"Mother, mother, awake; get up--I am thirsty, I am so thirsty."

But the instructions of the new chief were imperative, and the
officers, vexed and grieved to see the successes they had achieved
thus rendered nugatory, had nothing for it but to give orders for the
retreat. It was plain that the commander-in-chief, possessed by a
haunting dread of the enemy's turning movement, was determined to
sacrifice everything in order to escape from the toils. The Place de
l'Eglise was evacuated, the troops fell back from street to street;
soon the broad avenue was emptied of its defenders. Women shrieked and
sobbed, men swore and shook their fists at the retiring troops,
furious to see themselves abandoned thus. Many shut themselves in
their houses, resolved to die in their defense.

"Well, _I_ am not going to give up the ship!" shouted Weiss, beside
himself with rage. "No! I will leave my skin here first. Let them come
on! let them come and smash my furniture and drink my wine!"

Wrath filled his mind to the exclusion of all else, a wild, fierce
desire to fight, to kill, at the thought that the hated foreigner
should enter his house, sit in his chair, drink from his glass. It
wrought a change in all his nature; everything that went to make up
his daily life--wife, business, the methodical prudence of the small
bourgeois--seemed suddenly to become unstable and drift away from him.
And he shut himself up in his house and barricaded it, he paced the
empty apartments with the restless impatience of a caged wild beast,
going from room to room to make sure that all the doors and windows
were securely fastened. He counted his cartridges and found he had
forty left, then, as he was about to give a final look to the meadows