The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories (109 page)

We were almost dead with fright when the sergeant came in. He had heard loud words, and asked: “What is it, Father Moses? What is it about? What does this man want?”

Sorlé, who never lost her presence of mind, told him the whole story, shortly and clearly; he comprehended it at once.

“Twelve pipes of three-six, that makes twenty-four pipes of cognac. What luck for the garrison! what luck!”

“Yes,” said I, “but it cannot come in; the city gates are shut, and the wagons are surrounded by Cossacks.”

“Cannot come in!” cried the sergeant, raising his shoulders. “Go along! Do you take the governor for a fool? Is he going to refuse twenty-four pipes of good brandy, when the garrison needs it? Is he going to leave this windfall to the Cossacks? Madame Sorlé, pay the portage at once; and you, Father Moses, put on your cap and follow me to the governor’s, with the letter in your pocket. Come along! Don’t lose a minute! If the Cossacks have time to put their noses in your casks, you will find a famous deficit, I warrant you!”

When I heard that I exclaimed: “Sergeant, you have saved my life!” And I hastened to get my cap.

“Shall I pay the portage?” asked Sorlé.

“Yes! pay!” I answered as I went down, for it was plain that the wagoner could compel us. I went down with an anxious heart.

All that I remember after this is that the sergeant walked before me in the snow, that he said a few words to the sapper on orderly duty at the governor’s house, and that we went up the grand stairway with the marble balustrade.

Upstairs, in the gallery with the balustrade around it, he said to me: “Be easy, Father Moses! Take out your letter, and let me do the talking.”

He knocked softly at a door as he spoke:

Somebody said: “Come in!”

We went in.

Colonel Moulin, a fat man in a dressing-gown and little silk cap, was smoking his pipe in front of a good fire. He was very red, and had a caraffe of rum and a glass at its side on the marble mantel-piece, where were also a clock and vases of flowers.

“What is it?” he asked, turning round.

“Colonel, this is what is the matter,” replied the sergeant: “twelve pipes of spirits of wine have been stopped on the Mittelbronn hill, and are surrounded by Cossacks.”

“Cossacks!” exclaimed the governor. “Have they broken through our lines already?”

“Yes,” said the sergeant, “a sudden attack of Cossacks! They have possession of the twelve pipes of three-six which this patriot brought from Pézenas to sustain the garrison.”

“Some bandits,” said the governor—“thieves!”

“Here is the letter,” said the sergeant, taking it from my hand.

The colonel cast his eyes over it, and said hastily:

“Sergeant, go and take twenty-five men of your company. Go on the run, free the wagons, and put in requisition horses from the village to bring them into the city.”

And, as we were going: “Wait!” said he; and he went to his bureau and wrote four words; “here is the order.”

When we were once on the stairway, the sergeant said: “Father Moses, run to the cooper’s; we may perhaps need him and his boys. I know the Cossacks; their first thought will be to unload the casks so as to be more sure of keeping them. Have them bring ropes and ladders; and I will go to the Barracks and get my men together.”

Then I ran home like a hart, for I was enraged at the Cossacks. I went in to get my musket and cartridge-box. I could have fought an army: I could not see straight.

“What is it? Where are you going?” asked Sorlé and Zeffen.

“You will know by and by,” I replied.

I went to Schweyer’s. He had two large saddle-pistols, which he put quickly into his apron-belt with the axe; his two boys, Nickel and Frantz, took the ladder and ropes, and we ran to the French gate.

The sergeant was not yet there; but two minutes after he came running down the street by the rampart with thirty veterans in file, their muskets on their shoulders.

The officer guarding the postern had only to see the order to let us go out, and a few minutes after we were in the trenches behind the hospital, where the sergeant ranged his men.

“It is cognac!” he told them; “twenty-four pipes of cognac! So, comrades, attention! The garrison is without brandy; those who do not like brandy have only to fall to the rear.”

But they all wanted to be in front, and laughed in anticipation.

We went up the stairway, and were ranged in order in the covered ways. It might have been five o’clock. Looking from the top of the glacis we could see the broad meadow of Eichmatt, and above it the hills of Mittelbronn covered with snow. The sky was full of clouds, and night was coming on. It was very cold.

“Forward!” said the sergeant.

And we gained the highway. The veterans ran, in two files, at the right and left, their backs rounded, and their muskets in their shoulder-belts; the snow was up to their knees.

Schweyer, his two boys, and I walked behind.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, the veterans, who ran all the way, had left us far behind; we heard for some time their cartridge-boxes rattling, but soon this sound was lost in the distance, and then we heard the dog of the Trois-Maisons barking in his chain.

The deep silence of the night gave me a chance to think. If it had not been for the thought of my spirits of wine, I would have gone straight back to Phalsburg, but fortunately that thought prevailed, and I said:

“Make haste, Schweyer, make haste!”

“Make haste!” he exclaimed angrily, “you can make haste to get back your spirits of wine, but what do we care for it? Is the highway the place for us? Are we bandits that we should risk our lives?”

I understood at once that he wanted to escape, and was enraged.

“Take care, Schweyer,” said I, “take care! If you and your boys go back, people will say that you have been a traitor to the city brandy, and that is worse than being a traitor to the flag, especially in a cooper.”

“The devil take thee!” said he, “we ought never to have come.”

However, he kept on ascending the hill with me. Nickel and Frantz followed us without hurrying.

When we reached the plateau we saw lights in the village. All was still and seemed quiet, although there was a great crowd around the two first houses.

The door of the
Bunch of Grapes
was wide open, and its kitchen fire shone through the passage to the street where my two wagons stood.

