Each step also increased the hatred in his heart. Oh, how right his father had been to loathe those people! Paul now saw them at work. On every side were stupid devastation and unreasoning destruction, on every side arson, pillage and death, hostages shot, women murdered, bestially, for the love of the thing. Churches, country-houses, mansions of the rich and cabins of the poor: nothing remained. The very ruins had been razed to the ground, the very corpses tortured.
O the delight of defeating such an enemy! Though reduced to half its full strength, Paul's regiment, released like a pack of hounds, never ceased biting at the wild beast which it was hunting. The quarry seemed more vicious and formidable the nearer it approached to the frontier; and our men kept rushing at it in the mad hope of giving it the death-stroke.
One day Paul read on a sign-post at a cross-roads:
Corvigny, 14 Kil. Ornequin, 31 Kil. 400. The Frontier, 33 Kil. 200.
Corvigny! Ornequin! A thrill passed through his frame when he saw those unexpected words. As a rule, absorbed as he was by the heat of the conflict and by his private cares, he paid little attention to the names of the places which he passed; and he learnt them only by chance. And now suddenly he was within so short a distance of the Château d'Ornequin! "Corvigny, 14 kilometers:" less than nine miles! . . . Were the French troops making for Corvigny, for the little fortified place which the Germans had taken by assault and taken under such strange conditions?
That day, they had been fighting since daylight against an enemy whose resistance seemed to grow slacker and slacker. Paul, at the head of a squad of men, was sent to the village of Bléville with orders to enter it if the enemy had retired, but go no farther. And it was just beyond the last houses of the village that he saw the sign-post.
At the time, he was not quite easy in his mind. A Taube had flown over the country a few minutes before. There was the possibility of an ambush.
"Let's go back to the village," he said. "We'll barricade ourselves while we wait."
But there was a sudden noise behind a wooded hill that interrupted the road in the Corvigny direction, a noise that became more and more definite, until Paul recognized the powerful throb of a motor, doubtless a motor carrying a quick-firing gun.
