THE DOWNFALL

(LA DÉBÂCLE)

A STORY OF THE HORRORS OF WAR

BY

ÉMILE ZOLA

TRANSLATED BY ERNEST A. VIZETELLY

WAR CORRESPONDENT 1870-1

NEW AND REVISED EDITION

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1893

[PREFACE]

Before the present translation of M. Zola's novel, 'La Débâcle,' appeared in 'The Weekly Times and Echo,' in which it was originally issued, the author was interviewed for that journal by Mr. Robert H. Sherard, whom he favoured with some interesting particulars concerning the scope and purport of his narrative. By the courtesy both of Mr. Sherard and of the proprietor of 'The Weekly Times,' the translator is here able to republish the remarks made by M. Zola on the occasion referred to. They will be found to supply an appropriate preface to the story:—

'"La Débâcle" has given me infinitely more trouble than any of my previous works. When I began writing it, I had no conception of the immensity of the task which I had imposed on myself. The labour of reading up all that has been written on my subject in general, and on the battle of Sedan in particular, has been enormous, and the work of condensation of all that I have had to read has been all the more laborious that on no subject has more divergence of opinion been expressed ... I have read all that has been written about the battle of Sedan, as well as about the unhappy adventures of the luckless Seventh Army Corps, in which is placed the fictitious regiment which plays the leading rôle in my novel. And the digestion has not been an easy task. Each general, for instance, has a different version to give of the why and the wherefore of the defeat. Each claims to have had a plan, which, if it had been followed, would have averted the disaster. Another difficulty has been that I took no part in that campaign, not having been a soldier, and that for my information on the life and experience of those who went through the campaign in general, and the battle of Sedan in particular, I have had to depend on outside testimony, often of a conflicting nature. I may say, however, that in this matter I have been greatly helped by the kindness of persons who are good enough to be interested in my work, and as soon as it became known that I was writing a book about the war and about Sedan, I received from all parts of France manuscript relations written by people of all classes who had been present at the battle, and who sent me their recollections. That was most excellent material—indeed, the best, because not to be found anywhere else. An "Anecdotal Account of the Battle of Sedan" was sent me by a gentleman who is now professor at one of the Universities in the South. A long, ill-spelt letter came to me from a gamekeeper in the North, in which he gave me a full account of the battle as it impressed him, who was a private soldier in the Seventh Army Corps at the time. I have masses of such documents, and it was my duty to go through everything that could throw any light on my subject.

'The subject was to be War. I had to consider War in its relation to various classes of society—War vis-à-vis the bourgeois, War vis-à-vis the peasant, War vis-à-vis the workman. How the war was brought about—that is to say, the state of mind of men in France at the time—was a consideration which also supplied me with a number of characters. I had to show, in a series of types, France who had lost the use of liberty, France drunk with pleasure, France fated irrevocably to disaster. I had to have types to show France so prompt to enthusiasm, so prompt to despair. And then there were to be shown the immense faults committed, and to show by character how the commission of such faults was possible, a natural sequence of a certain psychological state of mind of a certain preponderating class, which existed in the last days of the Empire. Then each phase of action had to be typified. The question of the Emperor and his surroundings—I had to have characters to explain "the sick man" and his state at the time. I had to show how it was with the peasants of the period, and hence to equip a character or two for that purpose. The Francs-tireurs played an important part in the epoch; it therefore became necessary for me to incarnate these, to create a typical Franc-tireur. The spies and spying had their influence on the whole; I had to have a spy. By the way, the spy in my book is one of the few German characters that I have created—four or five—this spy and an officer or two. Then, having thus, with a stroke of the rake, dragged together all that I could find as likely to illustrate my period, both historically and psychologically considered, I wrote out rapidly—the work of one feverish morning—a maquette, or rough draft of all I wanted to do, some fifteen or twenty pages.

'It then became necessary to see the places, to study the geography of my book, for at that period I did not know where my scenes were to be laid, whether on the banks of the Rhine, or elsewhere. So, with my rough draft in my pocket, and my head teeming with the shadows of my marionettes, and of the things that they were to do and to explain, I set off for Rheims and went carefully over the whole ground, driving from Rheims to Sedan, and following foot by foot the road by which the Seventh Corps—already then decided upon as the milieu in which my novel was to develop—marched to their disaster. During that drive I picked up an immense quantity of material, halting in farmhouses and peasants' cottages, and taking copious notes. Then came Sedan, and after a careful study of the place and the people, I saw that my novel must deal largely, for the full comprehension of my story, not only with the locality, but with the people of the town. This gave me the bourgeois of Sedan, who play an important part in my tale. Little by little, the geography gave me also the physiology of my book. Each new place that it became necessary to describe supplied its type, its characters.

'So, on my return to Paris, I was in an immense workshop or yard surrounded with huge mountains of hewn stones, mortar and bricks, and all that remained then to do was to build the best structure that I could build of these materials. But before that, the architect's plan was necessary, and that I next carefully evolved. My plan of work is most rigorous. Each chapter is marked out in advance, but it is only as I am writing that the various incidents which I have collected fall into place.... My labour has been one of reconciliation of divergent statements in the first place, and of condensation in the second. I had to reduce to one page what I could easily, and without prolixity, have treated in a dozen pages; so that with each page, nay with each sentence, I have been confronted with the question what to leave out and what to say. Then, when each page was written, I began to torture myself with the doubt whether I had left unsaid things I ought to have said, whether I had sacrificed good to inferior material.

'"La Débâcle" is divided into three parts. The first part treats of the action of the luckless Seventh Army Corps, in which is the fictitious regiment in which my hero or heroes are placed. I say heroes, because I have really two heroes in this story. One is Jean, of my novel 'La Terre,' who is a corporal in this regiment; the other is a new character named Maurice, who goes through Sedan as a private soldier. Between these two men a great friendship exists, and, indeed, it is from this friendship in the face of death and danger, this comradeship of arms malgré tout, that I draw the chief effects of sentiment with which my novel is seasoned. For "La Débâcle" is not a love story. The female characters in it play only secondary rôles; there is no love-making worth speaking about, at the most, only the "intention" of love, the indication of courtship. Jean and Maurice, my two heroes, moreover, present types of the France of the day. Maurice, who is represented as a young man who has recently been admitted to the bar, is the man of the world—light, cynical, sceptical, the type of the France of the Empire, embodying her grace and her faults. He is the type of the France that, sated with pleasure, rushed to disaster. Jean represents the new social couche, a new stratum, and is in some way emblematic of the France of the future. Now, I will confess that when I began writing my book, and had this idea of this friendship, I expected to be able to produce by its means a much greater effect than I think I have done. This friendship has not yielded all that I had hoped for from it.

'The first section of eight chapters opens with allusion to the trifling defeats on the frontier, it shows the Seventh Corps crowded back on to Rheims; but the principal subject of these chapters is the terrible march from Rheims to Sedan. It is an epic event, pregnant with the irony of fate, and, to my thinking, one of the most tragic military episodes that history records. There is no fighting described in this part; indeed, the only battle that I describe is Sedan. The tragedy lies in the exposition of the faults that gradually led up to the terrible disaster. The reader follows the movements of this ill-fated corps, knowing what a terrible shadow of defeat, disaster, and death overhangs it. It was a wonderful corps, and the way it was managed was wonderful in its crass stupidity.

'My second part is entirely devoted to a description of the battle of Sedan in all its phases, seen from all sides. I have omitted nothing which can help to a comprehension of that enormous episode in the histories of France and of the world. Now we are with Napoleon, now with the Emperor of Germany, now with the bourgeois of Sedan, now with the Francs-tireurs in the woods. Each movement of troops that contributed to the final dénouement is exposed. I have endeavoured to be complete, but as I have said, I had too little space for the immense amount of material in my hands. I have also endeavoured to speak the plain truth without either fear or favour. The reader will be aroused to compassion with the sufferings, bodily and mental, of the heroic and martyred army, just as he will be aroused to indignation at the conduct of its chiefs, which fell little short of downright dementia. It has been my duty to be severely critical, and I have not shrunk from the responsibility of wounding, where it was right and just to do so, susceptibilities which I see no reason for respecting. I dare say there will be some outcry at my blame, but I am indifferent, having spoken the truth.

'The last part of my novel is played out in Sedan, after the battle. From thence the reader follows the rest of the history of the war as it develops itself in other parts of France, until it culminates in the outbreak of the Commune and the final collapse of Paris in a sea of fire and an ocean of blood. The last chapter of the book is an account of Paris in flames, of Paris with its gutters running with blood. I hope by this means to produce a gradation of effect—the catastrophe of Sedan, which ends the second part, followed up by the still greater catastrophe of the last chapter. To resume: The first part of my novel is the march from Rheims to Sedan; the second is the catastrophe of Sedan, from inception to dénouement; and the third the collapse not of Paris alone, but of the whole of old-time France, with the dénouement of the burning of Paris, the flames of which clear away not only an old régime, but a whole psychological state, and prepare a fresh field for a new and regenerated people. For observe, that my book, as far as outward construction goes, divided into three parts, may also be divided into a novel of historical and a novel of psychological interest. It tells a tale of many adventures, but it also aims to give a full list of psychological studies of French society as it was at the outbreak of the war.

'My novels have always been written with a higher aim than merely to amuse. I have so high an opinion of the novel as a means of expression—I consider it parallel with lyrical poetry, as the highest form of literary expression, just as in the last century the drama was the highest form of expression—that it is on this account that I have chosen it as the form in which to present to the world what I wish to say on the social, scientific, and psychological problems that occupy the minds of thinking men. But for this I might have said what I wanted to say to the world in another form. But the novel has to-day risen from the place which it held in the last century at the table of the banquet of letters. It was then the idle pastime of the hour, and sat low down between the fable and the idyll. To-day it contains, or may be made to contain, everything; and it is because that is my creed that I am a novelist. I have, to my thinking, certain contributions to make to the thought of the world on certain subjects, and I have chosen the novel as the best way of communicating these contributions to the world. Thus "La Débâcle," in the form of a very precise and accurate relation of a series of historical facts—in other words, in the form of a realistic historical novel—is a document on the psychology of France in 1870. This will explain the enormous number of characters which figure in the book. Each character represents one état d'âme psychologique of the France of the day. If my work be well done, the reader will be able to understand what was in men's minds and what was the bent of men's minds—what they thought, and how they thought, at that period.'

As might have been expected with a work dealing with such a question as the last Franco-German War, 'La Débâcle' has given rise to considerable controversy in France. Some ultra-bellicose Frenchmen, and among them M. de Vogue of the Academy, have taunted the author with a lack of patriotism, their notion being apparently that they ought never to be told the truth concerning themselves. Other persons have impeached M. Zola's accuracy with regard to various matters of detail, and a few have gone so far as to accuse him of having written that which he must have known to be untrue. It may be as well to notice some of the charges here.

It is said that there are no hop-gardens on the road from Mulhausen to Altkirch, as will be found stated in [Chapter II. (Part I.)], and in this instance it would really appear that M. Zola has fallen into error. Viewing the road from a distance, and being very short-sighted, he doubtless mistook vineyards for hop-grounds. The error is in some degree excusable, however, when it is remembered that in this part of Alsace the vines are trained to poles ten and eleven feet high. It is also denied that vast sums of money were distributed among the men of the Seventh Army Corps without any written acknowledgment at the close of the battle of Sedan, as will be found stated in [Chapter VII. (Part II.)]. I have reason to believe that it was the money of another army corps which was thus distributed, and that M. Zola transposed the incident for the purposes of his story. A little license of this kind is surely allowable in a work of fiction. M. Paul de Cassagnac, the well-known Bonapartist politician and journalist, denies that Napoleon III. had his face rouged and powdered on the morning of the battle of Sedan (Sept. 1), in proof of which he mentions that he was with Napoleon during the whole of the battle of Mouzon (Aug. 30), and also frequently ate at the Imperial table during the campaign. M. Zola does not state that Napoleon habitually painted his face. He says ([Chapters I.] and [III., Part II.]) that he did so on one occasion only, early on the morning of Sept. 1, and that the rouge, &c., was entirely washed away by perspiration at 11 a.m., when he returned into the town from the front. The battle of Mouzon and what occurred at other times during the campaign have nothing to do with the matter, and M. de Cassagnac's so-called denial is beside the question. The same may be said of the denials of M. Robert Mitchell, another Bonapartist politician and journalist, and of the Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, daughter of King Jerôme. The princess was not even at Sedan, and can know nothing of the matter. Moreover, is it likely that she would admit the accuracy of any statement at all disparaging to the memory of Napoleon III.? Is it likely that M. de Cassagnac would do so? Or M. Robert Mitchell either? These gentlemen upheld the Imperial régime through thick and thin, and the former, at any rate, was most liberally rewarded for his services. He has, therefore, good reason to be prejudiced. M. Zola declares that he had the information in dispute in part from 'a certain lady,' and in part from various people of Sedan, and so far there is nothing to prove that it is inaccurate.

I may, perhaps, be allowed to add that I have given considerable time and care to the translation of 'La Débâcle.' I have always tried to give the sense and substance of M. Zola's narrative, though at times I have found myself unable to use his actual words. In matters of translation, however, I am of the opinion of Thackeray, which was also that expressed by James Howell in one of his often-quoted 'Familiar Letters.' Here and there I have appended to the text some notes which may assist the reader, for whose benefit the publishers have provided two sketch-maps of the battle of Sedan.

E. A. V.

November 1892.

(See [Note] on p. 535.)

[CONTENTS]

BATTLE OF SEDAN AT 7 A.M.

[THE DOWNFALL]

PART I

FROM THE RHINE TO THE MEUSE

CHAPTER I

IN CAMP—A GREAT DISASTER

The camp was pitched in the centre of a fertile plain at a mile or so from Mulhausen, in the direction of the Rhine. In the twilight of a sultry day in August, under the dull sky, across which heavy clouds were drifting, the rows of shelter-tents could be seen stretching out amid a broad expanse of ploughed land. At regular intervals along the front gleamed the piles of arms, guarded by sentinels with loaded rifles, who stood there stock-still, their eyes fixed dreamily on the violet-tinted mist which was rising from the great river on the far horizon.

The men had arrived from Belfort at about five o' clock. It was now eight, and they had only just received their rations. The firewood, however, had apparently gone astray, for none had been distributed, so that there was neither fire nor soupe. The men had been obliged to munch their hard, dry biscuit, washing it down with copious draughts of brandy, which had dealt the last blow, as it were, to their failing legs, already nerveless through fatigue. Near the canteen, however, beyond the stacks of arms, two men were stubbornly endeavouring to light some green wood—a pile of young tree trunks, which they had cut down with their sword-bayonets, and which obstinately refused to blaze. Merely a coil of thick black smoke of lugubrious aspect ascended from the heap into the evening air.

There were here only 12,000 men, all that General Félix Douay had with him of the Seventh Army Corps. The first division, summoned by MacMahon the day before, had started for Frœschweiler; the third was still at Lyons; and the general had resolved to leave Belfort and advance to the front with merely the second division, supported by the reserve artillery and an incomplete division of horse. Camp fires had been signalled at Lorrach, and the Sub-Prefect of Schelestadt had telegraphed that the Prussians were about to cross the Rhine at Margolsheim. The general, who realised how dangerous was his isolated position at the extreme right of the other army corps, with none of which he was in communication, had hastened his advance to the frontier the more rapidly, as news had reached him, the day before, of the disastrous surprise of Weissenburg. Even supposing he did not have to resist an attack on his own lines, it was now to be feared that he might at any moment be called upon to support the First Army Corps.[1] That very day—that disquieting, stormy Saturday, August 6—there must have been fighting somewhere, most probably near Frœschweiler. There were signs of it in the air, in the heavy, restless sky across which there now and again swept a chilly shudder—a sudden gust of wind which passed by moaning, as if with anguish. For the past two days the troops had been convinced that they were advancing to battle. They one and all expected to find the Prussians in front of them at the end of their forced march from Belfort to Mulhausen.

The daylight was waning, when, from a distant corner of the camp, the tattoo sounded—a roll of the drums followed by a bugle call, faint as yet, wafted away, as it was, through the open air. It was heard, however, by Jean Macquart,[2] who had been endeavouring to strengthen his tent by driving the pickets deeper into the ground, and who now rapidly rose to his feet. Still bleeding from the grievous tragedy in which he had lost Françoise, his wife, and the land she had brought him in marriage, he had left Rognes, and, although nine-and-thirty years of age, had re-enlisted at the first rumour of war. Immediately enrolled, with his old rank of corporal, in the 106th Regiment of the Infantry of the Line, then being brought up to its full strength, Jean sometimes felt astonished to find himself again in uniform—he who had been so delighted to leave the service after the battle of Solferino, so pleased to cease playing the swashbuckler, the part of the man who kills. But what is a fellow to do when he has no trade or profession left him, neither wife nor even a scrap of property that he can call his own in all the wide world, and when grief and rage bring his heart with a leap into his very throat? Surely he has a right to trounce his country's enemies, especially if they plague him. Besides, Jean remembered the cry he had raised: 'Ah! dash it all, he would defend the old soil of France, since he no longer had courage enough to till it!'

