But in the open country as they drew near Belfort, Maurice's heart was still more sorely wrung, for there the homeless fugitives were in greater numbers and lined the borders of the road in an unbroken cortege. Ah! the unhappy ones, who had believed that they were to find safety under the walls of the fortifications! The father lashed the poor old nag, the mother followed after, leading her crying children by the hand, and in this way entire families, sinking beneath the weight of their burdens, were strung along the white, blinding road in the fierce sunlight, where the tired little legs of the smaller children were unable to keep up with the headlong flight. Many had taken off their shoes and were going barefoot so as to get over the ground more rapidly, and half-dressed mothers gave the breast to their crying babies as they strode along. Affrighted faces turned for a look backward, trembling hands were raised as if to shut out the horizon from their sight, while the gale of panic tumbled their unkempt locks and sported with their ill-adjusted garments. Others there were, farmers and their men, who pushed straight across the fields, driving before them their flocks and herds, cows, oxen, sheep, horses, that they had driven with sticks and cudgels from their stables; these were seeking the shelter of the inaccessible forests, of the deep valleys and the lofty hill-tops, their course marked by clouds of dust, as in the great migrations of other days, when invaded nations made way before their barbarian conquerors. They were going to live in tents, in some lonely nook among the mountains, where the enemy would never venture to follow them; and the bleating and bellowing of the animals and the trampling of their hoofs upon the rocks grew fainter in the distance, and the golden nimbus that overhung them was lost to sight among the thick pines, while down in the road beneath the tide of vehicles and pedestrians was flowing still as strong as ever, blocking the passage of the troops, and as they drew near Belfort the men had to be brought to a halt again and again, so irresistible was the force of that torrent of humanity.

It was during one of those short halts that Maurice witnessed a scene that was destined to remain indelibly impressed upon his memory.

Standing by the road-side was a lonely house, the abode of some poor peasant, whose lean acres extended up the mountainside in the rear. The man had been unwilling to leave the little field that was his all and had remained, for to go away would have been to him like parting with life. He could be seen within the low-ceiled room, sitting stupidly on a bench, watching with dull, lack-luster eyes the passing of the troops whose retreat would give his ripe grain over to be the spoil of the enemy. Standing beside him was his wife, still a young woman, holding in her arms a child, while another was hanging by her skirts; all three were weeping bitterly. Suddenly the door was thrown open with violence and in its enframement appeared the grandmother, a very old woman, tall and lean of form, with bare, sinewy arms like knotted cords that she raised above her head and shook with frantic gestures. Her gray, scanty locks had escaped from her cap and were floating about her skinny face, and such was her fury that the words she shouted choked her utterance and came from her lips almost unintelligible.

At first the soldiers had laughed. Wasn't she a beauty, the old crazy hag! Then words reached their ears; the old woman was screaming:

"Scum! Robbers! Cowards! Cowards!"

With a voice that rose shriller and more piercing still she kept lashing them with her tongue, expectorating insult on them, and taunting them for dastards with the full force of her lungs. And the laughter ceased, it seemed as if a cold wind had blown over the ranks. The men hung their heads, looked any way save that.

"Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!"

Then all at once her stature seemed to dilate; she drew herself up, tragic in her leanness, in her poor old apology for a gown, and sweeping the heavens with her long arm from west to east, with a gesture so broad that it seemed to fill the dome:

"Cowards, the Rhine is not there! The Rhine lies yonder! Cowards, cowards!"

They got under way again at last, and Maurice, whose look just then encountered Jean's, saw that the latter's eyes were filled with tears, and it did not alleviate his distress to think that those rough soldiers, compelled to swallow an insult that they had done nothing to deserve, were shamed by it. He was conscious of nothing save the intolerable aching in his poor head, and in after days could never remember how the march of that day ended, prostrated as he was by his terrible suffering, mental and physical.

The 7th corps had spent the entire day in getting over the fourteen or fifteen miles between Dannemarie and Belfort, and it was night again before the troops got settled in their bivouacs under the walls of the town, in the very same place whence they had started four days before to march against the enemy. Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour and their spent condition, the men insisted on lighting fires and making soup; it was the first time since their departure that they had had an opportunity to put warm food into their stomachs, and seated about the cheerful blaze in the cool air of evening they were dipping their noses in the porringers and grunting inarticulately in token of satisfaction when news came in that burst upon the camp like a thunderbolt, dumfoundering everyone. Two telegrams had just been received: the Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim, and there was not a single Prussian at Huningue. The passage of the Rhine at Markolsheim and the bridge of boats constructed under the electric light had existed merely in imagination, were an unexplained, inexplicable nightmare of the prefet at Schelestadt; and as for the army corps that had menaced Huningue, that famous corps of the Black Forest, that had made so much talk, it was but an insignificant detachment of Wurtemburgers, a couple of battalions of infantry and a squadron of cavalry, which had maneuvered with such address, marching and countermarching, appearing in one place and then suddenly popping up in another at a distance, as to gain for themselves the reputation of being thirty or forty thousand strong. And to think that that morning they had been near blowing up the viaduct at Dannemarie! Twenty leagues of fertile country had been depopulated by the most idiotic of panics, and at the recollection of what they had seen during their lamentable day's march, the inhabitants flying in consternation to the mountains, driving their cattle before them; the press of vehicles, laden with household effects, streaming cityward and surrounded by bands of weeping women and children, the soldiers waxed wroth and gave way to bitter, sneering denunciation of their leaders.

"Ah! it is too ridiculous too talk about!" sputtered Loubet, not stopping to empty his mouth, brandishing his spoon. "They take us out to fight the enemy, and there's not a soul to fight with! Twelve leagues there and twelve leagues back, and not so much as a mouse in front of us! All that for nothing, just for the fun of being scared to death!"

Chouteau, who was noisily absorbing the last drops in his porringer, bellowed his opinion of the generals, without mentioning names:

"The pigs! what miserable boobies they are, hein! A pretty pack of dunghill-cocks the government has given us as commanders! Wonder what they would do if they had an army actually before them, if they show the white feather this way when there's not a Prussian in sight, hein!—Ah no, not any of it in mine, thank you; soldiers don't obey such pigeon-livered gentlemen."

Someone had thrown another armful of wood on the fire for the pleasurable sensation of comfort there was in the bright, dancing flame, and Lapoulle, who was engaged in the luxurious occupation of toasting his shins, suddenly went off into an imbecile fit of laughter without in the least understanding what it was about, whereon Jean, who had thus far turned a deaf ear to their talk, thought it time to interfere, which he did by saying in a fatherly way:

"You had better hold your tongue, you fellows! It might be the worse for you if anyone should hear you."

He himself, in his untutored, common-sense way of viewing things, was exasperated by the stupid incompetency of their commanders, but then discipline must be maintained, and as Chouteau still kept up a low muttering he cut him short:

"Be silent, I say! Here is the lieutenant: address yourself to him if you have anything to say."

Maurice had listened in silence to the conversation from his place a little to one side. Ah, truly, the end was near! Scarcely had they made a beginning, and all was over. That lack of discipline, that seditious spirit among the men at the very first reverse, had already made the army a demoralized, disintegrated rabble that would melt away at the first indication of catastrophe. There they were, under the walls of Belfort, without having sighted a Prussian, and they were whipped.

The succeeding days were a period of monotony, full of uncertainty and anxious forebodings. To keep his troops occupied General Douay set them to work on the defenses of the place, which were in a state of incompleteness; there was great throwing up of earth and cutting through rock. And not the first item of news! Where was MacMahon's army? What was going on at Metz? The wildest rumors were current, and the Parisian journals, by their system of printing news only to contradict it the next day, kept the country in an agony of suspense. Twice, it was said, the general had written and asked for instructions, and had not even received an answer. On the 12th of August, however, the 7th corps was augmented by the 3d division, which landed from Italy, but there were still only two divisions for duty, for the 1st had participated in the defeat at Froeschwiller, had been swept away in the general rout, and as yet no one had learned where it had been stranded by the current. After a week of this abandonment, of this entire separation from the rest of France, a telegram came bringing them the order to march. The news was well received, for anything was preferable to the prison life they were leading in Belfort. And while they were getting themselves in readiness conjecture and surmise were the order of the day, for no one as yet knew what their destination was to be, some saying that they were to be sent to the defense of Strasbourg, while others spoke with confidence of a bold dash into the Black Forest that was to sever the Prussian line of communication.

