Old Jules Lemaire, ex-sergeant in the 3rd regiment of the line, raised his wine glass.

"Bonne chance," he said, "and may you fight the devils as we did in 1870 and 1871, and with more success too."

"Enough of you and your 1870," said someone roughly. "We go out to win where you lost; there will be no Woerth or Sedan in this war. We will drive the Prussians back to Berlin; you let them march to Paris. We are going to act, whereas you can only talk—you are much too old, you see, PÈre Lemaire."

The ex-sergeant put down his glass with a jerk as though he had been struck. He looked around on the company that filled the front room of the Faisan d'Or, and on the faces of the men who had looked up to him for years as the hero of 1870 he now saw only the keenness to fight. He was old, forgotten, and no longer respected, and the blow was a hard one to bear.

The cloud of war was drifting up from the east, and the French Army was mobilising for the Great War. The peasants of the village had just been called up, and within half an hour they would be on their way to the depots of their different regiments, while Jules Lemaire, sergeant of the line, would be left at home with the cripples and the women and the children.

"I will serve France as well as any of you," he said defiantly. "I will find a way." But his voice was unheeded in the general bustle and noise, and Madame Nolan, the only person who appeared to hear him, sniffed with contempt.

Men destined for different regiments were saying good-bye to each other; Georges Simon, the blacksmith, with his arm round his fiancÉe's waist, was joking with Madame Nolan, who hurried about behind her little zinc counter; the door slammed noisily at each departure—and Jules Lemaire sat unheeded in the corner by the old clock.

And presently, when the front room was quiet and Madame Nolan was using her dirty apron to wipe away her tears, the ex-sergeant crept out quietly into the street and hobbled along to his cottage. He reached up and took his old Chassepot rifle down from the wall where it had hung these many years, and, while the other inhabitants thronged the road, cheering, weeping, laughing, Jules Lemaire sat before his little wooden table, with his rifle in his hands and a pile of cartridges before him.

"There will be a way," he murmured. "I will help my country; there will be a way."

The grey invaders swept on through the village, and Jules Lemaire, from his hiding-place on the church tower, watched them come with tears of impotent rage on his cheeks. Battalion after battalion they passed by—big, confident Germans who jeered at the peasants, and who sang as they plodded over the pavÉ. Once, when a company was halted beneath him, while the officers went in to the Faisan d'Or across the road, to see what they could loot in the way of drinks, the ex-sergeant aimed carefully at the captain, but he put down his rifle without firing.

At last, late in the afternoon when the dusk was beginning to hide the southern hills, Jules Lemaire's waiting came to an end. A large motor car drew up outside the inn, and a general with three officers of his staff got out into the road. One of the officers spread a map on the old door bench—where Jules Lemaire had so often sat of an evening and told of his adventures in the war—and, while an orderly went to procure wine for them, the four Germans bent over the plan of the country they thought to conquer.

Suddenly a shot rang out from the church tower above them. The general fell forward on to the bench, while his blood and his wine mingled in a staining stream that ran across the map of invincible France, and dripped down on to the dust below.

They met Jules Lemaire coming down the spiral steps of the church tower, his rifle still in his hand. They hit him with their rifle butts, they tied him up with part of the bell rope, and propped him up against the church wall.

Just before they fired, Jules Lemaire caught sight of Madame Nolan, who stood, terrified and weeping, at the doorway of the inn.

"You see," he shouted to her, "I also, I have helped my country. I was not too old after all."

And he died with a smile on his face.