On rising up he glanced at the camp, where a final stir was being occasioned by the passage of the tattoo party. Some men were running to their quarters; others, already drowsy, sat up or stretched themselves out with an air of irritated weariness; whilst Jean, the patient fellow, awaited the roll-call with that well-balanced tranquillity of mind which made him such a capital soldier. His comrades said he would probably have risen rapidly in rank had he been more of a scholar, but it happened that he only just knew how to read and write, and he did not even covet a sergeant's stripes. He who has been a peasant always remains one.

Jean was concerned at the sight of the green logs which were still smoking, and called to the two men—Loubet and Lapoulle, both belonging to his squad—who were desperately endeavouring to kindle the fire: 'Just let that be. You're poisoning us with that smoke.'

Loubet, who was lithe and active, with the look of a wag, sneeringly replied, 'It's catching alight, corporal; I assure you it is.' And giving his comrade Lapoulle a push, he added, 'Here, you, why don't you blow?'

In point of fact, Lapoulle, a perfect colossus, was exhausting himself in his efforts to raise a tempest, with his cheeks puffed out like goat-skins full of liquor, his whole face suffused by a rush of blood, and his eyes red and full of tears. Two other men of the squad, Chouteau and Pache—the former of whom lay on his back like a lazybones fond of his ease, whilst the other had assumed a crouching posture that he might carefully repair a rent in his trousers—were greatly amused by the fearful grimace which that brute Lapoulle was making, and burst at last into a roar of laughter.

Jean let them laugh. There would, perhaps, not be many more opportunities for gaiety; and despite the serious expression which sat on his full, round, regular-featured face, he was by no means a partisan of melancholy. Indeed, he closed his eyes readily enough whenever his men wished to amuse themselves. However, another group now attracted his attention. For nearly an hour one of the privates of his squad, Maurice Levasseur, had been chatting with a civilian, a red-haired individual, looking some six-and-thirty years of age, with a good-dog-Tray sort of face, and large blue goggle eyes—short-sighted eyes, which had led to his being exempted from military service. A quartermaster of the reserve artillery, who with his dark moustache and imperial had a bold confident air, had joined the couple; and the three of them tarried there, making themselves at home.

To spare them a reprimand, Jean, in his obliging way, thought it his duty to intervene. 'You would do well to leave, sir,' he said to the civilian. 'Here comes the tattoo, and if the lieutenant saw you——'

Maurice did not let him finish. 'Don't go, Weiss,' said he; and, addressing the corporal, he dryly added, 'This gentleman is my brother-in-law. The colonel knows him, and has given him permission to remain in camp.'

Why did this peasant, Jean Macquart, whose hands still smelt of the dungheap, interfere in a matter that did not concern him? thought Maurice. He, who had been called to the bar during the previous autumn, and who, on joining the army as a volunteer, had been forthwith enrolled in the 106th of the Line, thanks to the colonel's protection, and without having to undergo the usual probation at the depôt—carried his knapsack willingly enough; but, at the very outset, a feeling of repugnance, of covert revolt, had turned him against this illiterate corporal, the clodhopper who commanded him.

'All right,' retorted Jean, in his quiet way. 'Get yourselves caught. I don't care a rap.'

Then he abruptly faced about on finding that Maurice had not told him a fib; for at that very moment the colonel, M. de Vineuil, whose long yellow face was intersected by bushy white moustaches, passed by with that grand aristocratic air of his, and acknowledged the salute of Weiss and Maurice with a smile. The colonel was walking rapidly towards a farmhouse which peeped out from among some plum trees on the right hand, a few hundred paces away. The staff was installed there for the night, but no one knew whether the commander of the Army Corps—struck down by the grievous tidings that his brother had been killed at Weissenburg[3]—was there or not. Major-General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, to whose brigade the 106th Regiment belonged, was, however, assuredly at the farm, brawling no doubt according to his wont, with his huge belly swaying to and fro atop of his diminutive legs, and with his face highly coloured, like the face of one fond of the table, who is not troubled with any excess of brains. There was an increasing stir around the farmhouse; every minute or so estafettes were galloping off and returning; and feverish, indeed, were the long hours of waiting for the belated telegrams that were expected to bring news of the great battle, which since daybreak everyone had deemed inevitable and proximate. Where had it been fought, and how had it resulted? By degrees, as the night fell, it seemed as though the spirit of anxiety were brooding over the orchards, over the scattered stacks, and around the cow-sheds, spreading itself out on all sides like a shadowy sea. The men told one another that a Prussian spy had been caught prowling about the camp, and had been conducted to the farm to be questioned by the general. If Colonel de Vineuil ran there so fast it was, perhaps, because he had received a telegram.

Meanwhile, Maurice Levasseur had begun to chat again with his brother-in-law Weiss, and his cousin Honoré Fouchard, the quartermaster. The tattoo party, coming from afar off with its numbers gradually strengthened, passed near them, drumming and trumpeting in the melancholy twilight peacefulness; and yet they did not seem to hear it even. Grandson of a hero of the First Napoleon's armies, Maurice was born at Le Chêne Populeux, in the Argonne. His father, being turned away from the paths of glory, had sunk down to a meagre tax-collectorship; and his mother, a peasant woman, had expired in bringing him and his twin sister, Henriette, into the world. If Maurice had enlisted in the army, it was because of grave offences, the outcome of a course of dissipation in which his weak, excitable nature had embarked at the time when he had repaired to Paris to read for the bar, and when his relatives had pinched and stinted themselves to make a gentleman of him. But he had squandered their money in gaming, on women, and on the thousand and one follies of the all-devouring city, and his conduct had hastened his father's death. His sister, after parting with her all to pay his debts, had been lucky enough to secure a husband, that honest fellow Weiss, an Alsatian of Mulhausen, who had long been an accountant at the refinery of Le Chêne Populeux, and was now an overseer in the employ of M. Delaherche, owner of one of the principal cloth-weaving establishments of Sedan. Maurice, who with his nervous nature was seized as promptly with hope as with despair, who was both generous and enthusiastic, but utterly devoid of stability—the slave indeed of each shifting, passing breeze—imagined that he was now quite cured of his follies. Fair and short, with an unusually large forehead, a small nose and chin, and generally refined features, he had grey, caressing eyes, in which there gleamed at times a spark of madness.

Weiss had hastened to Mulhausen on the eve of hostilities, having suddenly become desirous of settling some family affair; and if he had availed himself of Colonel de Vineuil's kindness, in order to shake hands with his brother-in-law, Maurice, it was because the colonel happened to be the uncle of young Madame Delaherche, a pretty widow, whom the cloth merchant of Sedan had married the year before, and whom both Maurice and Henriette had known when she was a child, her parents then being neighbours of their own. Besides the colonel, Maurice had come across another of Madame Delaherche's connections in the person of Captain Beaudoin, who commanded his company, and who had been this lady's most intimate friend, it was insinuated, at the time when she was Madame Maginot of Mézières, wife of M. Maginot, inspector of the State forest.

'Mind you kiss Henriette for me,' said Maurice, again and again—he was, indeed, passionately fond of his sister—'tell her she will have every reason to be pleased, and that I want to make her proud of me.'

Tears filled his eyes as he thought of his foolish conduct in Paris; but his brother-in-law, touched in his turn, changed the conversation by saying to Honoré Fouchard, the artilleryman: 'The first time I pass by Remilly I shall run up and tell uncle Fouchard that I saw you and found you well.'

Uncle Fouchard, a peasant with a little land of his own, who plied the calling of itinerant village butcher, was a brother of Maurice's mother. He lived at Remilly, right at the top of the hill, at four miles or so from Sedan.

'All right,' said Honoré, quietly; 'the old man doesn't care a rap about me, but, if it pleases you, you can go to see him.'

Just at that moment there was a stir in front of the farmhouse, and they saw the prowler—the man accused of being a Prussian spy—come out, accompanied by an officer. He had no doubt produced some papers, related some plausible tale or other, for he was no longer under arrest—the officer was simply turning him out of the camp. At that distance, in the impending darkness, one could only vaguely distinguish his huge, square-built figure and tawny head. Maurice, however, impetuously exclaimed: 'Look there, Honoré. Isn't that fellow like the Prussian—you know the man I mean—Goliath?'

The quartermaster started on hearing this name, and fixed his ardent eyes upon the supposed spy. This mention of Goliath Steinberg, the slaughterman, the rascal who had made bad blood between himself and his father, who had robbed him of his sweetheart Silvine, had revived all the horrible story—the filthy abomination that still caused him so much suffering—and he felt a sudden impulse to run after the man and strangle him. But the spy, if such he was, had already passed beyond the camp lines, and, walking rapidly away, soon vanished in the darkness of the night.

'Oh! Goliath,' muttered Honoré; 'it isn't possible. He must be over there with the others. Ah! if ever I meet him——'

And with a threatening gesture he pointed to the darkening horizon, the violet-tinted eastern sky which to him meant Prussia.

They all relapsed into silence, and the tattoo was again heard afar off, at the other end of the camp. 'Blazes!' resumed Honoré, 'I shall get into trouble if I'm not back for the roll call. Good night. Good-bye to all!' Then having once more pressed Weiss's hands he hastily strode away towards the hillock where the reserve artillery was massed; he had not again mentioned his father, nor had he even sent any message to Silvine, whose name burnt his lips.

A few minutes had elapsed, when a bugle call was heard on the left, near the quarters of the second brigade. Another bugle nearer at hand replied. Then a third rang out, afar off. They were all sounding, far and near, when Gaude, the bugler of Jean's company, made up his mind to discharge a volley of sonorous notes. He was a big, skinny, sorrowful, taciturn man, without a hair on his chin, and blew his instrument with the lungs of a whirlwind.

Sergeant Sapin, an affected little fellow, with big dreamy eyes, began to call the roll, shouting out the men's names in a shrill voice, whilst they, having drawn near to him, made answer in a variety of tones, now akin to the sound of a violoncello and now to that of a flute. A break, however, suddenly occurred in the responses. 'Lapoulle!' repeated the sergeant, shouting as loud as he could. There was still no answer, and Jean had to rush to the pile of green logs, which Lapoulle, egged on by his comrades, was still obstinately trying to ignite. Stretched there on his stomach, with his face quite scorched, he continued blowing away the smoke of the blackening wood.

'Thunder!' shouted Jean, 'just leave that alone and answer to your name.'

Lapoulle sat up with a bewildered air, then appeared to understand, and finally bellowed 'Present!' in a voice so like that of a savage that Loubet fell flop on the ground, so amazingly funny did he consider the incident. Pache, who had finished his sewing, replied to his name in a scarcely audible voice as though he were mumbling a prayer. Chouteau, without even rising, let his answer drop disdainfully from his lips, and then stretched himself out more comfortably. Meanwhile, Rochas, the lieutenant on duty, stood waiting, motionless, a few yards off. When the roll had been called, and Sergeant Sapin came to tell him that there was no one missing, he protruded his chin in the direction of Weiss, who was still chatting with Maurice, and growled from under his moustache, 'There's even one man too many. Why on earth is that fellow here?'

'He has the colonel's permission, sir,' explained Jean, who had overheard the question.

Rochas shrugged his shoulders, and, without replying, began walking up and down in front of the tents pending the time to turn in, whilst Jean, worn out by the day's march, sat down not far from Maurice, whose words reached him without any intentional listening on his part, occupied as he was with vague dim reflections that were germinating in the depths of his slow, dull brain.

Maurice was a believer in war, which he considered to be inevitable—necessary, even, to the existence of nations. This doctrine had imposed itself upon him since he had adopted the theory of evolution, which already at that time impassionated young men of culture. Is not life itself an incessant battle, which does not flag, even for a second? Continuous fighting, the victory of the fittest, the maintenance and renewal of strength by action, and the resuscitation of juvenescent life from death itself—are not these the very essence of the natural law? Maurice remembered the great transport that had buoyed him up when, with the view of atoning for his errors, he had thought of becoming a soldier and hurrying to the frontier. Possibly the voters of the Plebiscitum, though surrendering themselves to the Emperor, had not really desired war. Maurice himself, but a week previously, had declared that such a war as was being spoken of would be both culpable and idiotic. People were then discussing the candidature of a German prince to the Spanish throne, and in the confusion which gradually arose it seemed as if everybody were in the wrong. No one could say precisely from which side the provocation had come, and only the inevitable remained, the fatal law which at a given hour impels one people against another. Then a great thrill swept through Paris, and Maurice in his mind's eye still beheld the scenes of that torrid night, the boulevards a human sea, the bands of men who waved their torches and shouted: 'To Berlin! To Berlin! To Berlin!' And he again saw a tall woman[4] with a sculptural figure and a queenly profile mount on a carriage-box in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and, swathed in the folds of a tricolour flag, chant the 'Marseillaise.' Was all that a lie? Had not the heart of Paris really beaten that night?

As was always the case with Maurice, however, after this nervous excitement there had come long hours of fearful wavering and disgust. His arrival at the barracks, the adjutant to whom he had reported himself, the sergeant who had provided him with his uniform, the stinking and repulsively filthy dormitory, the rough familiarity of his new companions, the mechanical exercises which had exhausted his limbs and rendered his brain so heavy—all these had been unpleasant experiences. In less than a week, however, he had become accustomed to his new life, and displayed no further repugnance for it. And, indeed, when the regiment at last set out for Belfort, enthusiasm again seized hold of him.

From the very outset he had felt confident of victory. The Emperor's plan was quite clear to him. Four hundred thousand men were to cross the Rhine before the Prussians were ready, and by a bold, vigorous dash to separate Northern from Southern Germany; whilst, at the same time, thanks to some brilliant success, Austria and Italy would speedily be compelled to ally themselves with France. Had it not been rumoured, too, at one moment, that the Seventh Army Corps, to which Maurice's regiment belonged, was to put to sea at Brest in view of landing in Denmark and creating a diversion which would compel Prussia to immobilise one of her armies? She was to be surprised, overwhelmed on every side, crushed in a few weeks' time. There was to be a mere military promenade—from Strasburg to Berlin. Since that period of waiting at Belfort, however, Maurice had been distracted by anxiety. The Seventh Corps, whose allotted task was to watch the outlets of the Black Forest, had reached Belfort in fearful confusion, deficient in men, and lacking everything. It was necessary to wait for the third division to arrive from Italy.[5] The second cavalry brigade had to remain at Lyons, as some rioting was feared there; and three batteries of artillery had actually gone astray, no one knew where. Moreover, the corps was in an extraordinary state of destitution. The magazines of Belfort, which were to have supplied all requisites, proved to be empty; there were no tents, no pots or pans, no flannel waistbands, no pharmaceutical supplies, no field smithies, no horse-locks, not an ambulance attendant, nor an artificer. At the last moment, too, it was discovered that the indispensable spare mechanism for thirty thousand chassepots was wanting, and it became necessary to send an officer to Paris, whence he returned with barely sufficient for five thousand weapons, and he had had the utmost difficulty in obtaining even these.

On the other hand, Maurice was particularly worried by the inaction of the army. What! they had been there a fortnight—why did they not march forward? He fully realised that each day's delay was an irreparable blunder, an opportunity of victory irretrievably lost. And, confronting the plan he had dreamt of, there rose up the reality, the blundering fashion in which this plan had been executed. Of this he was as yet but anxiously and dimly conscious; it was only at a later period that he knew the truth—the Seventh Army Corps écheloned or rather disseminated along the frontier from Metz to Bitche and from Bitche to Belfort—the regiments invariably below their assumed strength, there being at best but 230,000 men, when it was supposed that there were 430,000; the generals jealous of one another, each bent on gaining his own marshal's bâton without helping his neighbour; the most fearful lack of foresight, mobilisation and concentration being carried out simultaneously to gain time, but resulting in inextricable confusion; and above all else that creeping paralysis, originating in high quarters, with the ailing Emperor, who was incapable of prompt decision, and which was to spread over the entire army, disorganise and annihilate it, and toss it to the most fearful disasters, without any possibility of its defending itself. And yet, above the secret disquietude of those days of waiting, there still lingered an instinctive confidence in victory.