Early the next morning the 106th was bundled into cattle-cars and started off among the first. The car that contained Jean's squad was particularly crowded, so much so that Loubet declared there was not even room in it to sneeze. It was a load of humanity, sent off to the war just as a load of sacks would have been dispatched to the mill, crowded in so as to get the greatest number into the smallest space, and as rations had been given out in the usual hurried, slovenly manner and the men had received in brandy what they should have received in food, the consequence was that they were all roaring drunk, with a drunkenness that vented itself in obscene songs, varied by shrieks and yells. The heavy train rolled slowly onward; pipes were alight and men could no longer see one another through the dense clouds of smoke; the heat and odor that emanated from that mass of perspiring human flesh were unendurable, while from the jolting, dingy van came volleys of shouts and laughter that drowned the monotonous rattle of the wheels and were lost amid the silence of the deserted fields. And it was not until they reached Langres that the troops learned that they were being carried back to Paris.

"Ah, nom de Dieu!" exclaimed Chouteau, who already, by virtue of his oratorical ability, was the acknowledged sovereign of his corner, "they will station us at Charentonneau, sure, to keep old Bismarck out of the Tuileries."

The others laughed loud and long, considering the joke a very good one, though no one could say why. The most trivial incidents of the journey, however, served to elicit a storm of yells, cat-calls, and laughter: a group of peasants standing beside the roadway, or the anxious faces of the people who hung about the way-stations in the hope of picking up some bits of news from the passing trains, epitomizing on a small scale the breathless, shuddering alarm that pervaded all France in the presence of invasion. And so it happened that as the train thundered by, a fleeting vision of pandemonium, all that the good burghers obtained in the way of intelligence was the salutations of that cargo of food for powder as it hurried onward to its destination, fast as steam could carry it. At a station where they stopped, however, three well-dressed ladies, wealthy bourgeoises of the town, who distributed cups of bouillon among the men, were received with great respect. Some of the soldiers shed tears, and kissed their hands as they thanked them.

But as soon as they were under way again the filthy songs and the wild shouts began afresh, and so it went on until, a little while after leaving Chaumont, they met another train that was conveying some batteries of artillery to Metz. The locomotives slowed down and the soldiers in the two trains fraternized with a frightful uproar. The artillerymen were also apparently very drunk; they stood up in their seats, and thrusting hands and arms out of the car-windows, gave this cry with a vehemence that silenced every other sound:

"To the slaughter! to the slaughter! to the slaughter!"

It was as if a cold wind, a blast from the charnel-house, had swept through the car. Amid the sudden silence that descended on them Loubet's irreverent voice was heard, shouting:

"Not very cheerful companions, those fellows!"

"But they are right," rejoined Chouteau, as if addressing some pot-house assemblage; "it is a beastly thing to send a lot of brave boys to have their brains blown out for a dirty little quarrel about which they don't know the first word."

And much more in the same strain. He was the type of the Belleville agitator, a lazy, dissipated mechanic, perverting his fellow workmen, constantly spouting the ill-digested odds and ends of political harangues that he had heard, belching forth in the same breath the loftiest sentiments and the most asinine revolutionary clap-trap. He knew it all, and tried to inoculate his comrades with his ideas, especially Lapoulle, of whom he had promised to make a lad of spirit.

"Don't you see, old man, it's all perfectly simple. If Badinguet and Bismarck have a quarrel, let 'em go to work with their fists and fight it out and not involve in their row some hundreds of thousands of men who don't even know one another by sight and have not the slightest desire to fight."

The whole car laughed and applauded, and Lapoulle, who did not know who Badinguet[*] was, and could not have told whether it was a king or an emperor in whose cause he was fighting, repeated like the gigantic baby that he was:

[*] Napoleon III.

"Of course, let 'em fight it out, and take a drink together afterward."

But Chouteau had turned to Pache, whom he now proceeded to take in hand.

"You are in the same boat, you, who pretend to believe in the good God. He has forbidden men to fight, your good God has. Why, then, are you here, you great simpleton?"

"Dame!" Pache doubtfully replied, "it is not for any pleasure of mine that I am here—but the gendarmes—"

"Oh, indeed, the gendarmes! let the gendarmes go milk the ducks!—say, do you know what we would do, all of us, if we had the least bit of spirit? I'll tell you; just the minute that they land us from the cars we'd skip; yes, we'd go straight home, and leave that pig of a Badinguet and his gang of two-for-a-penny generals to settle accounts with their beastly Prussians as best they may!"

There was a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau's hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves to the enemy at the rate of a million a piece. He was a revolutionist, he boldly declared; the others could not even say that they were republicans, did not know what their opinions were, in fact, except Loubet, the concocter of stews and hashes, and he had an opinion, for he had been for soup, first, last, and always; but they all, carried away by his eloquence, shouted none the less lustily against the Emperor, their officers, the whole d——d shop, which they would leave the first chance they got, see if they wouldn't! And Chouteau, while fanning the flame of their discontent, kept an eye on Maurice, the fine gentleman, who appeared interested and whom he was proud to have for a companion; so that, by way of inflaming his passions also, it occurred to him to make an attack on Jean, who had thus far been tranquilly watching the proceedings out of his half-closed eyes, unmoved among the general uproar. If there was any remnant of resentment in the bosom of the volunteer since the time when the corporal had inflicted such a bitter humiliation on him by forcing him to resume his abandoned musket, now was a fine chance to set the two men by the ears.

"I know some folks who talk of shooting us," Chouteau continued, with an ugly look at Jean; "dirty, miserable skunks, who treat us worse than beasts, and, when a man's back is broken with the weight of his knapsack and Brownbess, aie! aie! object to his planting them in the fields to see if a new crop will grow from them. What do you suppose they would say, comrades, hein! now that we are masters, if we should pitch them all out upon the track, and teach them better manners? That's the way to do, hein! We'll show 'em that we won't be bothered any longer with their mangy wars. Down with Badinguet's bed-bugs! Death to the curs who want to make us fight!"

Jean's face was aflame with the crimson tide that never failed to rush to his cheeks in his infrequent fits of anger. He rose, wedged in though as he was between his neighbors as firmly as in a vise, and his blazing eyes and doubled fists had such a look of business about them that the other quailed.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! will you be silent, pig! For hours I have sat here without saying anything, because we have no longer any leaders, and I could not even send you to the guard-house. Yes, there's no doubt of it, it would be a good thing to shoot such men as you and rid the regiment of the vermin. But see here, as there's no longer any discipline, I will attend to your case myself. There's no corporal here now, but a hard-fisted fellow who is tired of listening to your jaw, and he'll see if he can't make you keep your potato-trap shut. Ah! you d——d coward! You won't fight yourself and you want to keep others from fighting! Repeat your words once and I'll knock your head off!"

By this time the whole car, won over by Jean's manly attitude, had deserted Chouteau, who cowered back in his seat as if not anxious to face his opponent's big fists.

"And I care no more for Badinguet than I do for you, do you understand? I despise politics, whether they are republican or imperial, and now, as in the past, when I used to cultivate my little farm, there is but one thing that I wish for, and that is the happiness of all, peace and good-order, freedom for every man to attend to his affairs. No one denies that war is a terrible business, but that is no reason why a man should not be treated to the sight of a firing-party when he comes trying to dishearten people who already have enough to do to keep their courage up. Good Heavens, friends, how it makes a man's pulses leap to be told that the Prussians are in the land and that he is to go help drive them out!"

Then, with the customary fickleness of a mob, the soldiers applauded the corporal, who again announced his determination to thrash the first man of his squad who should declare non-combatant principles. Bravo, the corporal! they would soon settle old Bismarck's hash! And, in the midst of the wild ovation of which he was the object, Jean, who had recovered his self-control, turned politely to Maurice and addressed him as if he had not been one of his men:

"Monsieur, you cannot have anything in common with those poltroons. Come, we haven't had a chance at them yet; we are the boys who will give them a good basting yet, those Prussians!"

It seemed to Maurice at that moment as if a ray of cheering sunshine had penetrated his heart. He was humiliated, vexed with himself. What! that man was nothing more than an uneducated rustic! And he remembered the fierce hatred that had burned in his bosom the day he was compelled to pick up the musket that he had thrown away in a moment of madness. But he also remembered his emotion at seeing the two big tears that stood in the corporal's eyes when the old grandmother, her gray hairs streaming in the wind, had so bitterly reproached them and pointed to the Rhine that lay beneath the horizon in the distance. Was it the brotherhood of fatigue and suffering endured in common that had served thus to dissipate his wrathful feelings? He was Bonapartist by birth, and had never thought of the Republic except in a speculative, dreamy way; his feeling toward the Emperor, personally, too, inclined to friendliness, and he was favorable to the war, the very condition of national existence, the great regenerative school of nationalities. Hope, all at once, with one of those fitful impulses of the imagination, that were common in his temperament, revived in him, while the enthusiastic ardor that had impelled him to enlist one night again surged through his veins and swelled his heart with confidence of victory.

"Why, of course, Corporal," he gayly replied, "we shall give them a basting!"

