'Ah! the dirty blackguards, the dirty blackguards!'
And still he kept on firing--so rapidly in fact that the barrel of his chassepot began to burn his fingers.
Everything now betokened a terrible attack. The fusillade had ceased on the side of the meadows. The Bavarians had become masters of a narrow stream fringed with poplars and pollard willows, and were preparing to assault the houses defending the Place de l'Eglise. Their skirmishers had prudently fallen back, and now the sunshine alone was drowsily streaming in a golden sheet over the immense grassy expanse, flecked here and there with black patches--the corpses of the soldiers who had been killed. And accordingly, the Lieutenant of Marine Infantry, realising that danger would henceforth come from the side of the street, evacuated the courtyard of the dyeworks, leaving merely a sentry there; and speedily ranged his men along the side-walk, informing them that should the enemy obtain possession of the Place de l'Eglise they were to barricade themselves inside the building, on the first floor, and defend it as long as they had a cartridge left them. The men fired as they pleased, lying on the ground, screened by border stones and profiting by the slightest projections of the buildings; and along the broad, deserted highway, bright with sunshine, there now sped a perfect hurricane of lead, with streaks of smoke--a hailstorm, as it were, driven along by a violent wind. A girl was seen to dart madly across the road without receiving any injury; then an old peasant in a blouse, stubbornly bent upon taking his horse into the stable, was struck by a bullet in the forehead, the force of the shock throwing him into the middle of the road. Moreover, the roof of the church had just been broken in by a shell, and two other projectiles had set fire to some houses, whose timbers crackled and blazed in the broad sunlight. And the sight of that poor creature, Françoise, pounded to pieces near her ailing child, of the peasant lying in the road with the bullet in his skull, of the damaged church and the flaming houses, put the finishing touch to the wrath of the inhabitants, who, rather than fly to Belgium, had preferred to stay and meet death in their modest homes. And men of the middle classes and sons of toil, men in coats and men in blouses, fired on the enemy from their windows with a fury akin to madness.