Suddenly, on August 3, the news of the victory of Saarbrucken, gained the day before, burst upon one. Nobody knew whether it was a great victory or not, but the newspapers were brimful of enthusiasm. So Germany was invaded at last. This was the first step in the glorious march; and then began the legend of the Prince Imperial, who had calmly picked up a bullet on the battle field. Two days later, when the surprise and crushing reverse of Weissenburg became known, a cry of rage arose from every breast. Five thousand Frenchmen, caught in an ambuscade, had for ten long hours gallantly resisted five-and-thirty thousand Prussians—this evidently demanded vengeance! The commanders had no doubt been guilty in not keeping a better look-out, and in not foreseeing what had happened; but everything was about to be remedied. MacMahon had summoned the first division of the Seventh Army Corps; the First Corps was to be supported by the Fifth;[6] and at the present time, no doubt, the Prussians had recrossed the Rhine with the bayonets of the French linesmen in their loins. And the thought that there must have been some furious fighting that very day, the increasing, feverish longing for news, all the prevailing anxiety grew and spread under the broad pale heavens.

Thus it was that Maurice discoursed to Weiss.

'Ah!' he added, 'they must certainly have received a good licking to-day.'

Instead of replying, Weiss nodded his head with a thoughtful air. He also was looking towards the Rhine—towards the east, where night had now completely fallen, and where the sky, darkened as with mystery, had the aspect of a great black wall. Since the last bugle calls of the mustering, a profound silence had been falling over the drowsy camp, disturbed only by the footsteps and converse of a few belated soldiers. A light, looking like a twinkling star, had just been placed in the room of the farmhouse where the staff officers sat keeping their vigil, waiting for the telegrams which arrived at intervals, bringing as yet only ambiguous tidings. The fire of green wood had been abandoned at last, but some dense, funereal smoke still ascended from it, and was driven away by the breeze over the restless farm and towards the sky, where it dimmed the early stars.

'A licking!' repeated Weiss, at last. 'God grant it!'

Jean, who was still seated a few steps away, pricked up his ears; and Lieutenant Rochas, noticing the accent of doubt that quivered in Weiss's wish, stopped short to listen.

'What, do you lack confidence?' Maurice resumed; 'do you think a defeat possible?'

His brother-in-law stopped him with a gesture, his hands trembling, his good-natured face suddenly convulsed and quite pale. 'A defeat! Heaven shield us from it! I belong to this part of the country, you know. My grandfather and grandmother were murdered by the Cossacks, in 1814, and whenever I think of invasion my hands clench instinctively, and I feel inclined to go and fight the enemy in my frock-coat, just as I am! But a defeat—no, no, I won't believe it possible!'

He became calmer, and his shoulders drooped as though he felt oppressed. 'All the same,' he resumed, 'I am not at ease. I know Alsace well; I have just travelled through the province on business, and have seen things which stared our generals in the face, but which they refused to see. We Alsatians certainly desired war with Prussia; we have long been awaiting an opportunity to pay off old scores. But that did not interfere with our friendly intercourse with Baden and Bavaria. We most of us have friends or relatives just across the Rhine. We thought that, like ourselves, they dreamed of curbing the unbearable pride of the Prussians. Calm and resolute as we usually are, we have, nevertheless, been seized with impatience and disquietude for a fortnight past, on seeing how everything has gone from bad to worse. Ever since the declaration of war the enemy's cavalry scouts have been allowed to come and terrify our villages, reconnoitre the country, and cut the telegraph wires. Baden and Bavaria are rising, masses of troops are marching through the Palatinate, and the information that has come in from all sides, from the fairs and the markets, shows that the frontier is menaced. But when the frightened villagers and their mayors come and tell all this to the passing officers, the latter shrug their shoulders and think these peasants are mere poltroons troubled with hallucinations. The enemy is far away! Ah! the truth is we ought not to have lost an hour, whereas days and days go by. What can we be waiting for? For the whole of Germany to fall upon us?'

He spoke in a low, sorrowful voice, as though repeating things that he had long thought out: 'Ah! Germany, I know it well, and the pity is that you others seem to know as little about it as you know of China. Do you remember my cousin Gunther, Maurice, the young fellow who came to shake hands with me last spring at Sedan? He is my cousin on the women's side. My mother and his are sisters; she was married at Berlin, and he is a true Prussian; he hates France. He is now serving as a captain in the Prussian Guards. On the evening when I saw him Off at the railway station—I still seem to hear him—he said to me in that rasping voice of his: "If France ever declares war against us she will be beaten."'

Lieutenant Rochas had, so far, restrained himself, but on hearing this he stepped forward with a furious air. He was a tall, thin fellow, nearly fifty years old, with a long, battered, tanned, smoked face. His huge, hooked nose fell over a large mouth—expressive both of violence and kindliness—above which bristled his coarse grey moustache. 'What the —— are you about,' he thundered, 'discouraging our men like that?'

Without taking part in the dispute, Jean considered the lieutenant to be in the right. Though astonished by the long delays and the prevailing confusion, he had never doubted that they would give the Prussians a fearful thrashing. It was sure and certain, indeed, since he and his comrades had been sent there for no other purpose.

'But I don't want to discourage anyone,' replied Weiss, somewhat taken aback. 'On the contrary, I wish everyone knew what I know, for forewarned is forearmed. But listen, Germany——'

Then, with that sober-minded air of his, he explained his fears: the victory of Sadowa had brought Prussia increased power, a national movement was placing her at the head of the other German States, a vast empire was in progress of formation, men were seized with an enthusiastic, irresistible impulse to secure the unification of the Fatherland. Thanks to the system of compulsory military service the whole nation was up in arms, fully instructed, well disciplined, provided with a powerful war material, trained also to European warfare, and still flushed with the glory of its triumph over Austria. The intelligence and moral strength of this army were also to be noted; nearly all the commanders were young men, and took their orders from a generalissimo who seemed destined to revolutionise the entire art of war, whose prudence and foresight were perfect, and whose perspicuity was marvellous. Then, confronting Germany, Weiss boldly depicted France: the Empire greatly aged, still acclaimed, as witness the Plebiscitum,[7] but rotten at the basis, having weakened love of country by destroying liberty, and having reverted to liberal courses when these could be of no avail but could only accelerate its fall; and exposed, moreover, to crumble away as soon as it ceased to encourage the appetite for enjoyment which itself had fostered. The army, still laden with the laurels of the Crimea and Italy, was certainly splendidly brave; but the system of allowing men to escape service by a pecuniary payment had tampered with its efficiency; and it had been abandoned to the routine of the Algerian school, and was far too confident of victory to make any real effort for proficiency in the new science of war. Finally, the generals, for the most part of indifferent merit, were consumed by rivalry, whilst some were crassly ignorant, and at the head of them there was the Emperor, ailing and hesitating, deceived by others and deceiving himself as to the outcome of this frightful adventure, into which they all plunged like blind men, without any attempt at serious preparation, and amid universal bewilderment and confusion, like that of a scared flock driven to the slaughter-house.

Rochas stood there listening, agape, with his eyes wide open and his terrible nose contracted. Suddenly, however, he made up his mind to laugh, with a huge laugh that distended his jaws from ear to ear. 'What are you cackling there? What does all this humbug mean?' he shouted. 'There's no sense in it; it is too stupid for anyone to trouble his head about. Go and tell it to the marines if you like, but not to me; no, not to me. I've seen twenty-seven years' service!'

So saying, he struck his chest with his clenched hand. The son of a journeyman mason from the Limousin country, Rochas had been born in Paris, and not caring for his father's calling had enlisted when he was only eighteen. A true soldier of fortune, he started off with his knapsack, gaining a corporal's stripes in Algeria, rising to the rank of a sergeant at Sebastopol, and promoted to a lieutenancy after Solferino. Fifteen years of hardship and heroic bravery was the price he had paid to become an officer, but he was so painfully ignorant that it was certain he would never be made a captain.

'Come, sir,' said he to Weiss, 'although you know everything, here's something you don't know. At Mazagran—I was barely nineteen at the time—we were only one hundred and twenty-three men, neither more nor less, yet we held out during four days against twelve thousand Arabs. Yes, indeed, for years and years out there in Africa, at Mascara, Biskra, and Dellys, then too in Khabylia, and later on at Laghouat, if you had only been with us, sir, you would have seen how all those dirty blackamoors skedaddled as soon as ever we appeared. And at Sebastopol, sir—ah! dash it, it can't be said that we had an easy time of it out there. Gales strong enough to tear the very hair out of your head, such bitter cold and ceaseless alerts, and then, at the very end, everything blown into the air by those savages! But all the same we made them dance—dance to our tune in our own frying pan. And then Solferino—you were not there, sir, so why do you speak of it? Ah! it was warm at Solferino—though there fell more water from the sky that day than you have seen fall in all your life—and a nice dressing we gave the Austrians. You should have seen how they ran away from our bayonets, how they galloped and pushed one another aside to run the faster, as if they were on fire!'

He was brimming over with delight, and all the old military gaiety of France rang out in his triumphant laugh. This was the legend—the French trooper marching victoriously all over the world with his sweetheart on one hand and a glass of good wine in the other; the universe conquered whilst singing a drinking refrain. A French corporal and four men, and lo! immense armies of foreigners bit the dust.

But he suddenly thundered out: 'Beaten, France beaten! Those Prussian pigs beat such men as we!' Then stepping up to Weiss he caught hold of a lapel of his coat. His tall, slim, knight-errant style of figure expressed profound contempt for any enemy, no matter who that enemy might be, and supreme indifference as to conditions of time and place. 'Listen to me, sir,' he said; 'if the Prussians dare to come here we will escort them home again—we'll kick them all the way back—all the way back to Berlin. You hear me!'

Then he waved his hand superbly, with the serenity of a child, the candid conviction of the innocent babe that knows nothing and fears nothing. 'Parbleu!' he added. 'That's how it is, because it can't be otherwise.'

Dazed and almost convinced, Weiss hastily declared that he asked for nothing better. As for Maurice, who held his tongue, not daring to speak out before his superior, he ended by laughing in unison with him. That devil of a lieutenant, stupid though he was, had warmed his heart. Jean, too, with a nod of the head, had approved each of the lieutenant's words. He also had fought at Solferino, when it rained so heavily. Moreover, that was the proper way to speak. If all the officers had spoken like that, the men would not have cared a fig about there being no pots or pans, or flannel waistbands.

For some time past the night had completely fallen, and in the darkness Rochas continued waving his long arms. He had never spelt through more than one book—a volume on the victories of Napoleon I. that had found its way from a pedlar's box into his knapsack—and unable to calm himself he vented all his science in this impetuous outburst: 'At Castiglione, Marengo, Austerlitz and Wagram we thrashed the Austrians! At Eylau, Jena, and Lutzen we thrashed Prussia! At Friedland, Smolensko, and the Moskowa we thrashed the Russians! We thrashed Spain and England everywhere! We thrashed the whole world, right and left, from top to bottom. Yet to-day you say we are to be thrashed ourselves! Why? How? Has the world suddenly been changed?'

He drew himself still more erect, raising his arm like a flag-staff. 'Listen, there has been fighting to-day, and the staff are waiting for news. Well, I'll tell you what news will come! The Prussians have been thrashed—thrashed to such a point that they have neither arms nor legs left them, thrashed to such a degree that only crumbs of them remain for us to sweep away!'

At that moment a loud, dolorous cry resounded under the sombre heavens. Was it the plaintive note of some night bird? Was it the sobbing voice of Mystery coming from afar? The whole camp, shrouded in darkness, shuddered at the sound, and the disquietude fostered by the delay in the arrival of the expected despatches became more intense, feverish, and widespread. The flame of the candle that illuminated the anxious vigil of the staff had shot up higher, and now it was shining erect, without a flicker, like the flame of a taper beside a death-bed.

But it was ten o'clock; and Gaude, springing from the dark ground where he had been lost to view, was the first to sound the signal for the men to retire for the night. Far and near, the other bugles replied, till the sound gradually died away in a faint flourish, as though the very instruments were drowsy. Then Weiss, who had lingered there so long, affectionately pressed Maurice to his heart, and bade him be brave and hopeful. He would kiss Henriette for him, and say all manner of kind things to uncle Fouchard.

Just as he was going off a rumour sped through the camp causing a feverish agitation: Marshal MacMahon had gained a great victory, it was said; the Crown Prince of Prussia and 25,000 men had been taken prisoners; the enemy had been driven back, annihilated, leaving his guns and baggage in the hands of the French.

'Of course!' exclaimed Rochas in his thundering voice; and running after Weiss, who, quite delighted, was hastening away towards Mulhausen, he added: 'We'll kick them all the way back, sir, all the way back!'

A quarter of an hour later, however, a despatch announced that the army had been obliged to abandon Wœrth,[8] and was in full retreat. Ah! What a night! Rochas, overcome by sleep, had wrapped himself in his cloak, and as often happened was slumbering on the ground, disdaining any shelter. Maurice and Jean had slipped into the tent, where, with their heads resting on their knapsacks, Loubet, Chouteau, Pache, and Lapoulle had already settled themselves. There was just room for six men, provided they curled up their legs. At the outset Loubet enlivened all these hungry fellows by convincing Lapoulle that some fowls would be given out at ration time, next day; they felt so tired, however, that they were soon snoring, careless whether the Prussians came or not. Jean remained for a moment quite motionless, pressed close against Maurice. Despite his great fatigue he could not get to sleep, for everything that Weiss had said of the innumerable, all-devouring German nation, that was up in arms against France, was revolving in his brain; and he realised that his companion also was awake, thinking of the self-same things. Suddenly Maurice drew back impatiently, and Jean divined that he inconvenienced him. The instinctive enmity and repugnance, due to difference of class and education, that separated the peasant from the young man of culture, assumed a form of physical dislike. It filled Jean with a feeling of shame and secret sadness, and he tried to make himself small, as it were, to escape the hostile contempt that he divined in Maurice. The night was freshening, but inside the tent, with all these closely packed bodies, the atmosphere became so stifling that Maurice, seized with feverish exasperation, at length bounded outside, and stretched himself on the ground a few paces off. Jean, feeling quite wretched, sank into a kind of semi-somnolence, full of unpleasant dreams, in which his sorrow that nobody cared for him was mingled with the apprehension of a terrible misfortune, which he fancied he could hear galloping along, afar off, in the depths of the Unknown.

Several hours must have elapsed, and the whole black, motionless camp seemed to be annihilated beneath the oppressive weight of that dense, evil night, heavy with something fearful which was as yet without a name. Every now and again there was an upheaval of that sea of darkness, a sudden groan resounded from some invisible tent, the gasp of some soldier in a fitful dream. Then there came noises that were not easily recognised, the snorting of a horse, the clash of a sabre, the hasty footsteps of some belated prowler—all those commonplace sounds which acquire at times a menacing sonority. Suddenly a great glow blazed forth near the canteen. The front was brilliantly illuminated, and the piles of arms could be seen with ruddy reflections streaking the burnished barrels of the guns, as if with trickling runnels of freshly shed blood. The sentinels stood out dark and erect amid this sudden conflagration. Was this the enemy, whose appearance the officers had been predicting for two days past, and to meet whom they had marched expressly from Belfort to Mulhausen? Then, amid a great crackling and sparkling, the flame suddenly went out. After smouldering for hours, the pile of green wood, with which Lapoulle and Loubet had busied themselves so long, had all at once blazed up and burnt away as though it had been so much straw.

Alarmed by the bright glow, Jean in his turn had precipitately bounded out of the tent, and in doing so he narrowly missed stumbling over Maurice, who lay there, looking on, with his head resting upon his elbow. The night had already fallen again, more dense than ever, and the two men remained there stretched on the bare ground, at a few paces from one another. In front of them, in the depths of the gloom, there still shone the window of the farmhouse, illumined by that solitary candle that looked like a funeral taper. What could be the time? Two o'clock, three o'clock perhaps. The staff had certainly not gone to bed. One could hear the brawling voice of General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who was quite exasperated by this long vigil, which he had only been able to endure thanks to multitudinous cigars and glasses of grog. Fresh telegrams were arriving, and matters must be getting worse, for the shadowy estafettes could be indistinctly seen galloping hither and thither like men deranged. Stamping and swearing could be heard; then came a stifled gasp like that of a dying man, followed by a fearful silence. Had the end come at last? An icy chill had swept over the camp, weighed down by sleep and anguish.

Just then, as a slim, tall, shadowy figure walked past them rapidly, both Jean and Maurice recognised Colonel de Vineuil. He was with Surgeon-Major Bouroche, a stout man with the head of a lion. They were exchanging disconnected words in an undertone, words but imperfectly articulated, like those one sometimes hears in dreams: 'It came from Basle—our first division is destroyed—twelve hours' fighting, the entire army in retreat.' The colonel stopped short, and called to another shadowy figure, slight, nimble, and dapper, that was hastily approaching, 'Is that you, Beaudoin?'

'Yes, colonel.'