And still the car kept rolling onward with its load of human freight, filled with reeking smoke of pipes and emanations of the crowded men, belching its ribald songs and drunken shouts among the expectant throngs of the stations through which it passed, among the rows of white-faced peasants who lined the iron-way. On the 20th of August they were at the Pantin Station in Paris, and that same evening boarded another train which landed them next day at Rheims en route for the camp at Chalons.



III.

Maurice was greatly surprised when the 106th, leaving the cars at Rheims, received orders to go into camp there. So they were not to go to Chalons, then, and unite with the army there? And when, two hours later, his regiment had stacked muskets a league or so from the city over in the direction of Courcelles, in the broad plain that lies along the canal between the Aisne and Marne, his astonishment was greater still to learn that the entire army of Chalons had been falling back all that morning and was about to bivouac at that place. From one extremity of the horizon to the other, as far as Saint Thierry and Menvillette, even beyond the Laon road, the tents were going up, and when it should be night the fires of four army-corps would be blazing there. It was evident that the plan now was to go and take a position under the walls of Paris and there await the Prussians; and it was fortunate that that plan had received the approbation of the government, for was it not the wisest thing they could do?

Maurice devoted the afternoon of the 21st to strolling about the camp in search of news. The greatest freedom prevailed; discipline appeared to have been relaxed still further, the men went and came at their own sweet will. He found no obstacle in the way of his return to the city, where he desired to cash a money-order for a hundred francs that his sister Henriette had sent him. While in a cafe he heard a sergeant telling of the disaffection that existed in the eighteen battalions of the garde mobile of the Seine, which had just been sent back to Paris; the 6th battalion had been near killing their officers. Not a day passed at the camp that the generals were not insulted, and since Froeschwiller the soldiers had ceased to give Marshal MacMahon the military salute. The cafe resounded with the sound of voices in excited conversation; a violent dispute arose between two sedate burghers in respect to the number of men that MacMahon would have at his disposal. One of them made the wild assertion that there would be three hundred thousand; the other, who seemed to be more at home upon the subject, stated the strength of the four corps: the 12th, which had just been made complete at the camp with great difficulty with the assistance of provisional regiments and a division of infanterie de marine; the 1st, which had been coming straggling in in fragments ever since the 14th of the month and of which they were doing what they could to perfect the organization; the 5th, defeated before it had ever fought a battle, swept away and broken up in the general panic, and finally, the 7th, then landing from the cars, demoralized like all the rest and minus its 1st division, of which it had just recovered the remains at Rheims; in all, one hundred and twenty thousand at the outside, including the cavalry, Bonnemain's and Margueritte's divisions. When the sergeant took a hand in the quarrel, however, speaking of the army in terms of the utmost contempt, characterizing it as a ruffianly rabble, with no esprit de corps, with nothing to keep it together,—a pack of greenhorns with idiots to conduct them, to the slaughter,—the two bourgeois began to be uneasy, and fearing there might be trouble brewing, made themselves scarce.

When outside upon the street Maurice hailed a newsboy and purchased a copy of every paper he could lay hands on, stuffing some in his pockets and reading others as he walked along under the stately trees that line the pleasant avenues of the old city. Where could the German armies be? It seemed as if obscurity had suddenly swallowed them up. Two were over Metz way, of course: the first, the one commanded by General von Steinmetz, observing the place; the second, that of Prince Frederick Charles, aiming to ascend the right bank of the Moselle in order to cut Bazaine off from Paris. But the third army, that of the Crown Prince of Prussia, the army that had been victorious at Wissembourg and Froeschwiller and had driven our 1st and 5th corps, where was it now, where was it to be located amid the tangled mess of contradictory advices? Was it still in camp at Nancy, or was it true that it had arrived before Chalons, and was that the reason why we had abandoned our camp there in such hot haste, burning our stores, clothing, forage, provisions, everything—property of which the value to the nation was beyond compute? And when the different plans with which our generals were credited came to be taken into consideration, then there was more confusion, a fresh set of contradictory hypotheses to be encountered. Maurice had until now been cut off in a measure from the outside world, and now for the first time learned what had been the course of events in Paris; the blasting effect of defeat upon a populace that had been confident of victory, the terrible commotions in the streets, the convoking of the Chambers, the fall of the liberal ministry that had effected the plebiscite, the abrogation of the Emperor's rank as General of the Army and the transfer of the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine. The Emperor had been present at the camp of Chalons since the 16th, and all the newspapers were filled with a grand council that had been held on the 17th, at which Prince Napoleon and some of the generals were present, but none of them were agreed upon the decisions that had been arrived at outside of the resultant facts, which were that General Trochu had been appointed governor of Paris and Marshal MacMahon given the command of the army of Chalons, and the inference from this was that the Emperor was to be shorn of all his authority. Consternation, irresolution, conflicting plans that were laid aside and replaced by fresh ones hour by hour; these were the things that everybody felt were in the air. And ever and always the question: Where were the German armies? Who were in the right, those who asserted that Bazaine had no force worth mentioning in front of him and was free to make his retreat through the towns of the north whenever he chose to do so, or those who declared that he was already besieged in Metz? There was a constantly recurring rumor of a series of engagements that had raged during an entire week, from the 14th until the 20th, but it failed to receive confirmation.

Maurice's legs ached with fatigue; he went and sat down upon a bench. Around him the life of the city seemed to be going on as usual; there were nursemaids seated in the shade of the handsome trees watching the sports of their little charges, small property owners strolled leisurely about the walks enjoying their daily constitutional. He had taken up his papers again, when his eyes lighted on an article that had escaped his notice, the "leader" in a rabid republican sheet; then everything was made clear to him. The paper stated that at the council of the 17th at the camp of Chalons the retreat of the army on Paris had been fully decided on, and that General Trochu's appointment to the command of the city had no other object than to facilitate the Emperor's return; but those resolutions, the journal went on to say, were rendered unavailing by the attitude of the Empress-regent and the new ministry. It was the Empress's opinion that the Emperor's return would certainly produce a revolution; she was reported to have said: "He will never reach the Tuileries alive." Starting with these premises she insisted with the utmost urgency that the army should advance, at every risk, whatever might be the cost of human life, and effect a junction with the army of Metz, in which course she was supported moreover by General de Palikao, the Minister of War, who had a plan of his own for reaching Bazaine by a rapid and victorious march. And Maurice, letting his paper fall from his hand, his eyes bent on space, believed that he now had the key to the entire mystery; the two conflicting plans, MacMahon's hesitation to undertake that dangerous flank movement with the unreliable army at his command, the impatient orders that came to him from Paris, each more tart and imperative than its predecessor, urging him on to that mad, desperate enterprise. Then, as the central figure in that tragic conflict, the vision of the Emperor suddenly rose distinctly before his inner eyes, deprived of his imperial authority, which he had committed to the hands of the Empress-regent, stripped of his military command, which he had conferred on Marshal Bazaine; a nullity, the vague and unsubstantial shadow of an emperor, a nameless, cumbersome nonentity whom no one knew what to do with, whom Paris rejected and who had ceased to have a position in the army, for he had pledged himself to issue no further orders.

The next morning, however, after a rainy night through which he slept outside his tent on the bare ground, wrapped in his rubber blanket, Maurice was cheered by the tidings that the retreat on Paris had finally carried the day. Another council had been held during the night, it was said, at which M. Rouher, the former vice-Emperor, had been present; he had been sent by the Empress to accelerate the movement toward Verdun, and it would seem that the marshal had succeeded in convincing him of the rashness of such an undertaking. Were there unfavorable tidings from Bazaine? no one could say for certain. But the absence of news was itself a circumstance of evil omen, and all among the most influential of the generals had cast their vote for the march on Paris, for which they would be the relieving army. And Maurice, happy in the conviction that the retrograde movement would commence not later than the morrow, since the orders for it were said to be already issued, thought he would gratify a boyish longing that had been troubling him for some time past, to give the go-by for one day to soldier's fare, to wit and eat his breakfast off a cloth, with the accompaniment of plate, knife and fork, carafe, and a bottle of good wine, things of which it seemed to him that he had been deprived for months and months. He had money in his pocket, so off he started with quickened pulse, as if going out for a lark, to search for a place of entertainment.

It was just at the entrance of the village of Courcelles, across the canal, that he found the breakfast for which his mouth was watering. He had been told the day before that the Emperor had taken up his quarters in one of the houses of the village, and having gone to stroll there out of curiosity, now remembered to have seen at the junction of the two roads this little inn with its arbor, the trellises of which were loaded with big clusters of ripe, golden, luscious grapes. There was an array of green-painted tables set out in the shade of the luxuriant vine, while through the open door of the vast kitchen he had caught glimpses of the antique clock, the colored prints pasted on the walls, and the comfortable landlady watching the revolving spit. It was cheerful, smiling, hospitable; a regular type of the good old-fashioned French hostelry.

