Excerpt from The New Magdalene: A Novel
It was a dark night. The rain was pouring in torrents.
Late in the evening a skirmishing party of the French, and a skirmishing party of the Germans, had met by accidents, near the little village of Lagrange, close to the German frontier. In the struggle that followed, the French had (for once) got the better of the enemy. For the time, at least, a few hundreds out of the host of the invaders had been forced back over the frontier. It was trifling affair, occurring not long after the great German victory of Weissenbourg and the newspapers took little or no notice of it.
Captain Arnault, commanding on the French side, sat alone in one of the cottages of the village, inhabited by the miller of the district. The captain was reading, by the light of a solitary tallow candle, some intercepted despatches taken from the Germans. He had suffered the wood fire, scattered over the large open grate, to burn low; the red embers only faintly illuminated a part of the room. On the floor behind him lay some of the miller's empty sacks.
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