All followed the captain, who allotted them a post along the parapet. The women busied themselves in placing ammunition within reach of the marksmen.
Marthe was left alone with her husband. She saw that the scene had stirred him. In the way in which those decent folk realized their duty and performed it without being compelled to, simply and spontaneously, there was that sort of greatness which touches a man to the very depths of his soul.
She said to him:
"Well, Philippe?"
His face was drawn; he did not reply.
She continued:
"Well, go… What are you waiting for? No one will notice your flight… Be quick… Take the opportunity while it's here…"
They heard the captain addressing his lieutenant:
"Keep down your head, Fabrègues, can't you? They'll see you, if you're not careful…"
Marthe seized Philippe's arm and, bending towards him:
"Now confess that you can't go … that all this upsets your notions … and that your duty is here … that you feel it."
"There they are! There they are!" said a voice.
"Yes," said Captain Daspry, searching the road through the orifice of a loop-hole, "yes, there they are!.. At six hundred yards, at most … It's the vanguard… They are skirting the pool and they haven't a notion that …"
A sergeant came to tell him that the enemy had hoisted a gun on the slope of the pass. The officer was alarmed, but old Morestal began to laugh:
"Let them bring up as many guns as they please!.. They can only take up positions which we command and which I have noted. A few good marksmen are enough to keep them from placing a battery."
And, turning to his son, he said to him, quite naturally, as though nothing had ever parted them:
"Are you coming, Philippe? We'll demolish them between us."
Captain Daspry interfered:
"Don't fire! We are not discovered yet. Wait till I give the order… There'll be time enough later…"
Old Morestal had moved away.
Philippe walked resolutely towards the gate that led to the garden, to the open country. But he had not taken ten steps, when he stopped. He seemed to be vaguely suffering; and Marthe, who had not left his side, Marthe, anxious, full of mingled hope and apprehension, watched every phase of the tragic struggle:
"All the past is calling on you, Philippe; all the love for France that the past has bequeathed to you. Listen to its voice."
And, replying to every possible objection:
"Yes, I know, your intelligence rebels against it. But is one's intelligence everything?.. Obey your instinct, Philippe… It's your instinct that is right."
"No, no," he stammered, "one's instinct is never right…"
"It is right. But for that, you would be far away by now. But you can't go. Your whole being refuses to go. Your legs have not the strength for flight."
The Col du Diable was pouring forth troops and more troops, whose swarming masses showed along the slope. Others must be coming by the Albern Road; and, on every side, along every path and through every gap, the men of Germany were invading the soil of France.
The vanguard reached the high-road, at the end of the Étang-des-Moines.
There was a dull roll of the drum; and, suddenly, in the near silence, a hoarse voice barked out a German word of command.
Philippe started as though he had been struck.
And Marthe clung to him, pitilessly:
"Do you hear, Philippe? Do you understand? The German speech on French soil! Their language forced upon us!"
"Oh, no!" he said. "That can't be… That will never be!"
"Why should it never be? Invasion comes first … and then conquest … and subjection…"
Near them, the captain ordered:
"Let no one stir!"
Bullets spluttered against the walls, while the sounds of firing reverberated. A window-pane was smashed on the floor above. And more bullets broke fragments of stone from the coping of the parapet. The enemy, surprised at the disappearance of the French troops, were feeling their way before passing below that house, whose gloomy aspect must needs strike them as suspicious.
"Ah!" said a soldier, spinning on his heels and falling on the threshold of the drawing-room, his face covered with blood.
The women ran to his assistance.
Philippe gazed haggard-eyed at that man who was about to die, at that man who belonged to the same race, who lived under the same sky as himself, who breathed the same air, ate the same bread and drank the same wine.
Marthe had taken down a rifle and handed it to Philippe. He grasped it with a sort of despair:
"Who would ever have told me …?" he stammered.
"I, Philippe … I was sure of you. We have not to do with theories, but with implacable facts. These are realities, to-day… The enemy is treading the bit of earth where you were born, where you played as a child. The enemy is forcing his way into France. Defend her, Philippe…"
He clenched his fists around his rifle and she saw that his eyes were full of tears.
He murmured, quivering with inward rebellion:
"Our sons will refuse … I shall teach them to refuse… What I cannot do, what I have not the courage to do they shall do."
"Perhaps, but what does the future matter!" she said, eagerly. "What does to-morrow's duty matter! Our duty, yours and mine, is the duty of to-day."
A voice whispered:
"They're coming near, captain… They're coming near…"
Another voice, beside Philippe, the voice of one of the women tending the wounded man, moaned:
"He's dead… Poor fellow!.. He's dead…"
The guns roared on the frontier.
"Are you coming, Philippe?" asked old Morestal.
"I'm coming, father," he said.
Very quickly, he walked out on the terrace and knelt beside his father, against the balusters. Marthe knelt down behind him and wept at the thought of what he must be suffering. Nevertheless, she did not doubt but that, notwithstanding his despair, he was acting in all conscience.
The captain said, clearly, and the order was repeated to the end of the garden:
"Fire as you please… Sight at three hundred yards…"
There were a few seconds of solemn waiting … then the terrible word:
"Fire!"
Yonder, along the barrel of his rifle, near an old oak in whose branches he once used to climb, Philippe saw a great lubber in uniform throw up his hands, bend his legs one after the other and stretch himself along the ground, slowly, as though to sleep…