'Ah! my poor friend. MacMahon has been beaten at Frœschweiler, Frossard is beaten at Speichern, De Failly hemmed in between them, gave neither any support. At Frœschweiler we had but a single corps engaged against an entire army. Prodigies of valour, but everything was swept away—rout and panic, and France open to the invader.'

His sobs were choking him, and the words he added died away as he and his shadowy companions disappeared, melting as it were in the surrounding darkness.

Maurice had sprung from the ground, shuddering from head to foot. 'My God!' he stammered.

And he found nothing else to say, whilst Jean, with an icy chill at his heart, muttered: 'Ah! What cursed luck! That gentleman, your relative, was right, after all, when he said they were stronger than we are.'

Maurice, quite beside himself, felt inclined to strangle Jean. The Prussians stronger than the French! The thought made his pride revolt. But the sober-minded, stubborn peasant was already adding—'Still it doesn't much matter. A man doesn't give in just for one blow. We shall have to hit them back.'

A tall figure had just sprung up in front of them, and they recognised Rochas, still draped in his cloak. The fugitive noises, perhaps even the passing breath of defeat, had roused him from his heavy slumber. He questioned them, determined to know the truth, and when, with great difficulty, he understood what had happened, an expression of profound stupefaction appeared in his empty child-like eyes. Again and again he repeated: 'Beaten! beaten! How's that? Beaten—why?'

The night had been pregnant with the anguish of this disaster. And now in the east appeared the dawn, an ambiguous dawn, infinitely sad, that whitened the tents full of sleepers, among whom one could now dimly descry the cadaverous-looking faces of Loubet and Lapoulle, Chouteau and Pache, who were still snoring with their mouths wide open. The aurora of a day of mourning was rising amid the soot-tinted mists that had ascended from the distant river.

[CHAPTER II]

THE PANIC—FROM BELFORT TO RHEIMS

Towards eight o'clock the heavy clouds were dissipated by the sun, and the bright, hot August Sunday shone upon Mulhausen, nestling amid the broad fertile plain. From the camp, now wide awake and buzzing with life, one could hear the bells of all the parish churches ringing out in full peal through the limpid atmosphere. Fraught though it was with a terrible disaster, this beautiful Sunday was a gay one, and the sky had a festive brilliancy.

When Gaude suddenly sounded the call to rations, Loubet affected great astonishment. What would there be? Some of that fowl which he had promised to Lapoulle the night before? Born amid the Paris Halles, in the Rue de la Cossonnerie, Loubet was the chance offspring of a market woman, and had enlisted, so he expressed it, for money's sake, after trying in turn a variety of callings. Fond of his stomach, he had a keen scent for dainty morsels, so he went off to see the rations distributed, whilst Chouteau, the artist—in reality a house painter of Montmartre—a handsome man and a revolutionist, who was furious at having been kept in the army after completing his time, began chaffing Pache, whom he had caught saying his prayers, on his knees, behind the tent. Pache, a sorry-looking little fellow with a pointed head, coming from some far-away village in Picardy, submitted to the chaffing with the patient gentleness of a martyr. He, and that colossus Lapoulle—a brutish peasant reared amid the Sologne marshes, and so stupendously ignorant that on joining the regiment he had asked to be shown the King—were the butts of the squad.

Although the news of the disaster of Frœschweiler had been current since the reveille, the four men laughed together, and set about their accustomed tasks with the indifference of machines. A bantering growl of surprise was heard when Corporal Jean, accompanied by Maurice, came back from the rationing with some firewood. So the supply which the men had vainly awaited the evening before in order to cook their soupe had arrived at last. There had merely been twelve hours' delay.

'A good mark for the commissariat!' exclaimed Chouteau.

'Never mind, we've got it now!' said Loubet. 'You shall see what a capital pot-au-feu I'll make you.'

He willingly took charge of the cooking as a rule; and the others thanked him for doing so, for he was a capital cook. But on these occasions he would overwhelm Lapoulle with extraordinary fatigue-duties. 'Go and fetch the champagne,' he would say to him, 'go and fetch the truffles.' That morning a comical idea, worthy of a Parisian gamin poking fun at a fool, came into his head: 'Make haste!' he cried; 'give me the fowl.'

'The fowl—why, where is it?'

'Why, there, on the ground. The fowl I promised you, the fowl the corporal brought.' So saying he pointed to a large white stone lying at their feet.

Lapoulle, quite amazed, ended by picking up the stone and turning it over in his hands.

'Now then, wash it! Wash the feet and the neck,' called Loubet, 'and use plenty of water, lazybones.' Then, by way of a joke and because the idea that they were going to have some soupe made him quite gay and facetious, he flung the stone into the pot full of water: 'That will flavour the broth nicely. What, didn't you know it? Don't you know anything, pighead? You shall have the parson's nose; you will see how tender it is.'

All the other men of the squad were splitting at sight of the expression on the face of Lapoulle, who, convinced at last, was already licking his lips. Ah! that rascal Loubet, there was no chance of catching the blues in his company. When the fire crackled in the sunlight and the pot began to sing, the whole squad, ranged around it like worshippers, visibly brightened as they watched the meat dancing on the water, and sniffed the nice smell that began to spread. They had felt fearfully hungry since the night before, and the idea of feeding took precedence of everything else. The army had been beaten, but all the same they must fill their stomachs. From one end to the other of the camp the fires were flaming and the pots boiling, and a voracious delight displayed itself while the bells continued clearly pealing from every steeple in Mulhausen.

Just as nine o'clock was about to strike, however, a sudden stir spread through the camp; officers hurried hither and thither, and Lieutenant Rochas, on receiving instructions from Captain Beaudoin, passed in front of the tents of his section.

'Now then, fold up everything, pack up everything; we are starting.'

'But the soupe?'

'You'll have it another day. We start at once.'

Gaude's bugle now rang out imperiously. Consternation and covert rage were general. What! must they start off without a bite, without waiting even an hour, by which time the soupe might be eatable? All the same the squad wished to drink the broth, but as yet it was merely so much water, whilst the uncooked meat was like tough leather between the men's teeth. Chouteau growled angry words, and Jean had to intervene to hasten the preparations for departure. What could there be such a tremendous hurry about that they should have to rush off in that style, without an opportunity even to recruit their strength? Some said they were about to march against the Prussians, to revenge the previous day's defeat; but Maurice, on hearing this, incredulously shrugged his shoulders. In a quarter of an hour the camp was raised, the tents were folded and strapped to the knapsacks, the guns were shouldered, and nothing remained on the bare ground save the expiring breakfast fires.

General Douay had determined on an immediate retreat, for some serious reasons. The Sub-Prefect of Schelestadt's despatch, already three days old, had been confirmed. Telegrams stated that Prussian camp-fires had again been seen threatening Markolsheim, and that an army corps of the enemy was crossing the Rhine at Huningen. Full and precise details were at hand; cavalry and artillery had been observed, with infantry marching from all directions to their rallying point. An hour's delay, and the line of retreat on Belfort would assuredly be intercepted. As a result of the defeats of Weissenburg and Frœschweiler, the general, isolated, adrift in his advanced position, now had no alternative but to fall back in all haste, especially as the morning's tidings were worse even than those of the night before.

The staff set out ahead at a rapid trot, spurring their horses onward and in dread lest they should be outstripped and find the Prussians already at Altkirch. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, foreseeing a hard march, took the precaution to pass through Mulhausen, where he breakfasted copiously, cursing the scramble all the while. And Mulhausen, as the officers rode through it, wore a sorrowful aspect. At news of the retreat the townsfolk poured into the streets, lamenting the sudden departure of the troops whose protection they had so pressingly implored. So they were to be abandoned, and all the valuable supplies accumulated at the railway station were to be left for the enemy; even the town itself would perhaps be merely a captured town before the evening. Along the country roads, the villagers and the peasants dwelling in wayside homesteads also hurried to their doors in astonishment and dismay. So the regiments they had seen marching to battle only the day before were already retreating, flying from the enemy without even having fought! The commanders were gloomy, and without answering any questions urged on their horses, as though the very fiend were at their heels. Was it true then that the Prussians had crushed the army, and were pouring forth from all sides into France like the waters of a swollen river? And, infected with the growing panic, the peasants fancied they could hear the distant roll of the invasion travelling through the atmosphere and roaring louder and louder every moment. Then carts were filled with furniture, houses were swiftly emptied, and families fled one after another by the roads along which fear was galloping.

In the confusion of the retreat, whilst skirting the canal from the Rhone to the Rhine, the 106th was brought to a halt near the bridge, after covering only the first thousand yards of the march. The marching orders, given badly enough, had been even worse executed, and had resulted in the whole of the Second Division crowding together at this spot. The passage was so narrow—barely sixteen feet—that the defiling seemed likely to last for ever.

Two hours elapsed and the 106th was still waiting there, facing the interminable stream of troops that flowed past it. Standing under the fiery sunrays with their knapsacks on their shoulders and their arms grounded, the men at last waxed indignant in their impatience.

'It seems we belong to the rear-guard,' said Loubet in that waggish voice of his.

'They are having a fine game with us, letting us roast here,' cried Chouteau in a rage; 'we were the first to arrive, we ought to have gone on ahead.'

At sight of the broad fertile plain and the level roads intersecting the hop grounds and fields of ripe corn, on the other side of the canal, it was now quite apparent that they were retreating, returning indeed along the same route they had come by the day before, and as this was realised jeers and furious scoffing sped through the ranks.

'So we are taking to our heels,' resumed Chouteau. 'Well, this march to meet the enemy, which they have been dinning into our ears since the other morning, is a precious funny one. Really now, this is too much bluster! We arrive, and then back we bolt without even having time to eat anything.'

At this, the men began to laugh again in their bitter rage, and Maurice, who stood near Chouteau, admitted he was in the right. As they had been kept standing there like posts for a couple of hours why hadn't they been allowed to cook their soupe quietly and eat it? They were getting hungry again, and felt the more rancorous that their pots should have been upset before the soupe was ready, as they could not understand the need of all this haste, which seemed to them both cowardly and stupid. Well, they were fine hares and no mistake.

However, Lieutenant Rochas began to trounce Sergeant Sapin for the disorderly bearing of his men; and hearing the noise, Captain Beaudoin, as dapper as ever, drew near: 'Silence in the ranks!'

Jean, who like a well-disciplined veteran soldier held his peace, was looking at Maurice, who seemed amused by Chouteau's malignant, passionate raillery: and he was astonished that a gentleman who had received so much schooling should approve of things which, however true they might be, were certainly not things to be said. If each soldier began blaming the generals and giving his opinion, they would certainly not get on together.

At last, after waiting another hour, the 106th was ordered to advance. The bridge, however, was still so crowded with the fag end of the division that the most deplorable disorder was created. Several regiments became intermingled; some companies were carried along and got across, whilst others, driven to the edge of the roadway, had to stay there marking time. And to make matters worse, a squadron of cavalry insisted on passing, driving the laggards who were already falling out of the ranks of the infantry into the neighbouring fields. After an hour's marching, quite a large party of stragglers stretched along the road, crawling and dawdling at their ease.

It was thus that Jean found himself in the rear, adrift with his squad, which he had not cared to leave, in the depths of a hollow road. The 106th had disappeared, not another man nor an officer of the company was to be seen—only solitary soldiers, a medley of strange men exhausted at the very outset of the march, and who were walking along leisurely wheresoever the paths might lead them. The sunrays were overpowering, it was extremely hot, and the knapsacks, rendered the heavier by the tents and all the complicated paraphernalia that swelled them out, weighed terribly on the men's shoulders. Many of these stragglers were not habituated to carrying them, and were inconvenienced too by their thick, campaigning great-coats, which seemed to them like leaden vestments. All at once a pale little linesman, whose eyes were full of tears, stopped short and flung his knapsack into a ditch with a deep sigh of relief, the long breath which the man who has been agonising draws as he feels himself coming back to life.

'He's in the right,' muttered Chouteau, though he himself continued marching along with his shoulders bending under the knapsack's weight. Two other men, however, having disburdened themselves, he could no longer hold out. 'Ah: curse it!' he cried, and with a jerk of his shoulders he tossed his knapsack on to the bank. Half a hundredweight on his shoulders—no, thanks. He had had enough of it. They were not beasts of burden that they should have to drag such things about.

Immediately afterwards Loubet imitated him, and compelled Lapoulle to do the same. Pache, who crossed himself each time they came upon a wayside cross, unfastened the straps of his knapsack, and carefully deposited it at the foot of a low wall, as if intending to come back and fetch it. And Maurice alone was still laden when Jean, on turning round, saw what his men had done.

'Take up your knapsacks. I shall have to pay for it if you don't.'

The men, however, without as yet openly revolting, trudged on silently, with an evil expression on their faces, as they pushed the corporal before them along the narrow road.

'Take them up or I shall report you!'

These words stung Maurice as though he had been lashed with a whip across the face. Report them! What! that brute of a peasant report them, because the poor fellows, feeling their muscles quite crushed, had eased themselves? And in a fit of feverish irritation he also unbuckled his straps, and with a defiant look at Jean, let his knapsack fall by the roadside.

'All right,' calmly said the corporal, realising the futility of a struggle; 'we will settle all that this evening.'

Maurice's feet caused him intense suffering. They were swelling in his coarse hard shoes, to which he was not habituated. He was far from robust, and though he had rid himself of his knapsack he could still feel a smarting sore on his spine, the unbearable hurt occasioned by his burden. Now, too, the mere weight of his gun, no matter how he carried it, made his breath come short and fast. But he was yet more distressed by the moral agony he experienced, for he was in one of those crises of despair to which he was subject. All at once, without possible resistance on his part, he would see his will-power collapse, and give way to evil instincts and self-abandonment, that subsequently made him sob with very shame. His errors in Paris had never been aught but the madness of 'his other self' as he expressed it, of the weak-minded fellow, capable of any degraded action, that he became in moments of low-spiritedness. And since he had been dragging himself along, under the overpowering sun, in this retreat which resembled a rout, he had become but a unit of the dawdling, disbanded flock spread over the roads. It was the countershock of the defeat, of the thunderbolt that had fallen leagues away, and the echo of which was following close at the heels of these panic-stricken men who fled without having seen an enemy. What could be hoped for now? Was it not all over? They were beaten, and there was nothing to do but to lie down and die.

'All the same,' shouted Loubet with that market boy's laugh of his; 'all the same we are not going to Berlin.'

'To Berlin! to Berlin!' Maurice again heard the cry bellowed forth by the swarming crowd on the Boulevards during that night of mad enthusiasm that had determined him to enlist. But the wind had changed into a tempestuous squall, there had been a terrible veering, and the very temperament of the French race was symbolised by the heated confidence which at the first reverse had suddenly collapsed into the despair now galloping among these vagrant, dispersed soldiers who were vanquished without having fought.

'This popgun of mine jolly well hurts my arms,' resumed Loubet, as he again changed his chassepot from one shoulder to the other. 'A nice toy, indeed, to carry about with one.' And then alluding to the money he had received as a substitute[9] he added: 'All the same, only fifteen hundred francs for such a trade as this—it's a regular swindle. That rich bloke whose place I've took must be smoking some nice pipes by his fireside, while I'm off to get my head cracked.'

'I had finished my time,' growled Chouteau, 'and I was just about to slope, but on account of this war they made me stay. Ah! what cursed bad luck to stumble into such a swinish business as this.'

He was balancing his rifle with a feverish hand, and suddenly he threw it, with all his strength, over a hedge. 'There,' said he, 'that's the place for the dirty thing.'

The gun spun round twice, and then fell in a furrow, where it lay motionless, stretched out like a dead body. Other guns were already flying through the air to join it, and the field was soon strewn with prostrate weapons looking sadly stiff in their abandonment under the oppressive sun. What with hunger torturing their stomachs, their shoes which injured their feet, this march which filled them with suffering, and the unforeseen defeat threateningly pursuing them, the men were seized as it were with epidemic madness. They could not hope for anything now; the generals bolted, the commissariat did not even feed them; and what with weariness and worry they experienced a desire to have done with the whole business before even beginning it. And that being so, the chassepot might as well join the knapsack. So with imbecile rage, and with the jeers of madmen amusing themselves, the laggards, scattered in endless file far away into the country, sent their guns flying into the fields.

Before ridding himself of his weapon, Loubet twirled it round and round like a drum-major's cane. Lapoulle, seeing his comrades fling their guns away, fancied no doubt it was a new drill exercise, and imitated them. Pache, however, with a confused consciousness of his duty, which he owed to his religious education, refused to do so, and was bespattered with insults by Chouteau, who called him a parson's drudge. 'There's a black-beetle for you,' said the house painter. 'Well, go and serve mass, as you're afraid to do like your comrades.'

