Tug of War

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Aline Houdart got off her bicycle and stood still, holding tightly to the handlebars. At this moment she needed to have her feet firmly on the ground and she fought down a ridiculous urge to take off her shoes, the better to connect herself to the earth. Surely she was mistaken? The sound she’d heard was a tree crashing to the ground in the forest around her. Or thunder. A snap of her starched headdress in the breeze as she rounded the bend perhaps. The explanations she snatched at were elbowed away by a single word: cannon. But at such close quarters?

Aline thought at once of her parents. They would have been able to identify the make, calibre and direction of fire. Her parents knew all about cannon. In their distant youth they’d been trapped in Paris during the Prussian siege of 1870 and, round a good fire in the wintertime, they still vied with each other to convey the horrors of bombardment by von Moltke’s fifty-ton siege gun. Aline tried to recall their lurid accounts of the hellish din with its earth-trembling accompaniment.

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