Stupefied, his eyes swollen, and his stomach rent by a similar craving, Jean looked at him and answered: 'Yes, all the same I'll have some; I feel too bad.'
They divided the bread and ate it gluttonously, without a thought of anything else so long as a mouthful of it remained. And it was only after they had finished that they again saw their colonel, on his big charger, with his bloody boot. The 106th was being overlapped on either side. Some companies must have already fled, and M. de Vineuil, compelled to give way to the torrent, raised his sword, and, with his eyes full of tears, exclaimed, 'God shield us, my lads, since He would not take us!' Bands of fugitives were surrounding him, and he disappeared from view in a depression of the ground.
Without knowing how they had got there, Jean and Maurice next found themselves with the remnants of their company behind the hedge which they had skirted in the morning. There remained at most some forty men under the command of Lieutenant Rochas. The colours were with them, and with a view of trying to save them, the sub-lieutenant, acting as ensign, had just rolled the silk around the staff. They all filed along to the end of the hedge, and then threw themselves among some little trees on a slope, where Rochas ordered them to open fire again. Sheltered and scattered in skirmishing order, the men were able to hold out here, the more especially as a mass of cavalry was being set in motion on their right, and regiments of infantry were again being brought into line to support it.
And now Maurice realised the slow, invincible encompassment which was on the point of being completed. Early in the morning he had seen the Prussians debouching from the defile of St. Albert, reaching first St. Menges, and then Fleigneux, and now he could not only hear the cannon of the Prussian Guard thundering behind the wood of La Garenne, but began to perceive some other German uniforms coming up by the heights of Givonne. But a few minutes more and the circle would close up, and the Guard would join hands with the Fifth German Corps, surrounding the French army with a living wall, an annihilating belt of artillery. It must have been with the desperate thought of making a last effort, of striving to break through this marching wall, that a division of the reserve cavalry, that commanded by General Margueritte, was now being massed behind a fold in the ground in readiness to charge. They, were, indeed, about to charge to death, without any possibility of effecting their object, but for the honour of France. And Maurice, thinking of Prosper, witnessed the terrible sight.
Since early morning Prosper had done nothing but urge on his horse, continually marching and counter-marching from one to the other end of the plateau of Illy. He and his comrades had been wakened one by one at dawn, without any trumpet call; and in order that they might make their coffee they had ingeniously contrived to screen each fire with a cloak so as not to set the Prussians on the alert. After that they had remained in ignorance of everything. They could certainly hear the guns, see the smoke, espy distant movements of infantry, but in the complete inaction in which they were left by the generals they knew nothing of the incidents of the battle, its importance and its results. Prosper, for his own part, was so sleepy that he could hardly keep up. Fatigue was the great suffering: bad nights, an accumulation of weariness, followed by invincible somnolence when the men rocked in the saddle. Prosper himself became a prey to hallucinations—fancied at times that he was on the ground, snoring on a mattress of pebbles; or dreamt that he was in a comfortable bed with clean white sheets. Sometimes he actually slept in the saddle for minutes together, becoming a mere moving thing, carried along according to the chances of the trot. In this way some of his comrades had occasionally fallen from their mounts. They were all so weary that the trumpet calls no longer awoke them; it was only by dint of kicking that they could be roused from oblivion and set upon their legs.
'What game are they having, what game are they having with us?' Prosper kept on saying, in the hope that by doing so he might shake off his irresistible torpor.
The cannon had been thundering since six o'clock. A couple of comrades had been killed by a shell beside him while they were ascending a hill, and, farther on, three others had fallen to the ground, riddled with bullets which had come no one knew whence. This useless, dangerous military promenade across the battlefield was altogether exasperating. At last, however, at about one o'clock, he realised that the commanders had decided to get them killed in a decent fashion, at any rate. The whole of General Margueritte's division, three regiments of Chasseurs d'Afrique, one of Chasseurs de France, and one of Hussars had just been assembled in a fold of the ground, on the left of the road, and slightly below the Calvary. The trumpets had sounded 'Dismount,' and the officers thereupon gave orders to tighten the girths and secure the kits.
Prosper dismounted, stretched himself, and fondled Zephyr with his hand. Poor Zephyr! he was as stultified as his master, quite worn out by the stupid life he was led. Besides, he carried such a multitude of things: First, there was the linen in the holsters, and the cloak rolled up above them; then the blouse, the overalls, and the haversack, with everything required for grooming, behind the saddle; and in addition there was the provision bag thrown across the horse's back, without mentioning the goat-skin, the water-can, and the mess-tin. The Chasseur's heart was flooded with tender compassion for his steed as he tightened the girth and made sure that all the paraphernalia on his back was properly secured.
It was a trying moment. Prosper, who was not more of a coward than his comrades, felt his mouth quite parched, and lighted a cigarette. When orders are given to charge, each man may fairly say: 'It's all up with me this time;' so few, indeed, are the chances in his favour.
Some five or six minutes went by, and the men told one another that General Margueritte had gone forward to reconnoitre the ground. Meantime, they waited. The five regiments had been assembled in three columns; each column was seven squadrons deep, so there would be plenty of food for the enemy's cannon.