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Updated: June 24, 2025
"I," said Cecil, "am going to drive Betty in the dog-cart." "She'll probably take the reins," said Sir Thorald, cynically. Cecil brandished his whip and looked determined; but it was Betty who drove him to Saint-Lys station, after all. The adieux were said, even more tearfully this time. Jack kissed his sister tenderly, and she wept a little on his shoulder thinking of Rickerl.
Even in Saint-Lys, where all day and all night the troop-trains rushed by, the cheers of the war-bound soldiers leaning from the flying cars were becoming monotonous in the ears of the sober villagers. When the long, flat cars, piled with cannon, passed, the people stared at the slender guns, mute, canvas-covered, tilted skyward.
The Curé is a prisoner; the Mayor of Saint-Lys and the Notary have been sent to the camp at Strassbourg. We, my 'Terrors of Morteyn' and I, are still facing the vandals; except for us, the Province of Lorraine is empty of Frenchmen in armed resistance." The old man, in his grotesque uniform, touched his bristling mustache and muttered: "Nom d'une pipe!" several times to steady his voice.
Once a little excitement came to Saint-Lys when a battalion of red-legged infantry tramped into the village square and stacked rifles and jeered at the mayor and drank many bottles of red wine to the health of the shy-eyed girls peeping at them from every lattice.
Lorraine bent nearer as the old man said: "The Château de Nesville is a mass of cinders; Morteyn, a stone skeleton. Pierre is dead. There are many dead there many, many dead. The Prussians burned Saint-Lys yesterday; they shot Bosquet, the letter-carrier; they hung his boy to the railroad trestle, then shot him to pieces.
They lingered there in the darkness a moment, unconscious of the amazed but humourous glances of the cook; then Jack went out and found Tricasse, and walked with him to the top of the tree-clad ridge. A road ran under the overhanging bank. "I didn't know we were so near a road," said Jack, startled. Tricasse laid his finger on his lips. "It is the high-road to Saint-Lys.
The fierce little man with the gray mustache, who was named Tricasse, and who commanded the Saint-Lys Pompiers, spoke gravely of Francs-corps, and drank too much eau-de-vie every evening.
Jack Marche heard of these things but saw little of them. The great war wave rolling through the provinces towards the Rhine skirted them at Saint-Lys, and scarcely disturbed them. They heard that Douay was marching through the country somewhere, some said towards Wissembourg, some said towards Saarbrück. But these towns were names to the peasants of Saint-Lys tant pis for the two towns! And General Douay who was he? Probably a fat man in red breeches and polished boots, wearing a cocked-hat and a cross on his breast. Anyway, they would chase the Prussians and kill a few, as they had chased the Russians in the Crimea, and the Italians in Rome, and the Kabyles in Oran. The result? Nothing but a few new colours for the ribbons in their sweethearts' hair like that pretty Magenta and Solferino and Sebastopol gray. "Fichtre! Faut-il gaspiller tout de même! mais,
"I had been to Forbach, where my cousin Passerat is a miner in the coal-mines. This morning I left to drive to Saint-Lys, having in my wagon these sacks of coal that my cousin Passerat procured for me,
The circle of gaunt, sallow faces grew friendly, and, as Lorraine stood up, looking questioningly from one to the other, caps were doffed, rifle-butts fell to the ground. "Why, it's Monsieur Tricasse of the Saint-Lys Pompiers!" she said. "Oh, and there is le Père Passerat, and little Émile Brun! Émile, my son, why are you not with your regiment?"
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