The War--the War--nothing but talk of the War came to our ears from the murmuring throng behind us. How "France has been betrayed." "How the new armies of the Third Republic would liberate Paris and sweep the Prussians back to Berlin. From every side brave patriots were even now closing in upon the beleaguered city. Ha, then the spiked helmets would see!" Still, a few facts grew more clear to us. At Lyons and Grenoble, Bourbaki was organising the army of the South-East. There came a sound from nowhere in particular that this army was to be joined and led by Garibaldi himself with thirty thousand of his red jackets from Italy. Deventer and I were immensely excited. We made plans for immediate invasion. We would fight for France and wear a red cardigan in the Foreign Legion. But the _Lycee_ St. Andre was well guarded, and so far no one had succeeded in escaping. I do not know that they tried very hard. They were French lads and brave--as many of them showed afterwards--but they were of the Midi, and even then the Midi was proverbially hard to budge. Not as in the North and East had the iron of the invasion entered the soul. The parapet upon which we leaned was of very ancient masonry, solid blocks laid clean and Cyclopean with very little visible cement. It had formed part of the defences of an ancient castle, long since overwhelmed by the college buildings, the materials of which had mostly been quarried from its imposing mass. Beneath us ran the Rhone in a fine, broad, half-mile-wide sweep, five or six miles an hour, yet save for the heaped hillocks of water about the bridge piers, and the swirl where the far bank curved over, as smooth as a mirror. Hugh Deventer and I had been talking of the great '61 campaign of Garibaldi in Sicily and through Naples--a thousand red-shirts and a kingdom in the dust! Ah, the glory of that time! But as we leaned and looked we fell silent. We saw Aramon the New opposite to us, as it were at our feet, across only that span of water. The factories were curiously silent, and from one fort after another darted the white spurt of smoke which meant artillery practice. We listened, knowing that in a little we should hear the report. _Boom! Boom! Rattle-rattle-chirr!_ Fighting--they were fighting in Aramon! Deventer's father would be in the thick of it. We looked and longed, but the way was closed. What could it be? Deventer knew that there were continually troubles between the operatives and the "masters," or rather the representatives of the masters of whom his father was the chief. The great _Compagnie d'Armes de Guerre Aramoise_ was not distinguished for generosity. The men were well lodged but poorly paid. In these war times they had been over-driven. So many hundreds of rifles to turn out daily--field artillery, too, and a new department to be set up for the manufacture of mitrailleuses. Outside, Dennis Deventer said little about the politics of the works, nothing at all to his son Hugh.