Maurice, who was very gloomy, marched on in silence, his head bent under the fiery sun. Amid a kind of nightmare, brought on by his atrocious weariness, and peopled with phantoms, he advanced as if bound for some abyss lying ahead; and he, the man of education, experienced a subsidence of all his culture, an abasement that lowered him to the bestial level of the wretches surrounding him. 'Ah! you are right,' he suddenly said to Chouteau.

He had already deposited his gun on a pile of stones, when Jean, who had vainly been trying to prevent the arms being thrown away in this abominable fashion, perceived him, and darted towards him.

'Take up your gun at once; at once, you hear me!' cried the corporal, his face suffused by a rush of terrible anger. Usually so calm and conciliatory, he now had flaming eyes, and his voice thundered. His men, who had never seen him like this before, stopped short in surprise. 'Take up your gun at once, or you'll have to deal with me.'

Maurice, quivering with excitement, let but one word fall which he sought to render insulting: 'Clodhopper!'

'Yes, that's it; I'm a clodhopper, and you are a gentleman, you are! And for that very reason you're a pig, a dirty pig. I tell you so to your face.' At this some hooting was heard, but the corporal continued vehemently: 'When a man's educated, he shows it. If we are peasants and brutes you ought to set us a good example, you who know more than we do. Take up your gun, I say, or I'll have you shot when we halt.'

Maurice, already conquered, had picked up his gun. Tears of rage obscured his eyes. He resumed his march, staggering like a drunken man amid his comrades, who now jeered at him for having given in. Ah! that Jean, Maurice hated him with an inextinguishable hatred, struck as he was in the heart by this severe lesson which he felt to be deserved. And when Chouteau growled out that when men had a corporal like that they waited for a day of battle to lodge a stray bullet in his head, Maurice, quite maddened, distinctly saw himself smashing Jean's skull behind a wall.

A diversion occurred, however. Loubet noticed that during the quarrel Pache also had ended by getting rid of his gun, gently depositing it at the foot of a bank. Why had he done this? He did not try to explain, but laughed slyly, in the somewhat shame-faced style of a good little boy detected in his first fault. Then, very gay and quite revived, he marched on with his arms swinging; and along the endless roads, between the fields of ripe corn and the hop grounds that followed one another, ever the same, the straggling march continued, and the laggards without knapsacks or guns were now but a tramping crowd, a medley of scamps and beggars, at whose approach the frightened villagers closed their doors.

Just then an unforeseen meeting put the finishing touch to Maurice's rage. A dull, continuous rumbling was heard from afar; it was the reserve artillery, which had been the last to start, and the first detachment of which suddenly debouched round a turn of the road, the laggard linesmen having barely time to throw themselves into the fields. There was an entire artillery regiment of six squadrons marching in column, the colonel in the centre and each officer in his place, and they all clattered along at equal, carefully observed distances, each accompanied by its caisson, horses, and men. And in the fifth squadron Maurice recognised his cousin Honoré's gun. The quartermaster was there, proudly erect on his horse, to the left of the front driver, Adolphe, a stalwart, fair-complexioned man, who bestrode a sturdy chestnut, which admirably matched the off-horse trotting beside it; whilst Adolphe's chum, Louis, the gunner, a dark little fellow, would be seen among the six men seated in pairs on the ammunition boxes. They all seemed to have grown taller to Maurice, who had become acquainted with them at the camp, and the gun, drawn by its four horses and followed by its caisson, to which six other horses were harnessed, appeared to him as dazzling as a sun, well groomed and furbished, idolised by all its people, man and beast, who clung to it as it were with the discipline and attachment of a gallant family; and fearfully was Maurice's suffering increased when he saw his cousin Honoré dart a contemptuous glance at all the laggards, and then look quite stupefied on perceiving him among this flock of unarmed men. The defiling was nearly over already. The train of the batteries, the ammunition and forage waggons, the field smithies passed by; and then in a last cloud of dust came the spare men and horses, who vanished from sight at another bend of the road, amid the gradually subsiding clatter of wheels and hoofs.

'Pooh!' said Loubet, 'it's easy enough to swagger when you travel about in a carriage.'

The staff had found Altkirch unoccupied. There were no Prussians there as yet. Still fearing, however, that he was being pursued, and that the enemy might appear at any moment, General Douay had determined upon pushing on to Dannemarie, where the first detachments only arrived at five in the evening. Eight o'clock had struck, and night was gathering in, when the regiments, in frightful confusion and reduced to half their strength, commenced preparations for bivouacking. The men were quite exhausted, sinking both with hunger and fatigue. The laggards, the lamentable and interminable tag-rag and bobtail of the army, the cripples and mutineers scattered along the roads, continued arriving, now one by one, now in little bands, until ten o'clock, and had to search in the darkness for their companies which they could not find.

As soon as Jean had joined his regiment he went to look for Lieutenant Rochas to report to him all that had happened, and found him and Captain Beaudoin conferring with the colonel at the door of a little inn, all three of them visibly preoccupied about the roll call, and anxious as to what had become of their men. At the first words the corporal addressed to the lieutenant, Colonel de Vineuil, overhearing him, made him approach and relate everything. There was an expression of deep despondency on the colonel's yellow face, lighted by eyes that seemed all the blacker on account of the whiteness of his thick snowy hair and long drooping moustaches.

'Half a dozen of these scamps must be shot, sir,' exclaimed Captain Beaudoin, without waiting for M. de Vineuil to give his opinion.

Lieutenant Rochas nodded assent, but the colonel made a gesture of helplessness: 'There are too many of them. Nearly seven hundred. How could you manage—whom could you select? Besides, to tell the truth, the general won't have it. He's quite paternal, and says he never punished a single man in Algeria. No, no; I can do nothing. It's terrible.'

'It is terrible,' boldly rejoined the captain, 'it's the end of everything.'

Jean was retiring, when he heard Surgeon-Major Bouroche, whom he had not seen, growl in an undertone on the threshold of the inn that without discipline and punishments the army was done for. Before a week was over the men would be kicking their officers, whereas if a few of these fine fellows had been shot at once, the others, perhaps, would have profited by the lesson.

Nobody was punished. With commendable forethought some officers of the rear-guard escorting the army train had caused the knapsacks and guns bestrewing either side of the roads to be picked up. Only a small number was missing, and the men were re-armed at daybreak, furtively as it were, so as to hush up the affair. Orders had been given to raise the camp at five o'clock, but the men were roused at four, and the retreat on Belfort was hastened, the commanders being convinced that the Prussians were now only two or three leagues away. The men had to content themselves with biscuit, and with nothing to warm their stomachs they remained quite foundered after that brief, feverish night. And again that morning anything like an orderly march was prevented by the precipitate departure.

The day was an infinitely sad one, far worse than the day before. The character of the scenery had changed; they had entered a mountainous country, the roads climbed and descended slopes planted with fir trees; and the narrow valleys, bushy with furze, were spangled with golden flowers. But across that stretch of country so bright in the August sunrays, panic, growing more and more frenzied, had been sweeping since the previous day. A fresh despatch, instructing the mayors to warn the inhabitants to place their valuables in safety, had brought the general terror to a climax. Was the enemy at hand then? Would they even have time enough to escape? And they all fancied they could hear the roar of the invasion coming nearer and nearer; that sound like the dull roll of an overflowing river which had been swelling in volume ever since their departure from Mulhausen, and which now, at each village they came to, was increased by some fresh scene of terror, fraught with wailing and uproar.

Maurice marched along like a somnambulist, with his feet tingling, and his shoulders crushed by his gun and knapsack. He no longer thought of anything; at the sights that met his gaze he fancied himself in a nightmare; and he was no longer conscious of his comrades' tramp, realising merely that Jean was at his side, worn out with the same weariness and the same grief as himself. The villages they passed through presented a lamentable, pitiful aspect, such as to fill the heart with poignant anguish. As soon as the retreating troops, the worn-out, footsore, straggling soldiers appeared, the inhabitants began to bestir themselves, and hasten their flight. They had felt so easy in mind only a fortnight previously; all Alsace, indeed, had awaited the war with a smile, convinced that the fighting would take place in Germany. But now France was invaded, and the tempest was falling upon their heads, around their houses, and over their fields like one of those terrible hail and thunder storms which ruin an entire province in a couple of hours.

Before the doors of the houses, amid a scene of fearful confusion, men were loading carts and piling up articles of furniture, careless whether they broke them or not; and from the upper windows women flung out a last mattress or lowered a baby's cradle which had been well-nigh forgotten. And the baby having been strapped inside it, the cradle was perched atop of the load, among the upturned legs of the chairs and tables. In another vehicle, standing behind, the poor, infirm, old grandfather was being bound to a wardrobe that he might be carted away like some household utensil. Then there were those who had no cart, and who piled a few goods and chattels into a wheelbarrow, and others who went off with simply a bundle of clothes under their arm, and others too who had only thought of saving their parlour clock, which they pressed to their hearts as though it had been an infant. It was impossible to remove everything, and many articles of furniture and heavy bundles of linen lay abandoned in the ditches. Some folks before leaving fastened up their homes, and the houses with their doors and shutters securely closed looked quite dead; but the majority of the people, in their haste and the despairing conviction that everything would be destroyed, left their old homesteads open, with doors and windows gaping widely; and these poor empty houses, through which the wind could blow as it listed, and whence the very cats had fled, shuddering at what was about to happen, were the saddest of all, sad like the houses of a captured town depopulated by fright. At each succeeding village the spectacle became more and more pitiable, the number of those who were moving and hastening away became larger and larger, and there was shaking of fists, swearing of oaths, and shedding of tears amid all the growing scramble and confusion.

But it was especially whilst he followed the high road through the open country that Maurice felt his anguish stifling him. As they drew nearer to Belfort the train of runaways closed up and became a continuous procession. Ah! the poor people who imagined they would find a shelter-place under the walls of the stronghold. The man belaboured the horse, and the woman followed, dragging the children with her. Entire families, bending beneath their burdens, and with the little ones, who were unable to keep up, lagging behind, were hastening over the blinding white roads which the fiery sun was heating. Many of the fugitives had taken off their shoes that they might cover the ground more rapidly, and were walking along barefooted; and mothers with their dress-bodies unfastened were giving the breast to crying infants, without pausing for a moment in their march.

In the panic-fraught breeze which dishevelled their hair and lashed their hastily donned garments, many of the runaways looked round with scared faces, and made gestures with trembling hands as though to shut out all view of the horizon. Others, farmers, accompanied by all their servants, were hastening across the fields, driving before them their herds and flocks—their sheep, cows, oxen and horses, which they had turned out with blows from their sheds and stables. They were making for the mountain gorges, the high table-lands, the deserted forests, and the sight of them recalled the memory of those great migrations of ancient times, when invaded nations made way for the conquering barbarians. They intended to live under canvas in some lonely rock-girt spot, so far from the roads that not one of the enemy's soldiers would dare to approach it. And the flying clouds that enveloped them were soon wafted away behind the clumps of fir trees, whilst the lowing of the cattle and the thuds of their hoofs grew more and more indistinct. Meantime, the flood of vehicles and wayfarers pressed along the road, hampering the march of the troops and becoming, as one approached Belfort, so compact and strong—with a force like the irresistible current of a spreading torrent—that the soldiers were repeatedly compelled to halt.

During one of those brief halts Maurice beheld a scene which he long remembered, as one might remember a blow dealt one in the face. There was a solitary house by the roadside, the abode of some poor peasant, whose meagre patch of land stretched behind it. Firmly rooted to his native soil, this man had been unwilling to leave his fields, feeling that if he did so he must needs tear his flesh to shreds. So he remained there, and could be seen crouching on a bench in a low room, whence with empty eyes he watched the passing soldiers, whose retreat was about to place his ripe corn at the mercy of the invader. Beside him stood a young woman, his wife, with a child in her arms, whilst another child was pulling at her skirts; and all three, mother and children, were sobbing and moaning. Suddenly, however, the door was roughly flung open, and on the threshold appeared the grandmother, a tall, thin, aged woman, who was furiously flourishing her bare arms which looked like knotted cords. Her grey hair, escaping from under her cap, was waving round her gaunt head, and so intense was her rage that the words she shouted were half-stifled in her throat, whence they escaped but indistinctly in an agonising hiccough. At first the soldiers began to laugh. The old lunatic had a fine phiz! But some of her words reached them, and they heard that she was shouting: 'Blackguards! brigands! cowards! cowards!'

In a more and more piercing voice she spat forth, as it were, that insulting epithet—coward. And then the laughter ceased, and a great chill sped through the ranks. The men lowered their heads and looked elsewhere.

'Cowards! cowards! cowards!'

Suddenly the old woman appeared to increase in stature. She raised her spare, tragic figure, draped in a shred of a dress, to its full height; and waving her long arm from west to east with so comprehensive a gesture that it seemed to embrace the entire heavens, she shouted: 'The Rhine is not there, you cowards—the Rhine is over there. Cowards! cowards!'

At last they were resuming their march, and Maurice, whose glance at this moment fell upon Jean's face, saw that the corporal's eyes were full of tears. He was thunderstruck, and his own suffering was increased at the thought that even this brutish peasant had felt the insult—an unmerited one, but to which they must needs submit. Everything then seemed to crumble away in Maurice's poor, aching head, and, overcome both by physical and moral suffering, he could never remember how he had finished the march.

The Seventh Army Corps had required an entire day to cover the fourteen or fifteen miles separating Dannemarie from Belfort; and night was again falling and it was very late when the troops were able to prepare their bivouacs under the walls of the fortress, on the very spot whence they had started four days previously to march against the enemy. Despite the lateness of the hour and their great weariness, the men insisted on lighting their fires and cooking their soupe. It was the first time, for four days, that they had something warm to swallow. And squatting around the fires in the freshening night air, they were all dipping their noses into their basins, and grunts of content were rising on all sides, when a rumour circulated, burst upon, spread through, and stupefied the camp. Two fresh telegrams had arrived at brief intervals. The Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim, and there was no longer a single Prussian at Huningen. The passage of the Rhine at Markolsheim, the pontoon bridge thrown across the river at night, thanks to powerful electric lights—all those alarming stories were mere dreams, the unaccountable hallucinations of the sub-prefect of Schelestadt. As for the army corps that threatened Huningen, the famous army corps of the Black Forest, which had made all Alsace tremble, this was composed of a petty detachment of Wurtembergers—two battalions of foot and a squadron of horse—who by skilful tactics, repeated marching and counter-marching, sudden and unforeseen apparitions, had created a belief in the presence of thirty or forty thousand men. To think the Dannemarie Viaduct had narrowly escaped being blown up that morning! Twenty leagues of prosperous country had been ravaged through an idiotic panic, for no reason whatever; and at thought of all they had seen that dreadful day—the inhabitants flying in terror, driving their cattle into the mountains, and the stream of furniture-laden vehicles flowing towards the town amid a troop of women and children—the soldiers felt thoroughly enraged, and vented their anger in exasperated jeers.

'It's altogether too funny,' stammered Loubet, with his mouth full, as he flourished his spoon. 'So that was the enemy we were taken to fight? There was nobody at all. Twelve leagues forward and twelve back, and not even a mouse anywhere. All that for nothing—for the mere pleasure of getting in a funk!'

Then Chouteau, who was noisily cleaning his basin, soundly rated the generals without naming them: 'The hogs! What idiots they are! As timid as hares. As they bolted like that when there was nobody, what would they have done had they found a real army in front of them?'

Another armful of wood had been flung on the fire that they might enjoy themselves around the tall leaping flame, and Lapoulle, whilst warming his legs, with an air of ecstasy, burst into an idiotic laugh at Chouteau's remarks, though he could not understand them; whereupon Jean, who had hitherto turned a deaf ear to the chatter, ventured to say paternally: 'Can't you be quiet? If you were overheard there might be some unpleasantness.' He, himself, with his simple common sense, was disgusted with the stupidity of the commanders. Still, he must enforce respect, and as Chouteau continued growling, he stopped him by saying, 'Silence! Here's the lieutenant. Address yourself to him if you have any remark to make.'

Maurice, who sat apart from the others in silence, had lowered his head. This was the end of everything! They were only at the beginning of the war, but it was all over. The indiscipline and mutinous behaviour of the men at the very first reverse had already turned the army into a mere mob without a tie to bind it together, but thoroughly demoralised and ripe for every catastrophe. They, beneath Belfort, had not seen a single Prussian, yet they were already beaten.

