As yet only a few random shots had struck the front of the house.  Weiss and the lieutenant, accompanied by the corporal and two men, had ascended to the attic, where they were in better position to observe the road, of which they had an oblique view as far as the Place de l’Eglise.  The square was now occupied by the Bavarians, but any further advance was attended by difficulties that made them very circumspect.  A handful of French soldiers, posted at the mouth of a narrow lane, held them in check for nearly a quarter of an hour, with a fire so rapid and continuous that the dead bodies lay in piles.  The next obstacle they encountered was a house on the opposite corner, which also detained them some time before they could get possession of it.  At one time a woman, with a musket in her hands, was seen through the smoke, firing from one of the windows.  It was the abode of a baker, and a few soldiers were there in addition to the regular occupants; and when the house was finally carried there was a hoarse shout:  “No quarter!” a surging, struggling, vociferating throng poured from the door and rolled across the street to the dead-wall opposite, and in the raging torrent were seen the woman’s skirt, the jacket of a man, the white hairs of the grandfather; then came the crash of a volley of musketry, and the wall was splashed with blood from base to coping.  This was a point on which the Germans were inexorable; everyone caught with arms in his hands and not belonging to some uniformed organization was shot without the formality of a trial, as having violated the law of nations.  They were enraged at the obstinate resistance offered them by the village, and the frightful loss they had sustained during the five hours’ conflict provoked them to the most atrocious reprisals.  The gutters ran red with blood, the piled dead in the streets formed barricades, some of the more open places were charnel-houses, from whose depths rose the death-rattle of men in their last agony.  And in every house that they had to carry by assault in this way men were seen distributing wisps of lighted straw, others ran to and fro with blazing torches, others smeared the walls and furniture with petroleum; soon whole streets were burning, Bazeilles was in flames.

And now Weiss’s was the only house in the central portion of the village that still continued to hold out, preserving its air of menace, like some stern citadel determined not to yield.

“Look out! here they come!” shouted the lieutenant.

A simultaneous discharge from the attic and the first floor laid low three of the Bavarians, who had come forward hugging the walls.  The remainder of the body fell back and posted themselves under cover wherever the street offered facilities, and the siege of the house began; the bullets pelted on the front like rattling hail.  For nearly ten minutes the fusillade continued without cessation, damaging the stucco, but not doing much mischief otherwise, until one of the men whom the lieutenant had taken with him to the garret was so imprudent as to show himself at a window, when a bullet struck him square in the forehead, killing him instantly.  It was plain that whoever exposed himself would do so at peril of his life.