Then a poor disabled soldier, lying on the grass, told me that they had been ordered from Bitche to Niederbronn, from Niederbronn to Bitche, and then from Bitche to Petersbach and Ottwiller, by dreadful roads, and that now they could hold on no longer: they were all exhausted! And in spite of myself, I thought that if men worn out to this degree were obliged to fight against fresh troops continually reinforced, they would be beaten before they could strike a blow! Yes, indeed, the want of knowledge of the country is one of the causes of our miseries.
Grédel, Catherine, and I, returned to the mill in the greatest distress.
It had at last begun to rain, after two months' drought. It was a heavy rain, which lasted all the night.
My wife and Grédel had gone to bed, but I could not close my eyes. I walked up and down in the mill, listening to this down-pour, the heavy rumbling of the guns, the pattering of endless footsteps in the mud. It was march, march—marching without a pause.
How melancholy! and how I pitied these unhappy soldiers, spent with hunger and fatigue, and compelled to retreat thus.
Now and then I looked at them through the window-panes, down which the rain was streaming. They were marching on foot, on horseback, one by one, by companies, in troops, like shadows. And every time that I opened the window to let in fresh air, in the midst of this vast trampling of feet, those neighings, and sometimes the curses of the soldiers of the artillery-train, or the horseman whose horse had dropped from fatigue or refused to move farther, I could hear in the far distance, across the plain two or three leagues from us, the whistle of the trains still coming and going in the passes.
Then noticing upon the wall one of those maps of the theatre of war which the Government had sent us three weeks ago, and which extended from Alsace as far as Poland, I tore it down, crumpled it up in my hand, and flung it out. Everything came back to me full of disgust. Those maps, those fine maps, were part of the play; just like the conspiracies devised by the police, and the explanations of the sous-préfets to make us vote "Yes" in the Plébiscite. Oh, you play-actors! you gang of swindlers! Have you done enough yet to lead astray your imbecile people? Have you made them miserable enough with your ill-contrived plays?
And it is said that the whole affair is going to be played over again: that they mean to put a ring through our noses to lead us along; that many rogues are reckoning upon it to settle their little affairs, to slip back into their old shoes and get fat again by slow degrees, humping their backs just like our curé's cat when she has found her saucer again after having taken a turn in the woods or the garden: it is possible, indeed! But then France will be an object of contempt; and if those fellows succeed, she will be worse than contemptible, and honorable men will blush to be called Frenchmen!
At daybreak I went to raise the mill-dam, for this heavy rain had overflowed the sluice. The last stragglers were passing. As I was looking up the village, my neighbor Ritter, the publican, was coming out from under the cart-shed with his lantern; a stranger was following him—a young man in a gray overcoat, tight trousers, a kind of leather portfolio hanging at his side, a small felt hat turned up over his ears, and a red ribbon at his button-hole.
This I concluded was a Parisian; for all the Parisians are alike, just as the English are: you may tell them among a thousand.