This crowd came from the Cossacks who were carousing at Heitz’s house, after tying their horses under the shed. They had made Mother Heitz cook them a good hot soup, and we saw them plainly, two or three hundred paces distant, go up and down the outside steps, with jugs and bottles which they passed from one to another. The thought came to me that they were drinking my spirits of wine, for a lantern hung behind the first wagon, and the rascals were all going from it with their elbows raised. I was so furious that, regardless of danger, I began to run to put a stop to the pillage.

Fortunately the veterans were in advance of me, or I should have been murdered by the Cossacks; I had not gone half way when our whole troop sprang from the fences of the highway, and ran like a pack of wolves, crying out, “To the bayonet!”

You never saw such confusion, Fritz. In a second the Cossacks were on their horses, and the veterans in the midst of them; the front of the inn with its trellis, its pigeon-house, and its little fenced garden, was lighted up by the firing of muskets and pistols. Heitz’s two daughters stood at the windows, with their arms lifted and screamed so that they could be heard all over Mittelbronn.

Every minute, in the midst of the confusion, something fell upon the road, and then the horses started and ran through the fields like deer, with their heads run out, and their manes and tails flying. The villagers ran; Father Heitz slipped into the barn, and climbed up the ladder, and I came up breathless, as if out of my senses.

I had not gone more than fifteen steps when a Cossack, who was running away at full speed, turned about furiously close to me, with his lance in the air, and called out, “Hurra!”

I had only time to stoop, and I felt the wind from the lance as it passed along my body.

I never felt so in my life, Fritz; I felt the chill of death, that trembling of the flesh, of which the prophet spoke: “Fear came upon me and trembling; the hair of my flesh stood up.”

But what shows the spirit of wisdom and prudence which the Lord puts into his creatures, when he means to spare them for a good old age, is that immediately afterward, in spite of my trembling knees, I went and sat under the first wagon, where the blows of the lances could not reach me; and there I saw the veterans finish the extermination of the rascals, who had retreated into the court, and not one of whom escaped.

Five or six were in a heap before the door, and three others were stretched upon the highway.

This did not take more than ten minutes; then all was dark again, and I heard the sergeant call: “Cease firing!”

Heitz, who had come down from his hay-loft, had just lighted a lantern; the sergeant seeing me under the wagon, called out: “Are you wounded, Father Moses?”

“No,” I replied, “but a Cossack tried to thrust his lance into me, and I got into a safe place.”

He laughed aloud, and gave me his hand to help me to rise.

“Father Moses,” said he, “I was frightened about you. Wipe your back; people might think you were not brave.”

I laughed too, and thought: “People may think what they please! The great thing is to live in good health as long as possible.”

We had only one wounded, Corporal Duhem, an old man, who bandaged his own leg, and tried to walk. He had had a blow from a lance in the right calf. He was placed on the first wagon, and Lehnel, Heitz’s granddaughter, came and gave him a drop of cherry-brandy, which at once restored his strength and even his good spirits.

“It is the fifteenth,” he exclaimed. “I am in for a week at the hospital; but leave me the bottle for the compresses.”

I was delighted to see my twelve pipes on the wagons, for Schweyer and his two boys had run away, and without their help we could hardly have reloaded.

I tapped at once at the bung-hole of the hindmost cask to find out how much was missing. These scamps of Cossacks had already drunk nearly half a measure of spirits; Father Heitz told me that some of them scarcely added a drop of water. Such creatures must have throats of tin; the oldest topers among us could not bear a glass of three-six without being upset.

At last all was ready and we had only to return to the city. When I think of it, it all seems before me now: Heitz’s large dapple-gray horses going out of the stable one by one; the sergeant standing by the dark door with his lantern in his hand, and calling out, “Come, hurry up! The rascals may come back!” On the road in front of the inn, the veterans surrounded the wagons; farther on the right some peasants, who had hastened to the scene with pitchforks and mattocks, were looking at the dead Cossacks, and myself, standing on the stairs above, singing praises to God in my heart as I thought how glad Sorlé and Zeffen and little Sâfel would be to see me come back with our goods.

And then when all is ready, when the little bells jingle, when the whip snaps, and we start on the way—what delight!

Ah Fritz! everything looks bright after thirty years; we forget fears, anxieties, and fatigues; but the memory of good men and happy hours remains with us forever!

The veterans, on both sides of the wagons, with their muskets under their arms, escorted my twelve pipes as if they were the tabernacle; Heitz led the horses, and the sergeant and I walked behind.

“Well, Father Moses!” said he laughing, “it has all gone off well; are you satisfied?”

“More than I can possibly tell, sergeant! What would have been my ruin will make the fortune of my family, and we owe it all to you.”

“Go along,” said he, “you are joking.”

He laughed, but I felt deeply; to have been in danger of losing everything, and then to regain it all and make profit out of it—it makes one feel deeply.

I exclaimed inwardly: “I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people; and I will sing praises unto thee among the nations.

“For thy mercy is great above the heavens, and thy truth reacheth unto the clouds.”

CHAPTER XI

FATHER MOSES RETURNS IN TRIUMPH

Now I must tell you about our return to Phalsburg.

You may suppose that my wife and children, after seeing me take my gun and go away, were in a state of great anxiety. About five o’clock Sorlé went out with Zeffen to try to learn what was going on, and only then they heard that I had started for Mittelbronn with a detachment of veterans.

Imagine their terror!

The rumor of these extraordinary proceedings had spread through the city, and quantities of people were on the bastion of the artillery barracks, looking on from the distance. Burguet was there, with the mayor, and other persons of distinction, and a number of women and children, all trying to see through the darkness. Some insisted that Moses marched with the detachment, but nobody would believe it, and Burguet exclaimed: “It is not possible that a sensible man like Moses would go and risk his life in fighting Cossacks—no, it is not possible!”