Meanwhile, the captain and the corporal had already begun to inspect the house. Nothing could be done on the ground floor, so they contented themselves with pushing a quantity of furniture before the door and the windows, with the view of barricading them as stoutly as possible. Then they organised the defence in the three little rooms on the first floor and the garret up above; approving, by the way, of the preparations that Weiss had already made, the mattresses placed against the shutters, and the loopholes devised in the latter between the transverse laths. Whilst the captain was venturing to peep out to examine the surroundings, he heard a child calling and crying. 'Who's that?' he asked.
Then Weiss, in his mind's eye, again espied poor little Auguste in the adjacent dyeworks, his face purple with fever as he lay between his white sheets asking for something to drink, and calling for his mother, who could never more answer him; for she was lying across the tiled threshold with her head smashed to pieces. And as this vision rose up before him he made a sorrowful gesture, and replied: 'It's a poor little fellow whose mother has been killed by a shell, and who is crying there, next door.'
'Thunder!' muttered Laurent. 'What a price we shall have to make them pay for it all!'
As yet only some stray bullets had struck the house-front. Weiss and the captain, accompanied by the gardener and two soldiers, had gone up to the garret, whence they could keep watch over the road. They could see it obliquely as far as the Place de l'Eglise, which was now in the possession of the Bavarians, who only continued advancing, however, with great difficulty and extreme caution. A handful of soldiers, at the corner of a lane, kept them at bay during nearly a quarter of an hour, with so galling a fire that there was soon quite a heap of slain. Then, at the other corner, there was a house which they had to secure possession of before proceeding any farther. At one moment, as the smoke blew off, a woman could be espied firing with a gun from one of the windows. It was the house of a baker; some other soldiers had been forgotten there, mingled with the occupants; and when the place was at last captured by the foe, loud shouts resounded, and a frightful scramble whirled to the wall over the way--a rush, amid which the woman's skirt and a man's jacket and bristling white hair suddenly appeared to view. Then came the sound of platoon firing, and blood spurted to the coping of the wall. The Germans were inflexible; every person, not belonging to the belligerent forces, who was captured with arms in his hand, was shot down there and then, as having placed himself beyond the pale of the law of nations. And their wrath was rising in presence of the furious resistance offered by the village. The frightful losses they had sustained during nearly five hours' combat urged them on to atrocious reprisals. The gutters were running red with blood, corpses were barring the streets, and some crossways were like charnel-houses, whence the rattle of death could be heard ascending to the sky. And they were seen to throw lighted straw into each house they carried by force. Some of them ran about with torches, others smeared the walls with petroleum, and soon entire streets were on fire--Bazeilles blazed.