A pretty, white-necked waitress came up and asked him with a great display of flashing teeth:

"Will monsieur have breakfast?"

"Of course I will! Give me some eggs, a cutlet, and cheese. And a bottle of white wine!"

She turned to go; he called her back. "Tell me, is it not in one of those houses that the Emperor has his quarters?"

"There, monsieur, in that one right before you. Only you can't see it, for it is concealed by the high wall with the overhanging trees."

He loosed his belt so as to be more at ease in his capote, and entering the arbor, chose his table, on which the sunlight, finding its way here and there through the green canopy above, danced in little golden spangles. And constantly his thoughts kept returning to that high wall behind which was the Emperor. A most mysterious house it was, indeed, shrinking from the public gaze, even its slated roof invisible. Its entrance was on the other side, upon the village street, a narrow winding street between dead-walls, without a shop, without even a window to enliven it. The small garden in the rear, among the sparse dwellings that environed it, was like an island of dense verdure. And across the road he noticed a spacious courtyard, surrounded by sheds and stables, crowded with a countless train of carriages and baggage-wagons, among which men and horses, coming and going, kept up an unceasing bustle.

"Are those all for the service of the Emperor?" he inquired, meaning to say something humorous to the girl, who was laying a snow-white cloth upon the table.

"Yes, for the Emperor himself, and no one else!" she pleasantly replied, glad of a chance to show her white teeth once more; and then she went on to enumerate the suite from information that she had probably received from the stablemen, who had been coming to the inn to drink since the preceding day; there were the staff, comprising twenty-five officers, the sixty cent-gardes and the half-troop of guides for escort duty, the six gendarmes of the provost-guard; then the household, seventy-three persons in all, chamberlains, attendants for the table and the bedroom, cooks and scullions; then four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor's personal use, ten horses for the equerries, eight for the grooms and outriders, not mentioning forty-seven post-horses; then a char a banc and twelve baggage wagons, two of which, appropriated to the cooks, had particularly excited her admiration by reason of the number and variety of the utensils they contained, all in the most splendid order.

"Oh, sir, you never saw such stew-pans! they shone like silver. And all sorts of dishes, and jars and jugs, and lots of things of which it would puzzle me to tell the use! And a cellar of wine, claret, burgundy, and champagne—yes! enough to supply a wedding feast."

The unusual luxury of the snowy table-cloth and the white wine sparkling in his glass sharpened Maurice's appetite; he devoured his two poached eggs with a zest that made him fear he was developing epicurean tastes. When he turned to the left and looked out through the entrance of the leafy arbor he had before him the spacious plain, covered with long rows of tents: a busy, populous city that had risen like an exhalation from the stubble-fields between Rheims city and the canal. A few clumps of stunted trees, three wind-mills lifting their skeleton arms in the air, were all there was to relieve the monotony of the gray waste, but above the huddled roofs of Rheims, lost in the sea of foliage of the tall chestnut-trees, the huge bulk of the cathedral with its slender spires was profiled against the blue sky, looming colossal, notwithstanding the distance, beside the modest houses. Memories of school and boyhood's days came over him, the tasks he had learned and recited: all about the sacre of our kings, the sainte ampoule, Clovis, Jeanne d'Arc, all the long list of glories of old France.

Then Maurice's thoughts reverted again to that unassuming bourgeoise house, so mysterious in its solitude, and its imperial occupant; and directing his eyes upon the high, yellow wall he was surprised to read, scrawled there in great, awkward letters, the legend: Vive Napoleon! among the meaningless obscenities traced by schoolboys. Winter's storms and summer's sun had half effaced the lettering; evidently the inscription was very ancient. How strange, to see upon that wall that old heroic battle-cry, which probably had been placed there in honor of the uncle, not of the nephew! It brought all his childhood back to him, and Maurice was again a boy, scarcely out of his mother's arms, down there in distant Chene-Populeux, listening to the stories of his grandfather, a veteran of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, his father, in the inglorious days that followed the collapse of the empire, had been compelled to accept a humble position as collector, and there the grandfather lived, with nothing to support him save his scanty pension, in the poor home of the small public functionary, his sole comfort to fight his battles o'er again for the benefit of his two little twin grandchildren, the boy and the girl, a pair of golden-haired youngsters to whom he was in some sense a mother. He would place Maurice on his right knee and Henriette on his left, and then for hours on end the narrative would run on in Homeric strain.

But small attention was paid to dates; his story was of the dire shock of conflicting nations, and was not to be hampered by the minute exactitude of the historian. Successively or together English, Austrians, Prussians, Russians appeared upon the scene, according to the then prevailing condition of the ever-changing alliances, and it was not always an easy matter to tell why one nation received a beating in preference to another, but beaten they all were in the end, inevitably beaten from the very commencement, in a whirlwind of genius and heroic daring that swept great armies like chaff from off the earth. There was Marengo, the classic battle of the plain, with the consummate generalship of its broad plan and the faultless retreat of the battalions by squares, silent and impassive under the enemy's terrible fire; the battle, famous in story, lost at three o'clock and won at six, where the eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard withstood the onset of the entire Austrian cavalry, where Desaix arrived to change impending defeat to glorious victory and die. There was Austerlitz, with its sun of glory shining forth from amid the wintry sky, Austerlitz, commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pratzen and ending with the frightful catastrophe on the frozen lake, where an entire Russian corps, men, guns, horses, went crashing through the ice, while Napoleon, who in his divine omniscience had foreseen it all, of course, directed his artillery to play upon the struggling mass. There was Jena, where so many of Prussia's bravest found a grave; at first the red flames of musketry flashing through the October mists, and Ney's impatience, near spoiling all until Augereau comes wheeling into line and saves him; the fierce charge that tore the enemy's center in twain, and finally panic, the headlong rout of their boasted cavalry, whom our hussars mow down like ripened grain, strewing the romantic glen with a harvest of men and horses. And Eylau, cruel Eylau, bloodiest battle of them all, where the maimed corpses cumbered the earth in piles; Eylau, whose new-fallen snow was stained with blood, the burial-place of heroes; Eylau, in whose name reverberates still the thunder of the charge of Murat's eighty squadrons, piercing the Russian lines in every direction, heaping the ground so thick with dead that Napoleon himself could not refrain from tears. Then Friedland, the trap into which the Russians again allowed themselves to be decoyed like a flock of brainless sparrows, the masterpiece of the Emperor's consummate strategy; our left held back as in a leash, motionless, without a sign of life, while Ney was carrying the city, street by street, and destroying the bridges, then the left hurled like a thunderbolt on the enemy's right, driving it into the river and annihilating it in that cul-de-sac; the slaughter so great that at ten o'clock at night the bloody work was not completed, most wonderful of all the successes of the great imperial epic. And Wagram, where it was the aim of the Austrians to cut us off from the Danube; they keep strengthening their left in order to overwhelm Massena, who is wounded and issues his orders from an open carriage, and Napoleon, like a malicious Titan, lets them go on unchecked; then all at once a hundred guns vomit their terrible fire upon their weakened center, driving it backward more than a league, and their left, terror-stricken to find itself unsupported, gives way before the again victorious Massena, sweeping away before it the remainder of the army, as when a broken dike lets loose its torrents upon the fields. And finally the Moskowa, where the bright sun of Austerlitz shone for the last time; where the contending hosts were mingled in confused melee amid deeds of the most desperate daring: mamelons carried under an unceasing fire of musketry, redoubts stormed with the naked steel, every inch of ground fought over again and again; such determined resistance on the part of the Russian Guards that our final victory was only assured by Murat's mad charges, the concentrated fire of our three hundred pieces of artillery, and the valor of Ney, who was the hero of that most obstinate of conflicts. And be the battle what it might, ever our flags floated proudly on the evening air, and as the bivouac fires were lighted on the conquered field out rang the old battle-cry: Vive Napoleon! France, carrying her invincible Eagles from end to end of Europe, seemed everywhere at home, having but to raise her finger to make her will respected by the nations, mistress of a world that in vain conspired to crush her and upon which she set her foot.

Maurice was contentedly finishing his cutlet, cheered not so much by the wine that sparkled in his glass as by the glorious memories that were teeming in his brain, when his glance encountered two ragged, dust-stained soldiers, less like soldiers than weary tramps just off the road; they were asking the attendant for information as to the position of the regiments that were encamped along the canal. He hailed them.

"Hallo there, comrades, this way! You are 7th corps men, aren't you?"

"Right you are, sir; 1st division—at least I am, more by token that I was at Froeschwiller, where it was warm enough, I can tell you. The comrade, here, belongs in the 1st corps; he was at Wissembourg, another beastly hole."

