away. Our corporal, however, shrugged his shoulders.
He was a very impudent little man, with a pock-eaten
face, full of pimples.
"Oh! I!" he said.
He clarified his thought by a cynical gesture, sat down on the heath, puffed at his pipe slowly, till fire appeared.
"Oh, piffle!" he concluded, emitting a cloud of smoke which vanished in the air.
While one company of chasseurs was detailed to the crossroads to establish an "impregnable barrier" there, my company went in the woods to "fell as many trees as possible." All the axes, bill-hooks and hatchets of the village were speedily requisitioned. Almost everything was used as a tool. For a whole day the blows of the axes were resounding and trees were falling. To spur us on to greater efforts, the general himself wanted to assist us in the vandalism.
"Come on, you scamps!" he would cry out at every occasion, clapping his hands. "Come on boys, let's get this one! . . ."
He himself pointed out the most stalwart among the trees, those which grew up straight and spread out like the columns of a temple. It was an orgy of destruction, criminal and foolish; a shout of brutal joy went up every time a tree fell on top of another with a great noise. The old trees became less dense, one could say they were mowed down by some gigantic and supernatural scythe. Two men were killed by the fall of an oak tree.
And the few trees which remained standing, austere in the midst of ruined trunks lying on the ground, and the twisted branches which rose up towards them like arms outstretched in supplication, were showing open wounds, deep and red gashes from which the sap was
oozing, weeping as it were.
