"Forward! forward!" shouted the officers.

The men passed over the body of their comrade, and under a hail of
bullets entered the town.

Dr. Reynaud and the Abbe Constantin marched with the troops; they stopped
by the wounded man; the blood was rushing in floods from his mouth.

"There is nothing to be done," said the doctor. "He is dying; he belongs
to you."

The priest knelt down by the dying man, and the doctor rose to go toward
the village. He had not taken ten steps when he stopped, beat the air
with both hands, and fell all at once to the ground. The priest ran to
him; he was dead-killed on the spot by a bullet through the temples.
That evening the village was ours, and the next day they placed in the
cemetery of Villersexel the body of Dr. Reynaud.

Two months later the Abbe Constantin took back to Longueval the coffin of
his friend, and behind the coffin, when it was carried from the church,
walked an orphan. Jean had also lost his mother. At the news of her
husband's death, Madame Reynaud had remained for twenty-four hours
petrified, crushed, without a word or a tear; then fever had seized her,
then delirium, and after a fortnight, death.

Jean was alone in the world; he was fourteen years old. Of that family,
where for more than a century all had been good and honest, there
remained only a child kneeling beside a grave; but he, too, promised to
be what his father and grandfather before him had been--good, and honest,
and true.