The monotonous days that followed were fraught with uneasiness and the tedium of waiting. To occupy the time of his men General Douay made them toil at the defensive works of the fortress, which were still far from completed. They turned up the soil and split the rocks. Meanwhile, no news came. Where was MacMahon? What was taking place under Metz? The most extravagant rumours circulated; only a few Paris newspapers reached the troops, and these, by their contradictory statements, increased the black anxiety amid which they were struggling. Twice had the general written asking for orders, and without even receiving an answer. However, on August 12, the Seventh Corps was at last completed by the arrival of its third division from Italy.[10] Still even now the general only had two divisions with him, for the first one, beaten at Frœschweiler, had been carried off in the rout, and it was not known where the current had cast it. At last, after a week of abandonment, of complete separation from the rest of France, a telegram brought orders for departure. The men were delighted, anything was preferable to the blank life they were leading. And whilst they were getting ready speculations were indulged in. No one knew where they were going. Some said they were to be sent to Strasburg to defend it, while others talked of a bold dash into the Black Forest to intercept the Prussian line of retreat.

Next morning the 106th was among the first regiments to start, packed in cattle trucks. The one in which Jean's squad found itself installed was so full that Loubet pretended there wasn't even room to sneeze. Rations, as usual, had been distributed amid great disorder, and the men, having received in brandy what they ought to have received in food, were nearly all drunk—drunk with a violent, brawling intoxication which vented itself in obscene songs. As the train travelled on they could no longer see one another, owing to the smoke of their pipes, which filled the truck as with fog. It was also unbearably hot there, owing to the fermentation of all these closely packed bodies, and as they sped along vociferous cries poured out of the black flying vehicle, drowning the sound of the wheels, and dying away afar off in the mournful country. It was only on reaching Langres that the men realised they were being taken back to Paris.

'Ah! Thunder!' repeated Chouteau, who, by the might of his glib tongue, already reigned undisputed master of his little corner, 'sure enough, we shall be drawn up at Charentonneau to prevent Bismarck from taking a nap at the Tuileries.'

The others roared, thinking this very droll, though they could not say why. However, the slightest incidents of the journey—the sight of some peasants posted beside the line, of the groups of anxious people who, in the hope of obtaining news, were waiting at the smaller stations for the trains to pass, the view, too, of all that region of France scared and quivering in presence of the invasion—sufficed to provoke hooting, shouting, and deafening laughter. And in the gust of wind that swept by as the engine forged onward, amid the rapid view they obtained of the train enveloped in smoke and noise, those that had hastened to the stations received full in the face the howls of these men, all food for powder, who were being carried along at express speed. At one station, however, where they stopped, three well-dressed ladies, rich bourgeoises of the town, who distributed bowls of broth to the soldiers, met with great success. The men cried as they thanked them, and kissed their hands.

But farther on, the filthy songs and the savage yells burst forth again. Shortly after passing Chaumont the train met another one full of some artillerymen who were no doubt being taken to Metz. Speed had just been slackened, and the soldiers of the two trains fraternised amid a fearful clamour. It was, however, the artillerymen, doubtless more intoxicated than the others, who carried off the palm by shaking their fists out of the trucks and raising this cry with such despairing violence that it drowned everything else: 'To the slaughter! slaughter! slaughter!'

It seemed as if a great chill, an icy wind from a charnel-house were passing by. There was a sudden brief silence, amid which one heard Loubet jeering: 'The comrades are not gay.'

'But they are in the right,' rejoined Chouteau, in his tavern-orator's voice; 'it's disgusting to send a lot of brave chaps to get their heads cracked on account of some dirty business they don't know a word about.' And he continued talking in the same strain. This incapable workman of Montmartre, this lounging, dissipated house-painter, who had badly digested some scraps of speeches heard at public meetings, and who mingled revolutionary clap-trap with the great principles of equality and liberty, played the part of the perverter. He knew everything, and indoctrinated his comrades, especially Lapoulle, whom he had promised to make a man of: 'Eh, old fellow? It's simple enough. If Badinguet and Bismarck have a row together let them settle it between them with their fists, instead of troubling hundreds of thousands of men who don't even know one another, and have no wish to fight.'

The whole truck-load laughed, feeling amused and subjugated, and Lapoulle, who did not even know who Badinguet[11] was, and who could not even have said whether he was fighting for an Emperor or a King, repeated, with that overgrown-baby air of his: 'Of course, with their fists—and a glass of wine together afterwards.'

But Chouteau had turned towards Pache, in view of taking him in hand. 'And you—you're religious—Well, your religion forbids fighting. So why are you here, you idiot?'

'Well,' replied Pache, taken aback, 'I'm not here to please myself. Only the gendarmes——'

'The gendarmes! Humbug! Who cares a rap for the gendarmes? Do you know, you others, what we ought to do if we were the right sort? Why, by-and-by, when we get out, we ought to slope—yes, quietly slope and leave that fat hog Badinguet and his clique of twopenny-halfpenny generals to settle matters as they please with their dirty Prussians.'

Bravos resounded, the work of perversion was proceeding, and then Chouteau triumphed, parading his theories, in which were confusedly mingled the Republic, the rights of man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be overthrown, and the treachery of all the generals who commanded them, and each of whom, as it had been proved, had sold himself for a million! He, Chouteau, proclaimed himself a revolutionist: Loubet also knew what his opinions were, he was in favour of grub and nothing else; but the others did not know whether they were Republicans or not, or even in what fashion a man might be a Republican. Nevertheless, carried away by Chouteau's oratory, they all railed at the Emperor, the officers, the whole cursed show, which they were bent on abandoning at the double-quick the first time they felt worried. While fanning their increasing intoxication, Chouteau stealthily watched Maurice, the gentleman, whom he was enlivening, and whom he felt so proud indeed to have on his side that at last, to impassion him the more, he fell upon Jean, who with his eyes half closed had until now stood there amid all the noise, motionless and as if asleep. If Maurice harboured any spite against the corporal for the bitter lesson the latter had given him in forcing him to pick up his gun, now was the time to urge the one against the other.

'And there are folks I know, who talked of having us shot,' resumed Chouteau, threateningly. 'Dirty curs who treat us worse than brute beasts, and who can't understand that when a man has had enough of his sack and his popgun he pitches the whole lot into the fields. Well, comrades, what would those curs say if we pitched them on to the line now that we have them comfortably in a corner? Is it agreed, eh? We must make an example if we don't want to be plagued any more with this beastly war. To death with Badinguet's vermin! To death with the dirty curs who want us to fight!'

Jean had become very red—red with the rush of blood which rose to his cheeks in his rare moments of anger; and close pressed though he was by his companions, he managed to draw himself up, hold out his clenched fists, and protrude his flaming face with so terrible an air that Chouteau turned quite pale.

'Thunder! just you shut up!' cried the corporal. 'I've said nothing for hours past, for there are no commanders left, and I can't even send you to the lock-up. I know well enough I should have rendered a big service to the regiment by ridding it of a filthy blackguard like you. But never mind, as punishment is mere humbug, you'll have to deal with me. I'm not a corporal now, but simply a chap you pester, and who'll shut your jaw for you. You filthy coward, you won't fight, and you try to prevent others from fighting! Just say all that again, and you'll feel my fists.' All the men in the truck had already turned round, stirred by Jean's gallant defiance, and deserting Chouteau, who stammered and drew back at sight of his adversary's big fists. 'And I don't care a rap for Badinguet any more than you do,' resumed Jean; 'I've never cared a rap for politics, for either Republic or Empire, and when I tilled my field I never wished but one thing, everybody's happiness, good order, and prosperity everywhere, the same as I wish now. No doubt it does plague one to have to fight, but all the same the rascals as try to discourage one when it's already so hard to behave properly ought to be stuck against a wall and shot. Dash it all, friends! doesn't your blood boil when you're told that the Prussians are here in France, and that we've got to bundle them out!'

In that easy way in which crowds change sides, the soldiers now began to acclaim Jean as he repeated his oath to break the skull of the first man in his squad who talked of not fighting. Bravo, corporal! That was the style! Bismarck's hash would soon be settled! In the midst of the savage ovation, Jean, who had calmed down, said to Maurice politely, as though he were not addressing one of his men, 'You can't be on the side of the cowards, sir—we haven't fought yet, but we'll end by licking them some day, those Prussians.'

At these words Maurice felt a sunray glide into his heart. He was disturbed, humiliated. So this Jean was not a mere rustic. Maurice remembered the fearful hatred that had consumed him when he picked up his gun after throwing it down in a moment of self-abandonment. But he also remembered how startled he had been at seeing the two large tears that stood in the corporal's eyes when the old grandmother, with streaming grey hair, was insulting them and pointing to the Rhine afar off beyond the horizon. Was it the fraternity born of fatigue and pain, endured in common, that was carrying his rancour away? Belonging as he did to a Bonapartist family, Maurice had never dreamt of the Republic otherwise than in theory; his inclinations were rather in favour of the Emperor personally, and he was a partisan of the war, war being in his mind an essential condition of the life of nations. Now, all of a sudden, hope was coming back to him in one of those veerings of the mind to which he was so subject; whilst the enthusiasm which one evening had impelled him to enlist again beat within him, filling his heart with confidence in victory.

'Certainly, corporal,' he answered gaily, 'we'll lick them!'

With its load of men, enveloped in the dense smoke of their pipes, and the stifling heat of their closely packed bodies, the cattle truck rolled and rolled along, greeting the anxious crowds at the stations and the haggard peasants posted along the hedges with obscene songs and drunken clamour. On August 20 they reached the Pantin station, just outside Paris, and the same night they started off again, quitting the train on the morrow at Rheims, en route for the camp of Châlons.

[CHAPTER III]

TALES OF TWO BATTLES—THE EMPEROR

Maurice was greatly surprised when, on detraining at Rheims, the 106th received orders to encamp there. Were they not going to join the army at Châlons then? And a couple of hours later, when his regiment had piled arms at a league from the city, over towards Courcelles, amid the vast plain skirting the canal from the Aisne to the Marne, his astonishment increased on learning that the entire army of Châlons had been falling back since the morning and would bivouac on this very spot. And, indeed, tents were being pitched from one end of the horizon to the other, as far away as St. Thierry and La Meuvillette, and even beyond the high road to Laon; and the fires of all four army corps would be blazing there that same evening. Evidently enough, the plan of taking up a position under Paris, there to await the Prussians, had prevailed, and Maurice was delighted, for was not this plan the wisest?

He spent most of the afternoon of August 21 in strolling through the camp in search of news. Great latitude was allowed, there seemed less discipline than ever, and the men went off and came back just as they pleased. Maurice himself was able to return to Rheims to cash a post-office order for a hundred francs which he had received from his sister. Whilst there he entered a café, where he heard a sergeant talking of the factious disposition of the eighteen battalions of the Garde Mobile of the Seine, which had been sent back to Paris. The sixth battalion had almost murdered its officers. At Châlons the generals had constantly been insulted, and since the Frœschweiler defeat the men no longer saluted MacMahon. The café was filling with chatterers, and a violent discussion arose between two peaceful civilians respecting the number of men that the marshal might have under his orders. One of the disputants talked of 500,000 men, which was absurd. The other, more sensible, passed the four corps in review: the Twelfth, completed with difficulty at the camp by means of marching regiments and a division of Marine Infantry; the First, the disbanded remnants of which had been arriving since August 14, and were now being more or less successfully reorganised; then the Fifth, defeated without having fought, carried away and broken up in the rout; and the Seventh, just arriving, which was likewise in a demoralised state, and lacked its first division, mere shreds of which it had now found at Rheims. Altogether there were at the utmost 120,000 men, including the Bonnemain and Margueritte divisions of the reserve cavalry. However, the sergeant having mixed himself up in the dispute, alluding to the army with furious contempt as a mere jumble of men, a flock of innocents led by idiots to the slaughter, the two civilians became alarmed and took themselves off, fearing lest they might be compromised.

Maurice followed their example, and endeavoured to obtain some newspapers. He filled his pockets with every number he could buy, and read them as he walked along under the spreading trees of the magnificent promenades that engirdle the town. Where could the German armies be? It seemed as if they had been lost. Two of them, no doubt, were near Metz—the first, under General Steinmetz, watching the fortress; the second, under Prince Frederick Charles, trying to make its way up the right bank of the Moselle so as to cut off Bazaine's communications with Paris. But where—so confused and contradictory were the newspaper statements—could the third army really be—the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia, victorious at Weissenburg and Frœschweiler, and launched in pursuit of the First and Fifth French corps? Was it still camping at Nancy, or was it on the point of reaching Châlons that the camp should have been so hastily abandoned, and the magazines, accoutrements, forage, quite an incalculable wealth of supplies, fired and destroyed? There was the same confusion, and the same contradictory suppositions were indulged in with respect to the plans of the French generals. Hitherto separated from the rest of the world, it was only now that Maurice learnt what had been occurring in Paris—the thunderbolt of defeat falling on a people confident of victory, the terrible emotion in the streets, the convocation of the Chambers, the fall of the Liberal ministry[12] that had organised the Plebiscitum, and the Emperor's deposition from the post of commander-in-chief, which he had been obliged to surrender to Marshal Bazaine. The Emperor had been at the camp of Châlons since August 16, and all the papers spoke of a great council held there on the 17th, and attended by Prince Napoleon and several generals. None of the accounts agreed, however, as to the decisions that had been arrived at, apart from the incidents that had immediately followed, such as the appointment of General Trochu as governor of Paris and of Marshal MacMahon as commander of the army of Châlons, which implied the complete effacement of the Sovereign. A general scare, prodigious irresolution, conflicting plans following swiftly one upon the other—all these could be divined. But ever the same question arose in Maurice's mind: Where were the German armies? Who were right—those who pretended that Bazaine's movements were free, and that he was effecting his retreat by way of the northern fortresses, or those who asserted that he was already blockaded under Metz? There were persistent rumours of gigantic battles, heroic struggles sustained during an entire week, from the 14th to the 20th, but from these there was evolved only a formidable echo of conflict, waged far away.

His legs sinking from fatigue, Maurice seated himself at last on a bench. The town around him seemed to be living its daily life. Nurses were minding children under the beautiful trees, and petty cits were slowly taking their usual walk. Maurice scanned his papers again, and in doing so came upon an article he had not previously noticed in one of the most fiery of the Republican opposition journals. This threw a vivid light on the situation. At the council held at the camp of Châlons on August 17, so this newspaper asserted, the retreat of the army upon Paris had been decided on, and General Trochu's appointment as governor of the capital had been made solely with the view of preparing the Emperor's return. But the newspaper added that these decisions had been frustrated by the attitude which the Empress-Regent and the new ministry[13] had taken up. According to the Empress Eugénie a revolution was certain if the Emperor returned to Paris. 'He would not reach the Tuileries alive,' she was asserted to have said. And she obstinately insisted on a forward march, on MacMahon effecting a junction, despite every obstacle, with the army of Metz; in which views she was supported by the minister of war, General de Palikao, who had planned a victorious, lightning march for MacMahon, so that the latter might join hands with Bazaine. Gazing dreamily in front of him, with his paper lying on his knees, Maurice now fancied that he could understand everything: The two conflicting plans; MacMahon's hesitation to undertake this dangerous flank march with such indifferent troops; and the impatient, increasingly fretful orders which reached him from Paris, urging him into this madly rash adventure. Whilst picturing the tragical struggle, Maurice had a clear vision of the Emperor, deprived of his imperial authority which he had confided to the Empress-Regent, and divested of the supreme command of the army which he had entrusted to Marshal Bazaine, so that he had now become a mere nothing—a vague, undefined shadow of an Emperor, a nameless and cumbersome inutility, whom no one knew what to do with, whom Paris rejected, and who no longer had any place in the army since he had undertaken not to give it a single order.

On the following morning, when Maurice awoke after a stormy night, which he had spent rolled up in his blanket outside his tent, he was relieved to hear that the plan of retreating upon Paris had gained the upper hand. There was some talk of a fresh council held the previous evening, which had been attended by the ex-vice-Emperor,[14] M. Rouher, whom the Empress had despatched to head quarters in view of hastening the march upon Verdun, but whom Marshal MacMahon seemed to have convinced of the danger that would attend such a movement. Had any bad news of Bazaine come to hand? No one dared to assert this. However, the absence of news was sufficiently significant. All the officers with any common sense pronounced themselves in favour of waiting for the enemy under Paris; and, feeling convinced that he and his comrades would begin falling back the very next day, since it was said that orders to that effect had been issued, Maurice in his delight determined to satisfy a childish craving. He wished, once in a way, to escape the mess-platter and to breakfast somewhere at a cloth-spread table, with a bottle of wine, a decanter of water, and a plate before him—all the things which it seemed to him he had been deprived of for many months. He had some money in his pocket, so he slipped away with a beating heart, as if bent on some spree, and began to search about him for an inn.