They told their story, how they had been swept away in the general panic, had crawled into a ditch half-dead with fatigue and hunger, each of them slightly wounded, and since then had been dragging themselves along in the rear of the army, compelled to lie over in towns when the fever-fits came on, until at last they had reached the camp and were on the lookout to find their regiments.

Maurice, who had a piece of Gruyere before him, noticed the hungry eyes fixed on his plate.

"Hi there, mademoiselle! bring some more cheese, will you—and bread and wine. You will join me, won't you, comrades? It is my treat. Here's to your good health!"

They drew their chairs up to the table, only too delighted with the invitation. Their entertainer watched them as they attacked the food, and a thrill of pity ran through him as he beheld their sorry plight, dirty, ragged, arms gone, their sole attire a pair of red trousers and the capote, kept in place by bits of twine and so patched and pieced with shreds of vari-colored cloth that one would have taken them for men who had been looting some battle-field and were wearing the spoil they had gathered there.

"Ah! foutre, yes!" continued the taller of the two as he plied his jaws, "it was no laughing matter there! You ought to have seen it,—tell him how it was, Coutard."

And the little man told his story with many gestures, describing figures on the air with his bread.

"I was washing my shirt, you see, while the rest of them were making soup. Just try and picture to yourself a miserable hole, a regular trap, all surrounded by dense woods that gave those Prussian pigs a chance to crawl up to us before we ever suspected they were there. So, then, about seven o'clock the shells begin to come tumbling about our ears. Nom de Dieu! but it was lively work! we jumped for our shooting-irons, and up to eleven o'clock it looked as if we were going to polish 'em off in fine style. But you must know that there were only five thousand of us, and the beggars kept coming, coming as if there was no end to them. I was posted on a little hill, behind a bush, and I could see them debouching in front, to right, to left, like rows of black ants swarming from their hill, and when you thought there were none left there were always plenty more. There's no use mincing matters, we all thought that our leaders must be first-class nincompoops to thrust us into such a hornet's nest, with no support at hand, and leave us to be crushed there without coming to our assistance. And then our General, Douay,[*] poor devil! neither a fool nor a coward, that man,—a bullet comes along and lays him on his back. That ended it; no one left to command us! No matter, though, we kept on fighting all the same; but they were too many for us, we had to fall back at last. We held the railway station for a long time, and then we fought behind a wall, and the uproar was enough to wake the dead. And then, when the city was taken, I don't exactly remember how it came about, but we were upon a mountain, the Geissberg, I think they call it, and there we intrenched ourselves in a sort of castle, and how we did give it to the pigs! they jumped about the rocks like kids, and it was fun to pick 'em off and see 'em tumble on their nose. But what would you have? they kept coming, coming, all the time, ten men to our one, and all the artillery they could wish for. Courage is a very good thing in its place, but sometimes it gets a man into difficulties, and so, at last, when it got too hot to stand it any longer, we cut and run. But regarded as nincompoops, our officers were a decided success; don't you think so, Picot?"

[*] This was Abel Douay—not to be confounded with his brother, Felix, who commanded the 7th corps.-TR.

There was a brief interval of silence. Picot tossed off a glass of the white wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Of course," said he. "It was just the same at Froeschwiller; the general who would give battle under such circumstances is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. That's what my captain said, and he's a little man who knows what he is talking about. The truth of the matter is that no one knew anything; we were only forty thousand strong, and we were surprised by a whole army of those pigs. And no one was expecting to fight that day; battle was joined by degrees, one portion after another of our troops became engaged, against the wishes of our commanders, as it seems. Of course, I didn't see the whole of the affair, but what I do know is that the dance lasted by fits and starts all day long; a body would think it was ended; not a bit of it! away would go the music more furiously than ever. The commencement was at Woerth, a pretty little village with a funny clock-tower that looks like a big stove, owing to the earthenware tiles they have stuck all over it. I'll be hanged if I know why we let go our hold of it that morning, for we broke all our teeth and nails trying to get it back again in the afternoon, without succeeding. Oh, my children, if I were to tell you of the slaughter there, the throats that were cut and the brains knocked out, you would refuse to believe me! The next place where we had trouble was around a village with the jaw-breaking name of Elsasshausen. We got a peppering from a lot of guns that banged away at us at their ease from the top of a blasted hill that we had also abandoned that morning, why, no one has ever been able to tell. And there it was that with these very eyes of mine I saw the famous charge of the cuirassiers. Ah, how gallantly they rode to their death, poor fellows! A shame it was, I say, to let men and horses charge over ground like that, covered with brush and furze, cut up by ditches. And on top of it all, nom de Dieu! what good could they accomplish? But it was very chic all the same; it was a beautiful sight to see. The next thing for us to do, shouldn't you suppose so? was to go and sit down somewhere and try to get our wind again. They had set fire to the village and it was burning like tinder, and the whole gang of Bavarian, Wurtemburgian and Prussian pigs, more than a hundred and twenty thousand of them there were, as we found out afterward, had got around into our rear and on our flanks. But there was to be no rest for us then, for just at that time the fiddles began to play again a livelier tune than ever around Froeschwiller. For there's no use talking, fellows, MacMahon may be a blockhead but he is a brave man; you ought to have seen him on his big horse, with the shells bursting all about him! The best thing to do would have been to give leg-bail at the beginning, for it is no disgrace to a general to refuse to fight an army of superior numbers, but he, once we had gone in, was bound to see the thing through to the end. And see it through he did! why, I tell you that the men down in Froeschwiller were no longer human beings; they were ravening wolves devouring one another. For near two hours the gutters ran red with blood. All the same, however, we had to knuckle under in the end. And to think that after it was all over they should come and tell us that we had whipped the Bavarians over on our left! By the piper that played before Moses, if we had only had a hundred and twenty thousand men, if we had had guns, and leaders with a little pluck!"

Loud and angry were the denunciations of Coutard and Picot in their ragged, dusty uniforms as they cut themselves huge slices of bread and bolted bits of cheese, evoking their bitter memories there in the shade of the pretty trellis, where the sun played hide and seek among the purple and gold of the clusters of ripening grapes. They had come now to the horrible flight that succeeded the defeat; the broken, demoralized, famishing regiments flying through the fields, the highroads blocked with men, horses, wagons, guns, in inextricable confusion; all the wreck and ruin of a beaten army that pressed on, on, on, with the chill breath of panic on their backs. As they had not had wit enough to fall back while there was time and take post among the passes of the Vosges, where ten thousand men would have sufficed to hold in check a hundred thousand, they should at least have blown up the bridges and destroyed the tunnels; but the generals had lost their heads, and both sides were so dazed, each was so ignorant of the other's movements, that for a time each of them was feeling to ascertain the position of its opponent, MacMahon hurrying off toward Luneville, while the Crown Prince of Prussia was looking for him in the direction of the Vosges. On the 7th the remnant of the 1st corps passed through Saverne, like a swollen stream that carries away upon its muddy bosom all with which it comes in contact. On the 8th, at Sarrebourg, the 5th corps came tumbling in upon the 1st, like one mad mountain torrent pouring its waters into another. The 5th was also flying, defeated without having fought a battle, sweeping away with it its commander, poor General de Failly, almost crazy with the thought that to his inactivity was imputed the responsibility of the defeat, when the fault all rested in the Marshal's having failed to send him orders. The mad flight continued on the 9th and 10th, a stampede in which no one turned to look behind him. On the 11th, in order to turn Nancy, which a mistaken rumor had reported to be occupied by the enemy, they made their way in a pouring rainstorm to Bayon; the 12th they camped at Haroue, the 13th at Vicherey, and on the 14th were at Neufchateau, where at last they struck the railroad, and for three days the work went on of loading the weary men into the cars that were to take them to Chalons. Twenty-four hours after the last train rolled out of the station the Prussians entered the town. "Ah, the cursed luck!" said Picot in conclusion; "how we had to ply our legs! And we who should by rights have been in hospital!"

Coutard emptied what was left in the bottle into his own and his comrade's glass. "Yes, we got on our pins, somehow, and are running yet. Bah! it is the best thing for us, after all, since it gives us a chance to drink the health of those who were not knocked over."

