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“Fire into the mass,” he said; “don’t stop to take aim. They are too cowardly to risk an advance unless they see your fire begin to slacken.”

And so the siege of the little house went on as if it was to last for eternity. Twenty times it seemed as if it must be swept away bodily by the storm of iron that beat upon it, and each time, as the smoke drifted away, it was seen amid the sulphurous blasts, torn, pierced, mangled, but erect and menacing, spitting fire and lead with undiminished venom from each one of its orifices. The assailants, furious that they should be detained for such length of time and lose so many men before such a hovel, yelled and fired wildly in the distance, but had not courage to attempt to carry the lower floor by a rush.

“Look out!” shouted the corporal, “there is a shutter about to fall!”

The concentrated fire had torn one of the inside blinds from its hinges, but Weiss darted forward and pushed a wardrobe before the window, and Laurent was enabled to continue his operations under cover. One of the soldiers was lying at his feet with his jaw broken, losing blood freely. Another received a bullet in his chest, and dragged himself over to the wall, where he lay gasping in protracted agony, while convulsive movements shook his frame at intervals. They were but eight, now, all told, not counting the lieutenant, who, too weak to speak, his back supported by the headboard of the bed, continued to give his directions by signs. As had been the case with the attic, the three rooms of the first floor were beginning to be untenable, for the mangled mattresses no longer afforded protection against the missiles; at every instant the plaster fell in sheets from the walls and ceiling, and the furniture was in process of demolition: the sides of the wardrobe yawned as if they had been cloven by an ax. And worse still, the ammunition was nearly exhausted.

“It’s too bad!” grumbled Laurent; “just when everything was going so beautifully!”

But suddenly Weiss was struck with an idea.

“Wait!”

He had thought of the dead soldier up in the garret above, and climbed up the ladder to search for the cartridges he must have about him. A wide space of the roof had been crushed in; he saw the blue sky, a patch of bright, wholesome light that made him start. Not wishing to be killed, he crawled over the floor on his hands and knees, then, when he had the cartridges in his possession, some thirty of them, he made haste down again as fast his legs could carry him.

Downstairs, as he was sharing his newly acquired treasure with the gardener’s lad, a soldier uttered a piercing cry and sank to his knees. They were but seven; and presently they were but six, a bullet having entered the corporal’s head at the eye and lodged in the brain.

From that time on, Weiss had no distinct consciousness of what was going on around him; he and the five others continued to blaze away like lunatics, expending their cartridges, with not the faintest idea in their heads that there could be such a thing as surrender. In the three small rooms the floor was strewn with fragments of the broken furniture. Ingress and egress were barred by the corpses that lay before the doors; in one corner a wounded man kept up a pitiful wail that was frightful to hear. Every inch of the floor was slippery with blood; a thin stream of blood from the attic was crawling lazily down the stairs. And the air was scarce respirable, an air thick and hot with sulphurous fumes, heavy with smoke, filled with an acrid, nauseating dust; a darkness dense as that of night, through which darted the red flame-tongues of the musketry.

“By God’s thunder!” cried Weiss, “they are bringing up artillery!”

It was true. Despairing of ever reducing that handful of madmen, who had consumed so much of their time, the Bavarians had run up a gun to the corner of the Place de l’Eglise, and were putting it into position; perhaps they would be allowed to pass when they should have knocked the house to pieces with their solid shot. And the honor there was to them in the proceeding, the gun trained on them down there in the square, excited the bitter merriment of the besieged; the utmost intensity of scorn was in their gibes. Ah! the cowardly bougres, with their artillery! Kneeling in his old place still, Laurent carefully adjusted his aim and each time picked off a gunner, so that the service of the piece became impossible, and it was five or six minutes before they fired their first shot. It ranged high, moreover, and only clipped away a bit of the roof.