"For my part," he would exclaim, "I shall be a lion! I will eat fifteen pounds of beef a-day!"
Then, recovering himself:
"No, I will be a man; I will preach peace, fraternity, justice! Ah! my friends," he would say, "we suffer by our own fault. What have we done, on the other side of the Rhine, for the last ten years? By what right did we want to impose masters on those peoples? Why did we not exchange our ideas, our sentiments, the products of our arts and of our industry, with them? Why did we not go to seek them as brothers, instead of wishing to subjugate them? We should have been well received. What must they have suffered—the unfortunates—during those ten years of violence and rapine? Now they avenge themselves; and it is justice! May the curse of Heaven alight on the wretches who divide the peoples to oppress them!"
After these moments of excitement, he would sink fainting against the wall of the tower, murmuring:
"Bread. Oh, for nothing but a morsel of bread!"
The sons of Materne, crouching among the bushes, gun on shoulder, seemed to be awaiting the passage of game which never arrived; the idea of perpetual ambush sustained their expiring strength.
Some, bent double, were shivering, and felt consumed by fever; they accused Jean-Claude of having led them to the Falkenstein.
Hullin, with superhuman strength of character, still went and came, observing what was passing in the surrounding valleys, without saying anything.
At times he advanced to the very edge of the rock, and with his large compressed jaws, and flashing eye, watched Yégof sitting before a large fire, on the plateau of the Bois-des-Chênes, in the midst of a troop of Cossacks. Since the arrival of the Germans in the valley of the Charmes, the fool had not quitted this post; he seemed, from there, to gloat over the agony of his victims.
Such was the aspect of these unfortunates under the vast canopy of heaven.