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By Root 2022 0

one of the windows. It was a baker’s shop in which there were some stranded soldiers together with the inhabitants, and when the house was taken, there were screams and a fearful vision of people being hustled across to the opposite wall: a flood in which could be glimpsed a woman’s skirt, a man’s jacket, a mane of white hair, and then the rattle of a firing squad and blood splashing up to the coping of the wall. The Germans were inflexible: any person not belonging to the armed forces who was found with weapons was shot at once, having wilfully deprived himself of all legal rights. In the face of the furious resistance of the village their anger was rising, and the terrible losses they had been suffering for nearly five hours provoked them to take atrocious reprisals. The gutters were running red and the dead were blocking the roadway, some crossroads were mere charnel-houses from which came the gasps of the dying. So then they could be seen throwing lighted straw into every house they captured after a fight, and others ran along with torches or sprinkled walls with paraffin. Soon whole streets were on fire and Bazeilles went up in flames.

Hence now in the centre of the village there only remained Weiss’s house, with its shutters closed, like a menacing fortress, determined never to give in.

‘Look out, here they come!’ cried the captain.

A volley from the attic and the first floor laid low three Bavarians who were creeping along by the walls. The others fell back and took cover in all the corners along the road; the siege of the house began, such a rain of bullets lashed the front that it was like a hailstorm. For nearly ten minutes this fusillade went on, making holes in the plaster but not doing much harm. But one of the men the captain had taken up with him into the attic was imprudent enough to show himself at a dormer window, and he was killed instantly with a bullet through the forehead.

‘Dammit, that’s one less!’ grunted the captain. ‘Do be careful, there aren’t so many of us that we can get killed for fun!’

He had taken a rifle himself and was firing from behind a shutter. But it was Laurent the gardener whom he admired the most. Kneeling with the barrel of his rifle supported in the narrow slit of a loophole, as though he were stalking game, he never let off a shot unless he was quite sure, and he even announced the result in advance.

‘Now for the little blue officer over there, I’ll get him in the heart… The other one further off, the tall skinny one, between the eyes… The fat one with the ginger beard – he’s getting me down, one in the belly for him…’

And each time the man fell, killed instantly, hit in the place he had indicated, and he went on calmly, with no rush, having plenty to do, as he put it, for it would take some time for him to kill them all off one by one like this.

‘Oh, if only my eyes were any good!’ Weiss kept saying furiously.

He had just broken his glasses and was very annoyed. He still had the folding ones, but he could not keep them firmly on his nose because of the sweat running down his face, and consequently he often fired at random, over excited and with shaky hands. A mounting passion was triumphing over his normal coolness.

‘Don’t be in a hurry, it’s no good at all,’ said Laurent. ‘Look, take aim carefully at that one over there without his cap, on the corner of the grocer’s… But that’s fine, you’ve smashed his foot, look at him jigging about in his own blood.’

Weiss looked at him and went a bit pale. He murmured:

‘You finish him off.’

‘What, and waste a bullet! Oh no. More use to do in another of them.’

The assailants must have noticed this formidable fire from the windows in the attic. Not a single man could step forward but he stayed there for good. So they brought up some fresh troops with orders to riddle the roof with bullets. That made the attic untenable, for the slates could be pierced as easily as sheets of thin paper, and the bullets came in on all sides, buzzing like bees. Each second meant risk of death.

‘Let’s go down,’ said the captain. ‘We can still hold