The sultry heats and cloudless nights of the wondrous and awful summer
of the year 1870 passed by, and to the Berceau de Dieu it was a summer
of fair promise and noble harvest, and never had the land brought
forth in richer profusion for man and beast. Some of the youngest and
ablest-bodied labourers were indeed drawn away to join those swift
trains that hurried thousands and tens of thousands to the frontier by
the Rhine. But most of the male population were married, and were the
fathers of young children; and the village was only moved to a thrill of
love and of honest pride to think how its young Louis and Jean and Andre
and Valentin were gone full of high hope and high spirit, to come back,
maybe,--who could say not?--with epaulets and ribbons of honour. Why
they were gone they knew not very clearly, but their superiors affirmed
that they were gone to make greater the greatness of France; and the
folk of the Berceau believed it, having in a corner of their quiet
hearts a certain vague, dormant, yet deep-rooted love, on which was
written the name of their country.

News came slowly and seldom to the Berceau. Unless some one of the men
rode his mule to the little town, which was but very rarely, or unless
some peddler came through the village with a news-sheet or so in his
pack or rumours and tidings on his lips, nothing that was done beyond
its fields and woods came to it. And the truth of what it heard it had
no means of measuring or sifting. It believed what it was told, without
questioning; and as it reaped the harvests in the rich hot sun of
August, its peasants laboured cheerily in the simple and firm belief
that mighty things were being done for them and theirs in the far
eastern provinces by their great army, and that Louis and Jean and Andre
and Valentin and the rest--though indeed no tidings had been heard of
them--were safe and well and glorious somewhere, away where the sun