heard of
Havanas, but to the little old man it was something precious. "I will
keep it for Sunday," he said.

I then got him back to the seventy-five chasseurs. It was just eight
o'clock in the morning--a beautiful sunshiny morning--when the German
column appeared around the bend in the road which we could see across
the bridge, and which joined the highway from Luneville. There were
twelve thousand in that first column. One hundred and fifty thousand
more came later. A band was playing "Deutschland ueber alles" and the men
were singing. The closely packed front ranks of infantry broke into the
goose step as they came in sight of the town. It was a wonderful sight;
the sun glistened on their helmets; they marched as though on parade
right down almost to the opposite end of the bridge.

Then came the command to halt. For a moment there was a complete
silence. The Germans, only a couple of hundred yards from the barricade,
seemed slowly to consider the situation. The Captain of the chasseurs,
from a shelter behind the very little house that is still standing--and
where his men up the two roads could see him--softly waved his hand.

Crack-crack-crack--crack-crack-crack-crack--crack-crack-crack! The
bullets from the mitrailleuses whistled across the bridge into the front
ranks of the "Deutchland ueber alles" singers, while the men behind the
bridge barricade began a deadly rifle fire.

Have you ever heard a mitrailleuse? It is just like a telegraph
instrument, with its insistant clickety click-click-click, only it is a
hundred times as loud. Indeed I have been told by French officers that
it has sometimes been used as a telegraph instrument, so accurately can
its operator reel out its hundred and sixty shots a minute.

On that morning at the Gerbeviller barricade, however, it went faster
than the telegraph. These men on the converging roads just shifted their
range slightly and poured bullets into the next ranks of infantry and so
on ba