From that time on, Weiss had no distinct consciousness of what was going on around him; he and the five others continued to blaze away like lunatics, expending their cartridges, with not the faintest idea in their heads that there could be such a thing as surrender.  In the three small rooms the floor was strewn with fragments of the broken furniture.  Ingress and egress were barred by the corpses that lay before the doors; in one corner a wounded man kept up a pitiful wail that was frightful to hear.  Every inch of the floor was slippery with blood; a thin stream of blood from the attic was crawling lazily down the stairs.  And the air was scarce respirable, an air thick and hot with sulphurous fumes, heavy with smoke, filled with an acrid, nauseating dust; a darkness dense as that of night, through which darted the red flame-tongues of the musketry.

“By God’s thunder!” cried Weiss, “they are bringing up artillery!”

It was true.  Despairing of ever reducing that handful of madmen, who had consumed so much of their time, the Bavarians had run up a gun to the corner of the Place de l’Eglise, and were putting it into position; perhaps they would be allowed to pass when they should have knocked the house to pieces with their solid shot.  And the honor there was to them in the proceeding, the gun trained on them down there in the square, excited the bitter merriment of the besieged; the utmost intensity of scorn was in their gibes.  Ah! the cowardly bougres, with their artillery!  Kneeling in his old place still, Laurent carefully adjusted his aim and each time picked off a gunner, so that the service of the piece became impossible, and it was five or six minutes before they fired their first shot.  It ranged high, moreover, and only clipped away a bit of the roof.

But the end was now at hand.  It was all in vain that they searched the dead men’s belts; there was not a single cartridge left.  With vacillating steps and haggard faces the six groped around the room, seeking what heavy objects they might find to hurl from the windows upon their enemies.  One of them showed himself at the casement, vociferating insults, and shaking his fist; instantly he was pierced by a dozen bullets; and there remained but five.  What were they to do? go down and endeavor to make their escape by way of the garden and the meadows?  The question was never answered, for at that moment a tumult arose below, a furious mob came tumbling up the stairs:  it was the Bavarians, who had at last thought of turning the position by breaking down the back door and entering the house by that way.  For a brief moment a terrible hand-to-hand conflict raged in the small rooms among the dead bodies and the debris of the furniture.  One of the soldiers had his chest transfixed by a bayonet thrust, the two others were made prisoners, while the attitude of the lieutenant, who had given up the ghost, was that of one about to give an order, his mouth open, his arm raised aloft.