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Miles southward beyond the river and the lands on that side, Lake des Allemands was combing with the tempest and hissing with the rain. Still farther away, on the little bayou and at the railway-station in the edge of the swamp that we already know, and westward over the prairie where Claude had vanished into the world, all life was hidden and mute.
Les Allemands, they have taken them also ... they are dead also, peutetre." "And you?" I continued. "Where was your home?" "Ah, but it is the long story. We live close by Liége. It is a small village. The Uhlans come and we are sorely frightened. We hide in the cellar, and do not go out at all. While there les Allemands post a notice in the village.
He was about to start on a tour of observation eastward through a series of short canals that span the shaking prairies from bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des Allemands, so through Lake Ouacha into and up Barataria, again across prairie, and at length, leaving Lake Cataouaché on the left, through cypress-swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans.
A large lake, Des Allemands, collects the waters from the higher lands on the river and bayou, and by an outlet of the same name carries them to Barataria Bay. Lying many feet below the flood level of the streams, protected by heavy dikes, with numerous steam-engines for crushing canes and pumping water, and canals and ditches in every direction, this region resembles a tropical Holland.
What were all those thousands of little ant-like things crawling forward over the slopes? Thousands and scores of thousands of men, and horses and guns! "Les Anglais? Toujours les Anglais?" An English officer laughed, in a queer way, without any mirth in his eyes. "Les Allemands, mon vieux. Messieurs les Boches!" "L'enemi? Non pas possible!"
Suddenly a soldier crouching beside me cried, "Les Allemands! Les Allemands!" and from the woods which screened the railway- embankment burst a long line of grey figures, hoarsely cheering. At almost the same moment I heard a sudden splutter of shots in the village street behind me and my driver screamed, "Hurry for your life, monsieur! The Uhlans are upon us!"
She awaited in terror the coming of her baby, and the fiends who had outraged her had brutally cut off her right arm just a little above the elbow. "How did this happen to you, Mademoiselle?" I asked in French. "Ah, Monsieur," she replied, "les Allemands, they did chop it off." "Why, Mademoiselle, surely no German would do such a hideous thing as that without some reason."
Though sundry hundreds of thousands of Germans had gone that way, no burnt houses or squandered fields marked their wake; and the few peasants who had not run away at the approach of the dreaded Allemands were back at work, trying to gather their crops in barrows or on their backs, since they had no work-cattle left.
They were tortured by anxiety: "Les Allemands vont venir ici de Shermans come heer?" they asked. But I knew no more than they did. I told them, against my own conviction, that the German advance would be held up, but they remained anxious. The uproar of the cannonade was louder than ever. All the windows of the building shook and rattled.
Pardonnez mon extase.... Ah! ai compris votre canon.... Oui, oui, la grande-bataille.... Allemands chiens! And then striking his breast violently: 'Dans le coeur, moi ... je vous porte.... Ah! How do such works come to be neglected by our Republic? How is it they have not a place in our public life? Why are they not part of our great ceremonies?
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