"But where did he come from? Where did he spring from?"
"But the night-patrols on the frontier? The sentries? The company on duty at Ornequin?"
"Never heard of again. No one knows anything, not a word, not a rumor, about those three hundred men whose business it was to keep watch and to warn the others. You can reckon up the Corvigny garrison, with the soldiers who escaped and the dead whom the inhabitants identified and buried. But the three hundred light infantry of Ornequin disappeared without leaving the shadow of a trace behind them, not a fugitive, not a wounded man, not a corpse, nothing at all."
"It seems incredible. Whom did you talk to?"
"I saw ten people last night who, for a month, with no one to interfere with them except a few soldiers of the Landsturm placed in charge of Corvigny, have pursued a minute inquiry into all these problems, without establishing so much as a plausible theory. One thing alone is certain: the business was prepared long ago, down to the slightest detail. The exact range had been taken of the forts, the cupolas, the church and the square; and the siege-gun had been placed in position before and accurately laid so that the eleven shells should strike the eleven objects aimed at. That's all. The rest is mystery."
"And what about the château? And Élisabeth?"
Paul had risen from his seat. The bugles were sounding the morning roll-call. The gun-fire was twice as intense as before. They both started for the square; and Paul continued:
"Here, too, the mystery is bewildering and perhaps worse. One of the cross-roads that run through the fields between Corvigny and Ornequin has been made a boundary by the enemy which no one here had the right to overstep under pain of death."
"I don't know, I know nothing more. And it's terrible, this shadow of death lying over everything, over every incident. It appears--I have not been able to find out where the rumor originated--that the village of Ornequin, near the château, no longer exists. It has been entirely destroyed, more than that, annihilated; and its four hundred inhabitants have been sent away into captivity. And then . . ." Paul shuddered and, lowering his voice, went on, "And then . . . what did they do at the château? You can see the house, you can still see it at a distance, with its walls and turrets standing. But what happened behind those walls? What has become of Élisabeth? For nearly four weeks she has been living in the midst of those brutes, poor thing, exposed to every outrage! . . ."