The Garden of Swords by Max Pemberton

It seemed that Strasburg could suffer no more; and yet she continued unyieldingly to suffer. Hours became days, and days weeks, and still no white flag floated over her citadel; nor were the voices of her brave men silent. Down below in the cellars the timid wailed and cried for light and bread. Mighty lanterns, the shells of her great buildings, gave to the night the crimson beacons which seemed dyed with the very blood of the dead. Faint hearts told each other that the Hotel de Ville, the theatre, the New Church, the Governor's house, the Library, were but ashes upon barren wastes. Two thousand dead the city mourned; and yet, mourning them, prepared to die. The ultimate woe of despair was upon a helpless people. Their homes crumbled to the very dust. The open grave became their offering to France and the children of France.

It had been upon the nineteenth day of September that Edmond Lefort fell wounded by the fragment of a shell at the very door of the surgeon Laroche's house in the Broglie. He lay in the same house upon the morning of the twenty-seventh; and those about him knew that he was dying. Since the grey light of dawn winged into that room of death and shone upon the haggard face, swathed still in its bloody bandages, his little wife had not moved from his bedside nor released his hot fingers from her own. She sat there as some angel of sleep comforting him. The tragedy of the weeks bygone, the hope, the fear of them had vanished as the mists of an autumn night. No other name, no other voice, no other scene stood between her and her lover now. Clinging as to some supreme faith in the God who had given her love, she could not believe that the supreme calamity was at hand. Edmond was dying, they said. She would not hear them.