“If you gentlemen will just follow me,” said Thérèse d’Uturry, “I will show you where the Huns are billeted in our outbuilding so that you may surprise and capture them.”

Lieutenant Delacroix nodded, and motioned to his poilus to follow with bayonets fixed. They’d had put up with the antics of that crazy woman and her insistence on running her parlor as if she were in high society City of Lights Paris instead of in a ramshackle chateau with lines of combat trenches snaking around the heights it occupied. But soon they would be able to capture a store of prisoners and occupy that strong point as a fait accompli without any further fuss.

“Have I told you about my Paris season, in 1903?” said Thérèse as she led the French soldiers down a muddy and shell-pocked path to the icehouse where the Germans were supposedly holed up, their guard down due to the Uturry “hospitality.”

“Frequently,” grunted Delacroix.

“I would have made such a splash in the cabaret scene if I’d been allowed to stay,” sighed Thérèse. “Did I tell you that I was courted briefly by Clemenceau? I might have made an honest man of him had I not been called back to my chateau to care for my dear family.”

“I’m sure,” Delacroix muttered.

Thérèse slid open the icehouse door and gestured at the floor. “Run in when I open it up.” She gripped an iron ring in the floor and wrenched it up. The door thudded to the ground next to a canvas-covered lump that was the only other thing occupying the space.

Delacroix and his poilus rushed in, with the second man in line brandishing a light for the others to see by. The Germans were there, a scouting patrol’s worth just as Thérèse had said, seated on stools, huddled around the coals of a cold and dark furnace. There was no response to the lieutenant’s barked orders, in German, to surrender. His men looked at each other, bewildered.

The Huns were already dead, to a man. Someone had carefully posed their bodies, to the extent of even placing cigarette stubs and glasses in their hands, in the cool and dry environment of the icehouse.

“What is the meaning of this, Mme. d’Uturry?” demanded Delacroix. He turned to look up the steps…just in time to see that the canvas covering of the object upstairs had been swept away to reveal a loaded Hotchkiss machine gun. Grime from the battlefield still coated the barrel.

Delacoix began to croak an order for his men to open fire, but their full-length Lebel rifles with fixed bayonets were too unwieldy to maneuver in such a tight space…just as the Germans’ Gewehr 98s had been. The lieutenant tried to bring his own Chamelot Delvigne revolver to bear, but the sight of a bloodstained Luger on the floor told of a similar, futile action on the part of the German oberstleutnant.

Thérèse opened fire. These men would stay here, with her; they would join her ever-growing circle of admirers.

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