Thirty grenadiers, detached as scouts and commanded by a sergeant, marched ahead, at a considerable distance from the main body. The vivandière of the battalion accompanied them. The vivandières like to join the vanguard; they run risks, but then they stand a chance of seeing something. Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine courage. Suddenly the soldiers of this little advanced guard received that shock familiar to hunters, which shows them that they are close upon the lair of their prey. They heard something like breathing in the middle of the thicket, and it seemed as if they caught sight of some commotion among the leaves. The soldiers made signs to each other. When this mode of watching and reconnoitring is confided to the scouts, officers have no need to interfere; what has to be done is done instinctively. In less than a minute the spot where the movement had been observed was surrounded by a circle of levelled muskets, aimed simultaneously from every side at the dusky centre of the thicket; and the soldiers, with finger on trigger and eye on the suspected spot, awaited only the sergeant's command to fire. Meanwhile, the vivandière ventured to peer through the underbush; and just as the sergeant was about to cry, "Fire!" this woman cried, "Halt!" And turning to the soldiers, "Do not fire!" she cried, and rushed into the thicket, followed by the men. There was indeed some one there. In the thickest part of the copse on the edge of one of those small circular clearings made in the woods by the charcoal-furnaces that are used to burn the roots of trees, in a sort of hole formed by the branches,--a bower of foliage, so to speak, half-open, like an alcove,--sat a woman on the moss, with a nursing child at her breast and the fair heads of two sleeping children resting against her knees. [Illustration 006] This was the ambush. "What are you doing here?" called out the vivandière. The woman raised her head, and the former added angrily,-- "Are you insane to remain there!" She went on,-- "A little more, and you would have been blown to atoms!" Then addressing the soldiers, she said, "It's a woman." "Pardieu! That's plain to be seen," replied a grenadier. The vivandière continued,--"To come into the woods to get oneself massacred. Can you conceive of any one so stupid as that?" The woman, surprised, bewildered, and stunned, was gazing around, as though in a dream, at these muskets, sabres, bayonets, and savage faces. The two children awoke and began to cry. "I am hungry," said one. "I am afraid," said the other. The baby went on nursing. The vivandière addressed it. "You are the wise one," she said. The mother was dumb with terror. "Don't be afraid," exclaimed the sergeant, "we are the battalion of the Bonnet Rouge." The woman trembled from head to foot. She looked at the sergeant, of whose rough face she could see only the eyebrows, moustache, and eyes like two coals of fire.