Maurice saw through it all. The sledge hammer blow of Froeschwiller, following so close on the heels of the idiotic surprise at Wissembourg, was the lightning flash whose baleful light disclosed to him the entire naked, terrible truth. We were taken unprepared; we had neither guns, nor men, nor generals, while our despised foe was an innumerable host, provided with all modern appliances and faultless in discipline and leadership. The three German armies had burst apart the weak line of our seven corps, scattered between Metz and Strasbourg, like three powerful wedges. We were doomed to fight our battle out unaided; nothing could be hoped for now from Austria and Italy, for all the Emperor's plans were disconcerted by the tardiness of our operations and the incapacity of the commanders. Fate, even, seemed to be working against us, heaping all sorts of obstacles and ill-timed accidents in our path and favoring the secret plan of the Prussians, which was to divide our armies, throwing one portion back on Metz, where it would be cut off from France, while they, having first destroyed the other fragment, should be marching on Paris. It was as plain now as a problem in mathematics that our defeat would be owing to causes that were patent to everyone; it was bravery without intelligent guidance pitted against numbers and cold science. Men might discuss the question as they would in after days; happen what might, defeat was certain in spite of everything, as certain and inexorable as the laws of nature that rule our planet.

In the midst of his uncheerful revery, Maurice's eyes suddenly lighted on the legend scrawled on the wall before him—Vive Napoleon! and a sensation of intolerable distress seemed to pierce his heart like a red hot iron. Could it be true, then, that France, whose victories were the theme of song and story everywhere, the great nation whose drums had sounded throughout the length and breadth of Europe, had been thrown in the dust at the first onset by an insignificant race, despised of everyone? Fifty years had sufficed to compass it; the world had changed, and defeat most fearful had overtaken those who had been deemed invincible. He remembered the words that had been uttered by Weiss his brother-in-law, during that evening of anxiety when they were at Mulhausen. Yes, he alone of them had been clear of vision, had penetrated the hidden causes that had long been slowly sapping our strength, had felt the freshening gale of youth and progress under the impulse of which Germany was being wafted onward to prosperity and power. Was not the old warlike age dying and a new one coming to the front? Woe to that one among the nations which halted in its onward march! the victory is to those who are with the advance-guard, to those who are clear of head and strong of body, to the most powerful.

But just then there came from the smoke-blackened kitchen, where the walls were bright with the colored prints of Epinal, a sound of voices and the squalling of a girl who submits, not unwillingly, to be tousled. It was Lieutenant Rochas, availing himself of his privilege as a conquering hero, to catch and kiss the pretty waitress. He came out into the arbor, where he ordered a cup of coffee to be served him, and as he had heard the concluding words of Picot's narrative, proceeded to take a hand in the conversation:

"Bah! my children, those things that you are speaking of don't amount to anything. It is only the beginning of the dance; you will see the fun commence in earnest presently. Pardi! up to the present time they have been five to our one, but things are going to take a change now; just put that in your pipe and smoke it. We are three hundred thousand strong here, and every move we make, which nobody can see through, is made with the intention of bringing the Prussians down on us, while Bazaine, who has got his eye on them, will take them in their rear. And then we'll smash 'em, crac! just as I smash this fly!"

Bringing his hands together with a sounding clap he caught and crushed a fly on the wing, and he laughed loud and cheerily, believing with all his simple soul in the feasibility of a plan that seemed so simple, steadfast in his faith in the invincibility of French courage. He good-naturedly informed the two soldiers of the exact position of their regiments, then lit a cigar and seated himself contentedly before his demitasse.

"The pleasure was all mine, comrades!" Maurice replied to Coutard and Picot, who, as they were leaving, thanked him for the cheese and wine.

He had also called for a cup of coffee and sat watching the Lieutenant, whose hopefulness had communicated itself to him, a little surprised, however, to hear him enumerate their strength at three hundred thousand men, when it was not more than a hundred thousand, and at his happy-go-lucky way of crushing the Prussians between the two armies of Chalons and Metz. But then he, too, felt such need of some comforting illusion! Why should he not continue to hope when all those glorious memories of the past that he had evoked were still ringing in his ears? The old inn was so bright and cheerful, with its trellis hung with the purple grapes of France, ripening in the golden sunlight! And again his confidence gained a momentary ascendancy over the gloomy despair that the late events had engendered in him.

Maurice's eyes had rested for a moment on an officer of chasseurs d'Afrique who, with his orderly, had disappeared at a sharp trot around the corner of the silent house where the Emperor was quartered, and when the orderly came back alone and stopped with his two horses before the inn door he gave utterance to an exclamation of surprise:

"Prosper! Why, I supposed you were at Metz!"

It was a young man of Remilly, a simple farm-laborer, whom he had known as a boy in the days when he used to go and spend his vacations with his uncle Fouchard. He had been drawn, and when the war broke out had been three years in Africa; he cut quite a dashing figure in his sky-blue jacket, his wide red trousers with blue stripes and red woolen belt, with his sun-dried face and strong, sinewy limbs that indicated great strength and activity.

"Hallo! it's Monsieur Maurice! I'm glad to see you!"

He took things very easily, however, conducting the steaming horses to the stable, and to his own, more particularly, giving a paternal attention. It was no doubt his affection for the noble animal, contracted when he was a boy and rode him to the plow, that had made him select the cavalry arm of the service.

"We've just come in from Monthois, more than ten leagues at a stretch," he said when he came back, "and Poulet will be wanting his breakfast."

Poulet was the horse. He declined to eat anything himself; would only accept a cup of coffee. He had to wait for his officer, who had to wait for the Emperor; he might be five minutes, and then again he might be two hours, so his officer had told him to put the horses in the stable. And as Maurice, whose curiosity was aroused, showed some disposition to pump him, his face became as vacant as a blank page.

"Can't say. An errand of some sort—papers to be delivered."

But Rochas looked at the chasseur with an eye of tenderness, for the uniform awakened old memories of Africa.

"Eh! my lad, where were you stationed out there?"

"At Medeah, Lieutenant."

Ah, Medeah! And drawing their chairs closer together they started a conversation, regardless of difference in rank. The life of the desert had become a second nature, for Prosper, where the trumpet was continually calling them to arms, where a large portion of their time was spent on horseback, riding out to battle as they would to the chase, to some grand battue of Arabs. There was just one soup-basin for every six men, or tribe, as it was called, and each tribe was a family by itself, one of its members attending to the cooking, another washing their linen, the others pitching the tent, caring for the horses, and cleaning the arms. By day they scoured the country beneath a sun like a ball of blazing copper, loaded down with the burden of their arms and utensils; at night they built great fires to drive away the mosquitoes and sat around them, singing the songs of France. Often it happened that in the luminous darkness of the night, thick set with stars, they had to rise and restore peace among their four-footed friends, who, in the balmy softness of the air, had set to biting and kicking one another, uprooting their pickets and neighing and snorting furiously. Then there was the delicious coffee, their greatest, indeed their only, luxury, which they ground by the primitive appliances of a carbine-butt and a porringer, and afterward strained through a red woolen sash. But their life was not one of unalloyed enjoyment; there were dark days, also, when they were far from the abodes of civilized man with the enemy before them. No more fires, then; no singing, no good times. There were times when hunger, thirst and want of sleep caused them horrible suffering, but no matter; they loved that daring, adventurous life, that war of skirmishes, so propitious for the display of personal bravery and as interesting as a fairy tale, enlivened by the razzias, which were only public plundering on a larger scale, and by marauding, or the private peculations of the chicken-thieves, which afforded many an amusing story that made even the generals laugh.

"Ah!" said Prosper, with a more serious face, "it's different here; the fighting is done in quite another way."

And in reply to a question asked by Maurice, he told the story of their landing at Toulon and the long and wearisome march to Luneville. It was there that they first received news of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller. After that his account was less clear, for he got the names of towns mixed, Nancy and Saint-Mihiel, Saint-Mihiel and Metz. There must have been heavy fighting on the 14th, for the sky was all on fire, but all he saw of it was four uhlans behind a hedge. On the 16th there was another engagement; they could hear the artillery going as early as six o'clock in the morning, and he had been told that on the 18th they started the dance again, more lively than ever. But the chasseurs were not in it that time, for at Gravelotte on the 16th, as they were standing drawn up along a road waiting to wheel into column, the Emperor, who passed that way in a victoria, took them to act as his escort to Verdun. And a pretty little jaunt it was, twenty-six miles at a hard gallop, with the fear of being cut off by the Prussians at any moment!

"And what of Bazaine?" asked Rochas.

"Bazaine? they say that he is mightily well pleased that the Emperor lets him alone."

But the Lieutenant wanted to know if Bazaine was coming to join them, whereon Prosper made a gesture expressive of uncertainty; what did any one know? Ever since the 16th their time had been spent in marching and countermarching in the rain, out on reconnoissance and grand-guard duty, and they had not seen a sign of an enemy. Now they were part of the army of Chalons. His regiment, together with two regiments of chasseurs de France and one of hussars, formed one of the divisions of the cavalry of reserve, the first division, commanded by General Margueritte, of whom he spoke with most enthusiastic warmth.

