A quiet settles over the farm as grenade blasts and bursts of automatic fire die away – even the horse, panicked by the fire a short time ago, has settled to walking agitatedly around its corral. Pyotr takes in the farmyard, the legionnaires huddled behind the horse trailer, the body of the man lying on the ground near the corral.
At the horse trailer, Nedjar looks at the smoke grenade in Vidal’s hand, then across the yard to Pyotr. “Through the door, you look left, I’ll look right, oui?” he asks the radioman as he waves his arm, beckoning Pyotr to cross the yard to the trailer. Vidal inspects the façade of the brick building – there is one window to the north of the door, three to the south, all narrow slots in the wall. The wooden door looks sturdy enough, but not unusually so. There is no gun barrel protruding from the northernmost window now, no sign of movement at all in fact.
Standing behind the tree, Normand looks up at the windows on the farmhouse, the glass reflecting the sky or the setting sun – inside lace curtains prevent a view of the interior. As he looks down, he sees Sgt. Müller moving carefully along the front of the farmhouse toward the front porch and the door, past a stand of rose bushes with a handful of fading pink blooms. When he reaches the porch, he looks back and motions to Normand to come across.
At that moment there is a peal of submachine gun fire from the back the house, shattering the stillness again like an angry snarl. Looking north, Normand sees Cpl. Sembene go down in a heap as he races toward the stone wall from behind the goat pen.