The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8)

peasants' clothes. We could hide under some straw at the bottom of the wagon, and it would be loaded with Gruyère cheese, which he was supposed to be going to sell in France. Th

g manner, but that was in order to impress his soldiers

ly smoked their pipes. I was half-suffocated in my box, which only admitted the air through

in, and the wagon loaded with

our Cantons, and so they could not understand each other; the sergeant, however, pretended to be very intelligent, and in order to make us believe that he understood us, they allo

ed in our ammunition, packets of cartridges which we had stowed away inside some of the huge cheeses. We had about a thousand of them, just two hundred each, b

at night on foot, so as to gain the heights which border the river Doubs; the next day they entered Besan?on, where there were plenty of Chassepots. There were nearly forty thousand of them left in the arsenal, and General Roland, a brave marine, laughed at the captain's daring project, but let him have six rifles and wished him "good luck." There he had also found his wife, who had been through all the war with us befor

ybody, as the possession of six rifles would have made them liable to suspicion. But in spite of everything,