It was on the outskirts of the village of Courcelles, beyond the canal, that he found the breakfast he had dreamt of. He had been told the day before that the Emperor had taken up his quarters at a private house in this village, and having strolled there out of curiosity, he remembered having noticed at the corner of a couple of roads a tavern with an arbour, where dangled some beautiful bunches of grapes already ripe and golden. There were some green-painted tables under the creeping vine, and through the open doorway of the spacious kitchen one could espy the loud-ticking clock, the cheap coloured prints pasted on the walls, and the fat hostess attending to the roasting-jack. A bowling alley stretched in the rear of the house, and the whole place had the gay, attractive, free-and-easy aspect of an old-fashioned guinguette.

A well-built, full-breasted girl, who showed her white teeth, came to ask Maurice if he wished to breakfast.

'Of course I do. Give me some eggs, a chop, and some cheese—and some white wine.' Then calling her back he asked, 'Isn't the Emperor quartered in one of those houses?'

'Yes, in the one in front of us; but you can't see it—it is behind the trees that rise above that high wall.'

Maurice then installed himself in the arbour, took off his belt that he might be more at his ease, and selected a table on which the sunrays, filtering through the vine leaves, were casting golden spots. His eyes kept on returning to that high yellow wall which screened the Emperor from view. The house was indeed a hidden and mysterious one; not even the tiles of the roof could be seen. The entrance was on the other side, facing the village street—a narrow street, where neither shop nor even window was to be seen, for it wound along between monotonous blank walls. The grounds in the rear of the house looked like an ait of dense verdure amid the neighbouring buildings. Among these, on the other side of the highway, Maurice noticed a large courtyard surrounded by stables and coach-houses, and filled with vans and carriages, amid which men and horses were continually coming and going.

'And are all those traps for the Emperor?' Maurice jokingly asked the servant, as she spread a clean white cloth on his table.

'Yes, for the Emperor and no one else,' she answered, with a gay sprightly air, pleased to have an opportunity of showing her fresh white teeth. Then she began to enumerate all there was; having learnt this, no doubt, from the grooms who had been coming to drink at the tavern since the day before. To begin with, there was the staff of twenty-five officers, the sixty Cent-Gardes, the escort-detachment of Guides,[15] the six Gendarmes of the provostship service; then the household, comprising seventy-three persons, chamberlains, valets and footmen, cooks and scullions; next four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor, ten horses for the equerries, and eight for the outriders and grooms, without counting forty-seven posting horses; then a char à bancs and twelve baggage vans, two of which, reserved to the cooks, had excited the girl's admiration by the large quantity of kitchen utensils, plates, and bottles that could be seen inside them, all in beautiful order. 'Ah! sir,' she said to Maurice, 'I never saw such saucepans before! They shine like the sun! And there are all sorts of dishes and vessels, and things I can't even tell the use of! And wine, too—bordeaux, and burgundy, and champagne enough to give a splendid wedding feast.'

Well pleased at sight of the clean white cloth and the light golden wine sparkling in his glass, Maurice ate a couple of boiled eggs with a gluttonous enjoyment he had never before experienced. Whenever he turned his head to the left he obtained, through one of the entrances to the arbour, a view of the vast tent-covered plain, the swarming city that had just sprung up amid the stubble between Rheims and the canal. Only a few meagre clumps of trees dotted the grey expanse, where three mills upreared their slender arms. Above the confused roofs of Rheims, intermingled with the crests of chestnut trees, the colossal pile of the cathedral stood out in the blue atmosphere, looking, though far away, quite gigantic by the side of the low houses. And, on seeing it, recollections of schoolboy days came back to Maurice. Lessons that he had learnt and hemmed and hawed over returned to his mind: the coronations of the French Kings in Rheims Cathedral, the holy oil, Clovis, Joan of Arc—all the departed glories of ancient France.

Then, again thinking of the Emperor hidden away in that modest private house so discreetly closed, Maurice turned his eyes once more on the high yellow wall, and was surprised to read on it the inscription, 'Vive Napoléon!' traced in huge letters with a bit of charcoal, beside some clumsy obscene drawings. The rain had washed away the yellow distemper that had previously concealed the writing, and the inscription was evidently an old one. How singular to find upon that wall this acclamation, born of the warlike enthusiasm of long ago, and intended, undoubtedly, for the uncle, the conquering Napoleon, not his nephew! At sight of it, all Maurice's childhood arose before him, carolling in his mind, and again he listened to the tales of his grandfather, a soldier of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, and his father had been obliged to accept a post of tax collector, no opportunities for winning glory being vouchsafed to the sons of the heroes of France after the fall of the First Empire. And the grandfather lived with them on a most meagre pension, fallen to the level of this modest home, and having but one consolation, that of recounting his campaigns to his grandchildren, the twins, boy and girl, each with the same fair hair, and whose mother he, in some measure, was. He would seat Henriette on his left knee, and Maurice on his right, and then, during long hours, there followed Homeric tales of battle.

These tales did not seem to belong to history; different periods were blended, and all the nations of the earth met together in one great, fearful collision. The English, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians passed by—now in turn, now all at the same time—just as alliances willed it, and without it being possible to say why some were beaten rather than others. But beaten they were, inevitably beaten in advance by a great dash of heroism and genius which swept armies away as if they had been merely chaff. There was Marengo, the classical engagement on level ground, with the long lines of troops skilfully deployed, and the faultless retreat in échelon order of the battalions so silent and impassive under fire. This was the legendary battle lost at three o'clock, won at six; the battle when eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard arrested the onslaught of the entire Austrian cavalry; when Desaix came up to meet his death and to change an impending rout into an immortal victory. Then there was Austerlitz, with its beautiful sun of glory shining through the wintry mist; Austerlitz, commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pritzen and ending with the terrifying disruption of the ice on the frozen lakes, when an entire Russian army corps, men and horses, sank into the water amid a frightful crash; whilst the god-like Napoleon, who had naturally foreseen everything, completed the disaster with his round shot. Next there was Jena, where Prussia's power was entombed; at first, the skirmishers firing through the October fog, and Ney, by his impatience, almost compromising everything; then Augereau's advance that extricated Ney, the great onslaught, so violent that it swept away the enemy's entire centre; and finally the panic, the sauve-qui-peut of an over-vaunted cavalry, whom the French Hussars mowed down like ripe oats, strewing the romantic valley with men and horses. Then there was Eylau—Eylau, the abominable—the most bloody of battles, when such was the slaughter that the hideously disfigured bodies lay on the ground in heaps; Eylau, blood red under its snow storm, with its mournful cemetery of heroes; Eylau still loudly re-echoing the thunderous charge of Murat's eighty squadrons, which cut right through the Russian army and strewed the field with such a depth of corpses that even Napoleon himself wept at the sight.

Then there was Friedland, the fearful trap into which the Russians, like a flight of careless sparrows, again fell; Friedland, the strategical masterpiece of that Emperor who knew everything and could do everything. At first the French left wing remained motionless and imperturbable, whilst Ney, having captured the town, was destroying the bridges; then the French left wing rushed upon the enemy's right, throwing it into the river, overwhelming it in the inextricable position into which it had been forced; and so much slaughter had to be accomplished that the French were still killing the foe at ten o'clock at night. Next there was Wagram—the Austrians wishing to cut the French off from the Danube, and repeatedly reinforcing their left wing so that they might overcome Masséna, who, being wounded, reclined in a carriage whilst commanding his troops; and meantime the artful, Titanic Napoleon allowed the Austrians to pursue this course till all at once the terrible fire of a hundred guns rained upon their weakened centre, sweeping it more than a league away; whereupon their left wing, terrified at its isolation, and already falling back before Masséna, who had retrieved his earlier reverses, carried off with it the remainder of the Austrian army with devastation akin to that caused by a breaking dyke. And at last there was the Moskowa, when the bright sun of Austerlitz shone out again for the last time, a terrible mêlée of men, with all the confusion born of vast numbers of antagonists and of stubborn courage, hillocks carried under an incessant fusillade, redoubts captured by assault at the bayonet's point, repeated offensive returns of the enemy, who disputed the ground inch by inch, and such desperate bravery on the part of the Russian Guards that the furious charges of Murat, the simultaneous thunder of three hundred guns, and all the valour of Ney, the triumphant prince of the day, were needed to secure victory. But whatever the battle was, the flags were stirred by the same glorious fluttering in the evening air; the same shouts of 'Vive Napoléon!' resounded when the bivouac fires were being lighted on the conquered positions; France was everywhere at home—a conqueress who marched her invincible eagles from one end of Europe to the other, and who needed but to set her foot on the soil of foreign kingdoms for the humbled nations to sink into the ground!

Less intoxicated by the white wine that sparkled in his glass than by the glorious memories carolling in his mind, Maurice was finishing his chop when his glance fell upon two ragged, mud-stained soldiers, who looked like bandits weary of roaming the highways; and on hearing them question the servant girl respecting the precise positions of the regiments encamped alongside the canal, he called out to them, 'Eh, comrades, here! You belong to the Seventh Corps, don't you?'

'Of course—to the first division,' replied one of the men; 'there's no mistake about it I warrant you. The best proof is, I was at Frœschweiler, where it wasn't cold by any means. And the comrade here belongs to the First Corps—he was at Weissenburg, another filthy hole!'

Then they told their tale, how both being slightly wounded they had fallen in the panic and the rout, lying half dead with fatigue in a ditch, and then dragging themselves along in the rear of the army, forced by exhausting attacks of fever to linger behind in the towns, and so belated at last that they were now only just arriving, somewhat restored to health, and bent upon joining their squads. Maurice, who was about to tackle a piece of Gruyère cheese, noticed, with his heart oppressed, the envious glances which they darted at his plate. 'Some more cheese, and some bread and some wine!' he called. 'You'll join me, comrades, eh? I stand treat! Here's to your health!'

They sat down delighted; and Maurice, with an increasing chill at his heart, noted to what a lamentable condition they had fallen, with no weapons, and with their overcoats and red trousers fastened with so many bits of string, and patched with so many different shreds of cloth that they looked like pillagers—gipsies who had donned some old garments stolen from corpses on the battlefield.

'Ah! curse it, yes!' resumed the bigger of the two, with his mouth full. 'It wasn't all fun over there. You should have seen it. Just tell your tale, Coutard.'

Then the little one, gesticulating with a hunk of bread in his hand, began his story: 'I was washing my shirt while the soupe was being got ready—we were in a beastly hole, a regular funnel with big woods all round it which enabled those swinish Prussians to creep up on all fours without our knowing it—then, just at seven o'clock, their shells began falling in our pots. We rushed to arms in a jiffy, curse it! and up to eleven o'clock we fancied we were giving them a downright licking—but there weren't more than five thousand of us, you must know, and fresh detachments of those pigs kept constantly coming up. I was on a little hill, lying down behind a bush, and in front of me and right and left of me I could see them marching up, swarming like ants, like lines of black ants that never came to an end. Well, you know, we couldn't help thinking that the commanders were regular duffers to have shoved us into such a wasp's nest, far away from our comrades, and to leave us there too, to be crushed without any help coming. Then, in the midst of it all, our general, that poor devil General Douay,[16] who was neither a fool nor a capon, was hit by a ball and toppled over with his legs in the air. His account was settled! All the same, we still held out, but there were too many of them, and we had to slope. Next we fought in an inclosure, and defended the station with such a thundering row going on that one was quite deafened. Then, I hardly know, but the town must have been captured, and we found ourselves on a mountain—the Geissberg they call it, I think—and there, having entrenched ourselves in a kind of château, we kept on potting those pigs. They jumped into the air as we hit them, and it was a sight to see how they came down again on their snouts. But it was all no good; they kept on coming up till they were quite ten to one, and with as many guns as they wanted.[17] It is all very well to be brave, but bravery in an affair like that simply means leaving one's carcase on the field. Well, we were quite in a jelly at last, and we had to take ourselves off. All the same, our officers showed themselves regular duffers—didn't they, Picot?'

There was a pause. Picot, the taller of the two men, drained a glass of white wine, and then, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, rejoined: 'Of course. It was the same at Frœschweiler. Only idiots would have thought of giving battle with affairs in such a state. My captain, an artful little beggar, said so. The truth is, the commanders can have known nothing. An entire army of those beasts fell on us when we were barely forty thousand. No fighting was expected that day, it seems; but the battle began little by little, without the officers wanting it. Of course, I didn't see everything, but I know well enough that the dancing went on all day, and that just when one thought it had ended the music began afresh. First at Wœrth, a pretty little village with a comical steeple, covered with earthenware tiles, which make it look like a stove. The devil, too, if I know why we were ordered out of Wœrth in the morning, for afterwards we had to fight, tooth and nail, to try and recapture it. But we didn't succeed. Ah! my boys, we did have a job there. You should have seen all the bellies ripped open and the brains scattered about. It was incredible. Then we had a set-to round another village—Elsasshausen, a beastly name to remember. We were being mowed down by a lot of guns which were firing at their ease from another cursed hill, which we had also given up in the morning. And then it was that I saw, yes, I myself saw the charge of the Cuirassiers. Ah! how the poor devils did get themselves killed! It was pitiful to send men and horses charging over such ground as that, a slope covered with scrub and full of ditches. And, besides, worse luck, it could be of no earthly use. All the same, however, it was brave, it was a grand sight to see. And after that? Well, after that it seemed as if we had no other course but to try and take ourselves off. The village was burning like tinder, the Badeners, the Wurtembergers, and the Prussians—the whole band, in fact—one hundred and twenty thousand of those beasts, had ended by surrounding us. But we didn't go off. The music began again round Frœschweiler. The plain truth is, MacMahon may be a duffer, but he's plucky. You should have seen him on his big horse in the midst of the shells! Any other man would have bolted at the outset, thinking it no shame to refuse battle when one isn't in force. But he, as the fighting had begun, determined to let the skull-cracking go on to the bitter end. And he managed it, too! In Frœschweiler we weren't like men fighting; we were like animals, eating one another. For a couple of hours the gutters ran with blood——. And then? Well, we had to skedaddle at last! And to think we learned just then that we had overthrown the Bavarians on our left! Ah! curse it, if we, too, had only had a hundred and twenty thousand men, if we had only had enough guns and not quite such duffing officers!'

Still exasperated and violently inclined, Coutard and Picot, in their ragged uniforms grey with dust, were cutting themselves hunks of bread and bolting big bits of cheese, whilst venting their nightmare-like souvenirs under the beautiful vine with its ripe grapes spangled with golden darts by the sun. They had now come to the fearful rout that had followed the battle; the disbanded, demoralised, hungry regiments fleeing through the fields; the high roads one stream of men, horses, carts, and guns in frightful confusion; all the wreckage of an annihilated army, lashed onward in its retreat by the mad blast of panic. Since they had not been able to fall back in good order and defend the passages of the Vosges, where ten thousand men might have stopped a hundred thousand, at least they might have blown up the bridges and filled up the tunnels. But the generals bolted in the universal scare, and such a tempest of stupefaction swept along, carrying off both vanquishers and vanquished, that for a moment the two conflicting armies lost one another—MacMahon hurrying in the direction of Lunéville, whilst the Crown Prince of Prussia was looking for him in the direction of the Vosges. On August 7 the remnants of the First French Army Corps swept through Saverne like a muddy, overflowing stream laden with wreckage. On the 8th, the Fifth Corps fell in with the First at Saarburg, like one torrent flowing into another. The Fifth Corps was also in full flight, beaten without having fought, and carrying along with it its commander, that sorry General de Failly, who was distracted to find that the responsibility of the defeat was ascribed to his inaction. On the 9th and 10th the flying gallop continued, a mad sauve-qui-peut, in which no one halted even to look round. On the 11th, in the pouring rain, they descended towards Bayon, so as to avoid Nancy, which was falsely rumoured to be in the enemy's hands. On the 12th they encamped at Haroué; on the 13th at Vicherey; and next day they reached Neufchâteau, where the railway at last gathered together this drifting mass of men, who, during three entire days, were shovelled into the trains, so that they might be conveyed to Châlons. Four-and-twenty hours after the last train had started the Prussians came up.

'Ah! cursed luck!' concluded Picot. 'We had to use our legs, and no mistake. And we two had been left at the infirmary.'

Coutard was just emptying the bottle into his comrade's glass and his own: 'Yes,' said he, 'we took ourselves off, and we've been on the road ever since. All the same, however, one feels better now that one can drink to the health of those that haven't had their skulls cracked.'