"Ah, the bougre! the enemy will catch a Tartar in him! But what's the good talking? the only use they can find for us is to send us pottering about in the mud."

There was silence for a moment, then Maurice gave some brief news of Remilly and uncle Fouchard, and Prosper expressed his regret that he could not go and shake hands with Honore, the quartermaster-sergeant, whose battery was stationed more than a league away, on the other side of the Laon road. But the chasseur pricked up his ears at hearing the whinnying of a horse and rose and went out to make sure that Poulet was not in want of anything. It was the hour sacred to coffee and pousse-cafe, and it was not long before the little hostelry was full to overflowing with officers and men of every arm of the service. There was not a vacant table, and the bright uniforms shone resplendent against the green background of leaves checkered with spots of sunshine. Major Bouroche had just come in and taken a seat beside Rochas, when Jean presented himself with an order.

"Lieutenant, the captain desires me to say that he wishes to see you at three o'clock on company business."

Rochas signified by a nod of the head that he had heard, and Jean did not go away at once, but stood smiling at Maurice, who was lighting a cigarette. Ever since the occurrence in the railway car there had been a sort of tacit truce between the two men; they seemed to be reciprocally studying each other, with an increasing interest and attraction. But just then Prosper came back, a little out of temper.

"I mean to have something to eat unless my officer comes out of that shanty pretty quick. The Emperor is just as likely as not to stay away until dark, confound it all."

"Tell me," said Maurice, his curiosity again getting the better of him, "isn't it possible that the news you are bringing may be from Bazaine?"

"Perhaps so. There was a good deal of talk about him down there at Monthois."

At that moment there was a stir outside in the street, and Jean, who was standing by one of the doors of the arbor, turned and said:

"The Emperor!"

Immediately everyone was on his feet. Along the broad, white road, with its rows of poplars on either side, came a troop of cent-gardes, spick and span in their brilliant uniforms, their cuirasses blazing in the sunlight, and immediately behind them rode the Emperor, accompanied by his staff, in a wide open space, followed by a second troop of cent-gardes.

There was a general uncovering of heads, and here and there a hurrah was heard; and the Emperor raised his head as he passed; his face looked drawn, the eyes were dim and watery. He had the dazed appearance of one suddenly aroused from slumber, smiled faintly at sight of the cheerful inn, and saluted. From behind them Maurice and Jean distinctly heard old Bouroche growl, having first surveyed the sovereign with his practiced eye:

"There's no mistake about it, that man is in a bad way." Then he succinctly completed his diagnosis: "His jig is up!"

Jean shook his head and thought in his limited, common sense way: "It is a confounded shame to let a man like that have command of the army!" And ten minutes later, when Maurice, comforted by his good breakfast, shook hands with Prosper and strolled away to smoke more cigarettes, he carried with him the picture of the Emperor, seated on his easy-gaited horse, so pale, so gentle, the man of thought, the dreamer, wanting in energy when the moment for action came. He was reputed to be good-hearted, capable, swayed by generous and noble thoughts, a silent man of strong and tenacious will; he was very brave, too, scorning danger with the scorn of the fatalist for whom destiny has no fears; but in critical moments a fatal lethargy seemed to overcome him; he appeared to become paralyzed in presence of results, and powerless thereafter to struggle against Fortune should she prove adverse. And Maurice asked himself if his were not a special physiological condition, aggravated by suffering; if the indecision and increasing incapacity that the Emperor had displayed ever since the opening of the campaign were not to be attributed to his manifest illness. That would explain everything: a minute bit of foreign substance in a man's system, and empires totter.

The camp that evening was all astir with activity; officers were bustling about with orders and arranging for the start the following morning at five o'clock. Maurice experienced a shock of surprise and alarm to learn that once again all their plans were changed, that they were not to fall back on Paris, but proceed to Verdun and effect a junction with Bazaine. There was a report that dispatches had come in during the day from the marshal announcing that he was retreating, and the young man's thoughts reverted to the officer of chasseurs and his rapid ride from Monthois; perhaps he had been the bearer of a copy of the dispatch. So, then, the opinions of the Empress-regent and the Council of Ministers had prevailed with the vacillating MacMahon, in their dread to see the Emperor return to Paris and their inflexible determination to push the army forward in one supreme attempt to save the dynasty; and the poor Emperor, that wretched man for whom there was no place in all his vast empire, was to be bundled to and fro among the baggage of his army like some worthless, worn-out piece of furniture, condemned to the irony of dragging behind him in his suite his imperial household, cent-gardes, horses, carriages, cooks, silver stew-pans and cases of champagne, trailing his flaunting mantle, embroidered with the Napoleonic bees, through the blood and mire of the highways of his retreat.

At midnight Maurice was not asleep; he was feverishly wakeful, and his gloomy reflections kept him tossing and tumbling on his pallet. He finally arose and went outside, where he found comfort and refreshment in the cool night air. The sky was overspread with clouds, the darkness was intense; along the front of the line the expiring watch-fires gleamed with a red and sullen light at distant intervals, and in the deathlike, boding silence could be heard the long-drawn breathing of the hundred thousand men who slumbered there. Then Maurice became more tranquil, and there descended on him a sentiment of brotherhood, full of compassionate kindness for all those slumbering fellow-creatures, of whom thousands would soon be sleeping the sleep of death. Brave fellows! True, many of them were thieves and drunkards, but think of what they had suffered and the excuse there was for them in the universal demoralization! The glorious veterans of Solferino and Sebastopol were but a handful, incorporated in the ranks of the newly raised troops, too few in number to make their example felt. The four corps that had been got together and equipped so hurriedly, devoid of every element of cohesion, were the forlorn hope, the expiatory band that their rulers were sending to the sacrifice in the endeavor to avert the wrath of destiny. They would bear their cross to the bitter end, atoning with their life's blood for the faults of others, glorious amid disaster and defeat.

And then it was that Maurice, there in the darkness that was instinct with life, became conscious that a great duty lay before him. He ceased to beguile himself with the illusive prospect of great victories to be gained; the march to Verdun was a march to death, and he so accepted it, since it was their lot to die, with brave and cheerful resignation.



IV.

On Tuesday, the 23d of August, at six o'clock in the morning, camp was broken, and as a stream that has momentarily expanded into a lake resumes its course again, the hundred and odd thousand men of the army of Chalons put themselves in motion and soon were pouring onward in a resistless torrent; and notwithstanding the rumors that had been current since the preceding day, it was a great surprise to most to see that instead of continuing their retrograde movement they were leaving Paris behind them and turning their faces toward the unknown regions of the East.

At five o'clock in the morning the 7th corps was still unsupplied with cartridges. For two days the artillerymen had been working like beavers to unload the materiel, horses, and stores that had been streaming from Metz into the overcrowded station, and it was only at the very last moment that some cars of cartridges were discovered among the tangled trains, and that a detail which included Jean among its numbers was enabled to bring back two hundred and forty thousand on carts that they had hurriedly requisitioned. Jean distributed the regulation number, one hundred cartridges to a man, among his squad, just as Gaude, the company bugler, sounded the order to march.

The 106th was not to pass through Rheims, their orders being to turn the city and debouch into the Chalons road farther on, but on this occasion there was the usual failure to regulate the order and time of marching, so that, the four corps having commenced to move at the same moment, they collided when they came out upon the roads that they were to traverse in common and the result was inextricable confusion. Cavalry and artillery were constantly cutting in among the infantry and bringing them to a halt; whole brigades were compelled to leave the road and stand at ordered arms in the plowed fields for more than an hour, waiting until the way should be cleared. And to make matters worse, they had hardly left the camp when a terrible storm broke over them, the rain pelting down in torrents, drenching the men completely and adding intolerably to the weight of knapsacks and great-coats. Just as the rain began to hold up, however, the 106th saw a chance to go forward, while some zouaves in an adjoining field, who were forced to wait yet for a while, amused themselves by pelting one another with balls of moist earth, and the consequent condition of their uniforms afforded them much merriment.

The sun suddenly came shining out again in the clear sky, the warm, bright sun of an August morning, and with it came returning gayety; the men were steaming like a wash of linen hung out to dry in the open air: the moisture evaporated from their clothing in little more time than it takes to tell it, and when they were warm and dry again, like dogs who shake the water from them when they emerge from a pond, they chaffed one another good-naturedly on their bedraggled appearance and the splashes of mud on their red trousers. Wherever two roads intersected another halt was necessitated; the last one was in a little village just beyond the walls of the city, in front of a small saloon that seemed to be doing a thriving business. Thereon it occurred to Maurice to treat the squad to a drink, by way of wishing them all good luck.

