'Oh! in my case it's different; it's necessary that I should know what's passing.'
Captain Beaudoin also remained bravely erect. But he did not open his mouth to speak to his men, to whom nothing attached him; and it seemed as if he were unable to keep still, for again and again did he tramp from one end of the field to the other.
And meantime the waiting continued, nothing came. Maurice was suffocating beneath his knapsack, which, in his horizontal position, so wearisome after a time, was weighing heavily on his back and chest. The men had been particularly cautioned that they were not to rid themselves of their knapsacks until the last extremity.
'I say, are we going to spend the whole day here?' Maurice ended by asking Jean.
'Perhaps so. At Solferino, I remember, we spent five hours lying in a carrot-field with our noses on the ground.' And then, like the practical fellow he was, Jean added: 'But what are you complaining of? We are not badly off. There'll always be time enough for us to expose ourselves. Everyone has his turn, you know. If we all got ourselves killed at the beginning there would be no one left for the finish.'
'Ah!' suddenly interrupted Maurice, 'look at that smoke on the Hattoy hill. They've captured it; they'll be leading us a nice dance now.'
For a moment the sight he beheld supplied some food for his anxious curiosity, into which the first quiver of fear was stealing. He could not take his eyes off the round summit of that hill, the only acclivity that he could perceive, above the fleeting line of fields, level with his eye. It was, however, much too far away for him to distinguish the gunners of the batteries that had just been established there by the Prussians, and, indeed, he only saw the puffs of smoke rising at each fresh discharge above a plantation, which probably concealed the guns.
As Maurice had instinctively divined, the capture of this position, the defence of which General Douay had been compelled to renounce, was a very serious matter. The Hattoy hill commanded the surrounding plateaux, and when the German batteries installed there opened fire on the Second Division of the Seventh Corps, they speedily decimated it. The enemy's practice was now much improved, and the French battery, near which Beaudoin's company was lying down, had a couple of gunners killed in rapid succession. A splinter at the same time wounded a quartermaster-corporal of the company, whose left heel was carried clean away, and who began shrieking with pain as though he had suddenly gone mad.
'Shut up, you brute!' shouted Rochas. 'Is there any sense in making such a row over a flea-bite?'
Suddenly calmed, the wounded man became silent, and sank into a senseless immobility, with his foot in his hand.