I interrupted, for I wanted to hear about the chasseurs. I gave the little old man a cigarette. He seized it eagerly--so eagerly that I also handed him a cigar. He just sort of fondled that cigar for a moment and then placed it in an inside pocket. It was a very cheap and very bad French cigar, for I was in a part of the country that has never heard of Havanas, but to the little old man it was something precious. "I will keep it for Sunday," he said. I then got him back to the seventy-five chasseurs. It was just eight o'clock in the morning--a beautiful sunshiny morning--when the German column appeared around the bend in the road which we could see across the bridge, and which joined the highway from Lunéville. There were twelve thousand in that first column. One hundred and fifty thousand more came later. A band was playing "Deutschland über alles" and the men were singing. The closely packed front ranks of infantry broke into the goose step as they came in sight of the town. It was a wonderful sight; the sun glistened on their helmets; they marched as though on parade right down almost to the opposite end of the bridge. Then came the command to halt. For a moment there was a complete silence. The Germans, only a couple of hundred yards from the barricade, seemed slowly to consider the situation. The Captain of the chasseurs, from a shelter behind the very little house that is still standing--and where his men up the two roads could see him--softly waved his hand. Crack-crack-crack--crack-crack-crack-crack--crack-crack-crack! The bullets from the mitrailleuses whistled across the bridge into the front ranks of the "Deutchland über alles" singers, while the men behind the bridge barricade began a deadly rifle fire. Have you ever heard a mitrailleuse? It is just like a telegraph instrument, with its insistant clickety click-click-click, only it is a hundred times as loud. Indeed I have been told by French officers that it has sometimes been used as a telegraph instrument, so accurately can its operator reel out its hundred and sixty shots a minute. On that morning at the Gerbéviller barricade, however, it went faster than the telegraph. These men on the converging roads just shifted their range slightly and poured bullets into the next ranks of infantry and so on back along the line, until Germans were dropping by the dozen at the sides of the little straight road. Then the column broke ranks wildly and fled back into the shelter of the road from Lunéville. A half hour later a detachment of cavalry suddenly rounded the corner and charged straight for the barricade. The seventy-five were ready for them. Some of them got half way across the bridge and then tumbled into the river. Not one got back around the corner of the road to Lunéville.