We were now compelled to do forced labor; not only to supply wood, but also to go and cleave it for the Landwehr. I paid Father Offran, who supplied my place; it was an additional expense, and the day of ruin, utter ruin, was drawing close. Of course the Landwehr, offended at having been hissed all through the village, had lost all consideration for us, and but for stringent orders, they would have wrung our necks on the spot; every time they were able to tell us a piece of bad news, they would come up laughing, dropping the butt-ends of their rifles on the stone floor, and crying: "Well, now, here's another crash! There goes another stampede of Frenchmen! Orleans evacuated! Champigny to be abandoned! Capital! all goes on right! Now, then, you people, is that soup ready? Hurry! good news like these give one a good appetite!" "Try to hold your tongues, if you can, pack of beggars," cried Gredel; "we don't believe your lies." Then they grinned again, and said: "There is no need you should believe us, if only you get put into our basket; when you are there you will believe! Then look out! If you stir a finger we'll nail you to the wall like mangy cats. Aha! did you laugh and hiss when you saw us going? but there are more yet to come. You will regret us, Mademoiselle Gredel; you will regret us some day; you will cry, 'if we had but our good Landwehr again!' but it will be too late." What surprises me is that Gredel never seems to have thought of poisoning them; luckily it was not the time of the year for the red toadstools: besides, we were obliged to boil our soup in the same kettle; or these wary people would have had their suspicions, and obliged us to taste their meat, as they did at the Quatre Vents, the Baraques du Bois de Chenes, and in several other places. They then drew their lines closer and closer round the place: upon all the roads which led to the advanced posts they placed guns, and watched by them day and night; they regulated their range and line of fire by day with pickets and with grooves cut in the ground, to enable them to change its direction and sweep the roads and paths, even in the dark nights, in case of an attack. The snow was then falling in great flakes; all the country was covered with snow, and often at midnight or at one or two in the morning, the musketry opened, and they cried in the street: "A sortie! a sortie!" And all the villagers, who still kept their cattle at home by order of the new mayor Placiard, were compelled to drive them to a distance, into the fields, to prevent the French, if they reached us, from finding anything in the stables. Ah! that abominable, good-for-nothing scoundrel Placiard, that famous pillar of the Empire, what abominations he has perpetrated, what toils has he undergone to merit the esteem of the Prussians! Does it not seem sad that such thieves should sometimes quietly terminate their existence in a good bed? CHAPTER XII