Maurice now understood everything. After so stupidly allowing themselves to be surprised at Weissenburg, the crushing, lightning stroke of Frœschweiler had fallen on the French, its sinister glare casting a vivid light upon the terrible truth. France was not ready, she had neither cannon, nor men, nor generals; and the enemy, treated with such contempt, proved to be strong and solid, innumerable, perfect alike in discipline and tactics. Through the weak screen formed of the seven French Army Corps, disseminated between Metz and Strasburg, the foe had literally punched his way. Of a certainty France would now be left to her own resources; neither Austria nor Italy would join her; the Emperor's plan had crumbled away through the delay in the operations and the incapacity of the commanders. And even fatality was working against the French, accumulating mishaps and deplorable coincidences, and enabling the Prussians to carry out their secret plan, which was to cut the French armies in two and throw one portion of them under Metz, that it might be isolated from the rest of France, whilst they—the invaders—marched upon Paris, after destroying the other portion. Already, at this stage, everything was mathematically clear. France was bound to be beaten, through causes the inevitable effects of which were already apparent; and this war was but a conflict between unintelligent bravery on the one hand, and superiority of numbers and calm methodical strategy on the other. Dispute about it as one might later on, in any and every case, no matter what might have been done, defeat was a fatal certainty, predetermined by the laws that rule the world.

Suddenly, as Maurice's dreamy eyes wandered away, they espied those words, 'Vive Napoléon!' traced in charcoal on the high yellow wall in front of him. He experienced an unbearable feeling of uneasiness at the sight; a sudden burning pang shot through his heart. So it was true that France, the France of the legendary victories, that had marched with beating drums through Europe, had now been thrown to the ground by a petty nation which it had despised. Fifty years had sufficed to change the world, and defeat was falling heavy and fearful on those who had once been conquerors. Maurice remembered all that his brother-in-law Weiss had told him on that night of anguish before Mulhausen. Yes, Weiss alone had shown any prescience, guessing the slow, hidden causes of the decline of France, perceiving what a breeze of youth and strength was blowing from Germany. One warlike age was ending; another was beginning. Woe to those who halt in the continuous effort which nations must make; victory belongs to those who march in the van, to the most accomplished, the healthiest, and the strongest!

Just then a girl's screams were heard. Lieutenant Rochas, like a conquering trooper, was kissing the pretty servant in the smoky old kitchen, brightened by cheap coloured prints. He stepped into the arbour and ordered coffee, and, having overheard the last words of Coutard and Picot, he gaily remarked, 'Pooh! my lads, all that's nothing. It's only the beginning of the dance; you're going to see the revenge we'll have now. So far, they've been five to one. But it's all going to change, take my word for it. There are three hundred thousand of us here. All the movements we are making, and which you don't understand, are to draw the Prussians down on us, whilst Bazaine, who's watching them, takes them in flank. Then we'll just squash them—like this fly.'

As he spoke he crushed a passing fly with a loud clap of his hands; and he talked on gaily, believing, in his childish simplicity, in the success of this easy plan, and having recovered all his pristine faith in the invincibility of bravery. He obligingly acquainted the two soldiers with the exact positions of their regiments, and then, feeling quite happy, he sat himself down with a cigar between his teeth, in front of his cup of coffee.

'The pleasure has been mine, comrades,' replied Maurice to Coutard and Picot, as, in taking themselves off, they thanked him for the cheese and the bottle of wine. He also had ordered some coffee, and he sat there looking at Rochas, and sharing his good humour, though he was surprised that an officer should talk of three hundred thousand men when they were barely more than one hundred thousand, and that he should consider the crushing of the Prussians between the army of Châlons and the army of Metz such a remarkably easy affair. But, on the other hand, Maurice felt such a need of illusions! Might he not continue hoping in victory, when the glorious past was carolling so loudly in his memory? The old guinguette had such a joyous aspect too, with its creeping vine, whence dangled the clear sun-gilt grapes of France! Once more did Maurice experience an hour's confidence rising above all the secret sadness that had slowly gathered in his heart.

As he sat there he noticed an officer of Chasseurs d'Afrique ride past at a rapid trot, followed by his orderly, and disappear round the corner of the silent house occupied by the Emperor. Then, as the orderly returned alone, and halted with both horses at the door of the tavern, Maurice gave a cry of surprise: 'What, Prosper! Why, I thought you were at Metz!'

The newcomer was a simple farm-hand of Remilly, whom Maurice had known when a child, at the time when he went to spend his holidays at uncle Fouchard's. Having been taken at the conscription, Prosper had already spent three years in Algeria when the war broke out, and, with his long thin face and his supple sturdy limbs, with which he was wonderfully adroit, he looked to great advantage in his sky-blue jacket, his full red trousers with blue stripes, and his ample red woollen sash. 'What! Monsieur Maurice,' he said. 'Here's an unexpected meeting!'

He did not hurry to join his friend, however, but forthwith took the steaming horses to the stable, eyeing his own mount with quite a paternal air. It was love of horseflesh, dating from childhood, from the time when he had taken the teams to the fields, that had induced him to enter the cavalry service. 'We've just come from Monthois, ten leagues at a stretch,' he said to Maurice, when he returned, 'and Zephyr needs a feed.' Zephyr was his horse. For his own part he refused to eat anything, and would only accept some coffee. He had to wait for his officer, who, on his side, had to wait for the Emperor. They might be five minutes there, or two hours, there was no telling, so his officer had told him to bait the horses. Then as Maurice, whose curiosity was roused, questioned him as to why the officer wanted to see the Emperor, he replied; 'I don't know—some commission of course—some papers to hand in.'

Rochas was eyeing Prosper with a softened glance, the sight of the chasseur uniform having revived his own recollections of Algeria. 'And where were you, out there, my lad?' he asked.

'At Medeah, sir.'

Medeah! Thereupon they began talking together like comrades, all regulations notwithstanding. Prosper had grown accustomed to that Algerian life of constant alerts, a life spent on horseback, the men setting out to fight as they might have set out on some hunting excursion, some great battue of Arabs. There was but one platter for each 'tribe'[18] of six men; and each 'tribe' was a family, one member of which did the cooking, whilst another did the washing, and the others pitched the tents, groomed the horses, and furbished the arms. They rode on through the morning and afternoon, laden with weighty burdens, in a heat as heavy as lead. Then in the evening they lighted large fires to drive away the mosquitoes, and gathered around to sing songs of France. During the clear, star-spangled nights it was often necessary to get up to quiet the horses, who, incommoded by the warm breeze, would suddenly begin to bite one another and tear up their pickets, neighing furiously. Then, too, there was the coffee, a great affair, the delicious coffee which they crushed in a pan and strained through one of their red regulation sashes. But there were also the black days, spent far from all human habitations, face to face with the enemy. Then there were no more camp-fires, no more songs, no more sprees. They suffered fearfully at times from thirst, hunger, and lack of sleep. Yet all the same they were fond of that adventurous life full of unexpected incidents, that skirmishing warfare so well adapted to deeds of personal bravery, and as amusing as the conquest of some island of savages, enlivened by razzias or wholesale pillaging expeditions, and by the petty thefts of the marauders, many of whose cunning exploits had become quite legendary, and made even the generals laugh.

'Ah!' said Prosper, suddenly becoming grave; 'it's not the same here; we fight differently.'

In reply to further questions from Maurice, he then related their landing at Toulon, and their long and wearisome journey to Lunéville. It was there they had heard of Weissenburg and Frœschweiler. He hardly recollected their line of route after that; they had gone, he thought, from Nancy to St. Mihiel, and then on to Metz. A great battle must have been fought on the 14th, for the horizon was aglow with fire; for his own part, however, he had only seen four Uhlans behind a hedge. On the 16th there had been more fighting, the guns had begun thundering at six in the morning, and he had heard say that the dance had begun again on the 18th, more terrible than ever.[19] The Chasseurs d'Afrique, however, were then no longer with the army, for on the 16th, whilst they were drawn up along a road near Gravelotte, waiting for orders, the Emperor, who was driving off in a carriage, took them along with him to escort him to Verdun. A nice ride that was, more than twenty-six miles at a gallop, with the fear that the Prussians might intercept them at every turn of the road.

'And Bazaine?' asked Rochas.

'Bazaine? It's said he was devilish pleased that the Emperor had taken himself off.'

The lieutenant wished to know, however, if Bazaine were approaching, and Prosper could only reply by a gesture. Who could tell? He and his comrades had spent long days marching and counter-marching in the rain, in reconnoitring, and on outpost duty—and without once seeing an enemy. They now belonged to the army of Châlons. His regiment, with two others of Chasseurs and one of Hussars, formed the first division of the reserve cavalry, and were commanded by General Margueritte, of whom Prosper spoke with enthusiastic affection. 'Ah! the devil,' said he, 'there's a lion for you! But what good is it?—so far they've never known what to do with us except to send us floundering through the mud.'

A pause followed, and then Maurice talked about Remilly and uncle Fouchard, and Prosper expressed his regret at not being able to go and shake hands with Honoré, the quartermaster, whose battery must be stationed more than a league away, on the other side of the road to Laon. Hearing a horse snort, however, he rose and hurried off to satisfy himself that Zephyr wanted nothing. It was the time for coffee and for something short to help it down, and soldiers of all arms and all ranks were now invading the tavern. There was not an unoccupied table, and bright was the display of uniforms amid the green vine-leaves flecked with sunshine. Surgeon-Major Bouroche had just seated himself beside Rochas, when Jean appeared and addressed himself to the lieutenant: 'The captain will expect you at three o'clock, for orders, sir.'

Rochas nodded, as much as to say that he would be punctual, and Jean, instead of immediately retiring, turned to smile at Maurice, who was lighting a cigarette. Since the scene in the train, there was a tacit truce between the two men, as though they were studying one another in a more and more kindly way.

Prosper, who had just returned, now exclaimed impatiently: 'I shall have something to eat if my officer doesn't come out of that shanty. It's disgusting; the Emperor may not be back before to-night.'

'I say,' exclaimed Maurice, whose curiosity was again aroused, 'it's perhaps some news of Bazaine that you've brought?'

'Perhaps so. They were talking about him at Monthois.'

Just then there was a sudden stir, and Jean, who had been standing at one of the entrances of the arbour, turned round and said: 'The Emperor!'

They all sprang to their feet. Between the poplars lining the white high road there appeared a platoon of Cent-Gardes still correctly dressed in their luxurious, resplendent uniforms, with large golden suns glittering upon their breastplates. In the open space behind them came the Emperor on horseback, escorted by his staff, which was followed by a second detachment of Cent-Gardes. Everyone uncovered, and a few acclamations were heard; and the Emperor raised his head as he passed by, so that one could clearly see his face, drawn and very pale, with dim wavering eyes which appeared full of water. He seemed as if he were waking out of a doze, smiled faintly at sight of the sunlit tavern, and then saluted.

Meantime, Bouroche had darted at Napoleon the quick glance of an experienced practitioner, and Jean and Maurice, who were standing in front of the surgeon, distinctly heard him growl: 'There's a nasty stone there, and no mistake.' And then he completed his diagnosis in two words, 'Done for!'

Jean, with his narrow-minded common-sense, had shaken his head sorrowfully; what fearful bad luck for an army to have such a chief as that! Ten minutes later, when Maurice, after shaking hands with Prosper, went off delighted with his nicely served breakfast, to stroll about and smoke some more cigarettes, he carried away with him the recollection of that pale, dim-eyed Emperor, passing by on horseback at a jog-trot. So that was the conspirator, the dreamer deficient in energy at the decisive moment. He was said to be kind-hearted, to be quite capable of great and generous ideas, and, silent man that he was, to have a very tenacious will; and he was also undoubtedly very brave, disdainful of danger, like a fatalist always ready to accept his destiny. But in great crises he seemed struck with stupor, paralysed as it were in presence of accomplished facts; and thenceforward he was unable to contend against evil fortune. Maurice wondered if this were not some special physiological condition which agony had aggravated; if the disease from which the Emperor was evidently suffering were not the cause of the growing indecision and incapacity that he had displayed since the outset of the campaign. In that way, everything would have been explained. A grain of sand in a man's flesh, and empires totter and fall!

Quite a stir suddenly arose in camp that evening after the roll call, the officers running hither and thither, transmitting orders, and arranging everything for the men's departure next morning at five o'clock. With mingled surprise and disquietude, Maurice learnt that everything was again changed, and that instead of falling back on Paris they were about to march on Verdun, in view of joining Bazaine. A rumour circulated that a despatch had arrived from the latter during the day, announcing that he was effecting his retreat; and Maurice then remembered Prosper and the officer he had come with from Monthois, perhaps to bring the Emperor a copy of this despatch. Thus the Empress-Regent and the Council of Ministers, so frightened at the thought of the Emperor's return to Paris, and so obstinately bent upon throwing the army forward at any cost in order that it might make a supreme attempt to save the dynasty, had triumphed at last over the perpetual hesitation of Marshal MacMahon. And that wretched Emperor, that poor devil who no longer had any place in his own empire, was to be carried off like a useless, cumbersome parcel among the baggage-train of his troops, condemned—oh! the irony of it—to drag after him all his Imperial household, his bodyguards, his carriages, his horses, his cooks, his vans full of silver saucepans and sparkling wine of Champagne—in a word, all the pomp of his bee-spangled, imperial robes, which could now only serve to sweep up the blood and mire that covered the high-roads of defeat!

At midnight, Maurice had not yet got to sleep. Feverish insomnia, fraught with ugly dreams, made him turn over and over in the tent. At last he ended by coming outside, and felt relieved on standing up and inhaling the cold, wind-swept air. The sky was covered with huge clouds, the night was becoming very dense, with an infinitely mournful darkness, which the last expiring fires along the camp front faintly illumined with star-like lights. And amidst the black, silent peacefulness one could detect the slow breathing of the hundred thousand men who were lying there. Then Maurice's anguish became quieted, and a feeling of fraternity came to him, of indulgent affection for all those living sleepers, thousands of whom would soon be sleeping the sleep of death. After all, they were good fellows. They were scarcely disciplined; they got drunk, and they robbed; but what sufferings had they not already endured, and what excuses there were for them in the Downfall of the entire nation! Among them there remained but a small number of the glorious veterans of Sebastopol and Solferino, mingled with men who were but lads, and incapable of any prolonged resistance. These four army corps, hastily assembled and reorganised, without any solid ties to bind them together, formed, so to say, the army of despair, the expiatory flock which was to be sent to the sacrifice in an endeavour to avert the anger of Destiny. And this army must climb its Calvary to the bitter end, paying, with the red flood of its blood, for the faults of everyone, and attaining to fame by the very horror of the disasters that awaited it.

Meditating thus in the depths of the quivering darkness, Maurice became conscious of the great duty that lay before him. He no longer indulged the braggart hope of repeating the legendary victories. This march upon Verdun was a march to Death, and he accepted it with stout and cheerful resignation, since die he must.

[CHAPTER IV]

ON THE MARCH—THE SPY

The camp was raised on Tuesday, August 23, at six o'clock in the morning, and the hundred thousand men of the army of Châlons set out on the march, flowing away in an immense stream, like some human river resuming its torrential course after expanding for a time into a lake. Despite the rumours current the evening before, it was a thorough surprise to many of the men to find that, instead of continuing their movement of retreat, they now had to turn their backs on Paris, and march towards the East—towards the Unknown.

At five o'clock in the morning, the Seventh Army Corps had not received any cartridges. For two days past the artillerymen had been exhausting themselves in removing their horses and matériel from the railway station, which was encumbered with supplies sent back from Metz. And it was only at the last moment that the vans laden with the ammunition were discovered among the fearful jumble of trains, and that a fatigue company, of which Jean formed part, was able to remove some 240,000 cartridges in hastily requisitioned vehicles. Jean distributed the regulation hundred cartridges to each of the men of his squad at the very moment when Gaude, the company's bugler, began to sound the march.

The 106th did not have to pass through Rheims. Its orders were to skirt the town and make for the Châlons high road. Once again, however, the commanders had neglected to regulate the men's departure at proper intervals, and, as the four army corps set out at the same time, extreme confusion arose when they debouched from the various bye-roads into the highways they were to follow in common. At every moment the artillery and cavalry intercepted the infantry, and compelled the latter to halt. Entire brigades had to wait for an hour in ploughed fields, and with arms grounded, until the roads should become clear. The worst was that a frightful storm burst some ten minutes after the start—a perfect deluge, which fell during more than an hour, soaking the men to the skin and rendering their heavy capotes and knapsacks still more oppressive. The 106th, however, was able to resume its march just as the rain was ceasing; whilst some Zouaves, who were still obliged to wait in a field hard by, devised, by way of taking patience, a little pastime to amuse themselves—that of assailing one another with balls of earth, huge lumps of mud, the splashing of which on the uniforms of those who were hit provoked uproarious laughter. Almost immediately afterwards the sun reappeared, the triumphant sun of a warm August morning. Then gaiety returned, the men steamed—much as washing steams before the fire—and they were soon dry, looking like so many dirty dogs pulled out of a pond, and joking with one another respecting the hard crusty mud that dangled from their red trousers. It was still necessary to stop and wait at each cross road, but at last there came a final halt at the end of one of the Rheims suburbs, just in front of a tavern, which never seemed to empty.