"Corporal, will you allow me—"

Jean, after hesitating a moment, accepted a "pony" of brandy for himself. Loubet and Chouteau were of the party (the latter had been watchful and submissive since that day when the corporal had evinced a disposition to use his heavy fists), and also Pache and Lapoulle, a couple of very decent fellows when there was no one to set them a bad example.

"Your good health, corporal!" said Chouteau in a respectful, whining tone.

"Thank you; here's hoping that you may bring back your head and all your legs and arms!" Jean politely replied, while the others laughed approvingly.

But the column was about to move; Captain Beaudoin came up with a scandalized look on his face and a reproof at the tip of his tongue, while Lieutenant Rochas, more indulgent to the small weaknesses of his men, turned his head so as not to see what was going on. And now they were stepping out at a good round pace along the Chalons road, which stretched before them for many a long league, bordered with trees on either side, undeviatingly straight, like a never-ending ribbon unrolled between the fields of yellow stubble that were dotted here and there with tall stacks and wooden windmills brandishing their lean arms. More to the north were rows of telegraph poles, indicating the position of other roads, on which they could distinguish the black, crawling lines of other marching regiments. In many places the troops had left the highway and were moving in deep columns across the open plain. To the left and front a cavalry brigade was seen, jogging along at an easy trot in a blaze of sunshine. The entire wide horizon, usually so silent and deserted, was alive and populous with those streams of men, pressing onward, onward, in long drawn, black array, like the innumerable throng of insects from some gigantic ant-hill.

About nine o'clock the regiment left the Chalons road and wheeled to the left into another that led to Suippe, which, like the first, extended, straight as an arrow's flight, far as the eye could see. The men marched at the route-step in two straggling files along either side of the road, thus leaving the central space free for the officers, and Maurice could not help noticing their anxious, care-worn air, in striking contrast with the jollity and good-humor of the soldiers, who were happy as children to be on the move once more. As the squad was near the head of the column he could even distinguish the Colonel, M. de Vineuil, in the distance, and was impressed by the grave earnestness of his manner, and his tall, rigid form, swaying in cadence to the motion of his charger. The band had been sent back to the rear, to keep company with the regimental wagons; it played but once during that entire campaign. Then came the ambulances and engineer's train attached to the division, and succeeding that the corps train, an interminable procession of forage wagons, closed vans for stores, carts for baggage, and vehicles of every known description, occupying a space of road nearly four miles in length, and which, at the infrequent curves in the highway, they could see winding behind them like the tail of some great serpent. And last of all, at the extreme rear of the column, came the herds, "rations on the hoof," a surging, bleating, bellowing mass of sheep and oxen, urged on by blows and raising clouds of dust, reminding one of the old warlike peoples of the East and their migrations.

Lapoulle meantime would every now and then give a hitch of his shoulders in an attempt to shift the weight of his knapsack when it began to be too heavy. The others, alleging that he was the strongest, were accustomed to make him carry the various utensils that were common to the squad, including the big kettle and the water-pail; on this occasion they had even saddled him with the company shovel, assuring him that it was a badge of honor. So far was he from complaining that he was now laughing at a song with which Loubet, the tenor of the squad, was trying to beguile the tedium of the way. Loubet had made himself quite famous by reason of his knapsack, in which was to be found a little of everything: linen, an extra pair of shoes, haberdashery, chocolate, brushes, a plate and cup, to say nothing of his regular rations of biscuit and coffee, and although the all-devouring receptacle also contained his cartridges, and his blankets were rolled on top of it, together with the shelter-tent and stakes, the load nevertheless appeared light, such an excellent system he had of packing his trunk, as he himself expressed it.

"It's a beastly country, all the same!" Chouteau kept repeating from time to time, casting a look of intense disgust over the dreary plains of "lousy Champagne."

Broad expanses of chalky ground of a dirty white lay before and around them, and seemed to have no end. Not a farmhouse to be seen anywhere, not a living being; nothing but flocks of crows, forming small spots of blackness on the immensity of the gray waste. On the left, far away in the distance, the low hills that bounded the horizon in that direction were crowned by woods of somber pines, while on the right an unbroken wall of trees indicated the course of the river Vesle. But over there behind the hills they had seen for the last hour a dense smoke was rising, the heavy clouds of which obscured the sky and told of a dreadful conflagration raging at no great distance.

"What is burning over there?" was the question that was on the lips of everyone.

The answer was quickly given and ran through the column from front to rear. The camp of Chalons had been fired, it was said, by order of the Emperor, to keep the immense collection of stores there from falling into the hands of the Prussians, and for the last two days it had been going up in flame and smoke. The cavalry of the rear-guard had been instructed to apply the torch to two immense warehouses, filled with tents, tent-poles, mattresses, clothing, shoes, blankets, mess utensils, supplies of every kind sufficient for the equipment of a hundred thousand men. Stacks of forage also had been lighted, and were blazing like huge beacon-fires, and an oppressive silence settled down upon the army as it pursued its march across the wide, solitary plain at sight of that dusky, eddying column that rose from behind the distant hills, filling the heavens with desolation. All that was to be heard in the bright sunlight was the measured tramp of many feet upon the hollow ground, while involuntarily the eyes of all were turned on that livid cloud whose baleful shadows rested on their march for many a league.

Their spirits rose again when they made their midday halt in a field of stubble, where the men could seat themselves on their unslung knapsacks and refresh themselves with a bite. The large square biscuits could only be eaten by crumbling them in the soup, but the little round ones were quite a delicacy, light and appetizing; the only trouble was that they left an intolerable thirst behind them. Pache sang a hymn, being invited thereto, the squad joining in the chorus. Jean smiled good-naturedly without attempting to check them in their amusement, while Maurice, at sight of the universal cheerfulness and the good order with which their first day's march was conducted, felt a revival of confidence. The remainder of the allotted task of the day was performed with the same light-hearted alacrity, although the last five miles tried their endurance. They had abandoned the high road, leaving the village of Prosnes to their right, in order to avail themselves of a short cut across a sandy heath diversified by an occasional thin pine wood, and the entire division, with its interminable train at its heels, turned and twisted in and out among the trees, sinking ankle deep in the yielding sand at every step. It seemed as if the cheerless waste would never end; all that they met was a flock of very lean sheep, guarded by a big black dog.

It was about four o'clock when at last the 106th halted for the night at Dontrien, a small village on the banks of the Suippe. The little stream winds among some pretty groves of trees; the old church stands in the middle of the graveyard, which is shaded in its entire extent by a magnificent chestnut. The regiment pitched its tents on the left bank, in a meadow that sloped gently down to the margin of the river. The officers said that all the four corps would bivouac that evening on the line of the Suippe between Auberive and Hentregiville, occupying the intervening villages of Dontrien, Betheniville and Pont-Faverger, making a line of battle nearly five leagues long.

Gaude immediately gave the call for "distribution," and Jean had to run for it, for the corporal was steward-in-chief, and it behooved him to be on the lookout to protect his men's interests. He had taken Lapoulle with him, and in a quarter of an hour they returned with some ribs of beef and a bundle of firewood. In the short space of time succeeding their arrival three steers of the herd that followed the column had been knocked in the head under a great oak-tree, skinned, and cut up. Lapoulle had to return for bread, which the villagers of Dontrien had been baking all that afternoon in their ovens. There was really no lack of anything on that first day, setting aside wine and tobacco, with which the troops were to be obliged to dispense during the remainder of the campaign.

Upon Jean's return he found Chouteau engaged in raising the tent, assisted by Pache; he looked at them for a moment with the critical eye of an old soldier who had no great opinion of their abilities.

"It will do very well if the weather is fine to-night," he said at last, "but if it should come on to blow we would like enough wake up and find ourselves in the river. Let me show you."

And he was about to send Maurice with the large pail for water, but the young man had sat down on the ground, taken off his shoe, and was examining his right foot.

"Hallo, there! what's the matter with you?"

"My shoe has chafed my foot and raised a blister. My other shoes were worn out, and when we were at Rheims I bought these, like a big fool, because they were a good fit. I should have selected gunboats."

Jean kneeled and took the foot in his hand, turning it over as carefully as if it had been a little child's, with a disapproving shake of his head.

"You must be careful; it is no laughing matter, a thing like that. A soldier without the use of his feet is of no good to himself or anyone else. When we were in Italy my captain used always to say that it is the men's legs that win battles."

He bade Pache go for the water, no very hard task, as the river was but a few yards away, and Loubet, having in the meantime dug a shallow trench and lit his fire, was enabled to commence operations on his pot-au-feu, which he did by putting on the big kettle full of water and plunging into it the meat that he had previously corded together with a bit of twine, secundum artem. Then it was solid comfort for them to watch the boiling of the soup; the whole squad, their chores done up and their day's labor ended, stretched themselves on the grass around the fire in a family group, full of tender anxiety for the simmering meat, while Loubet occasionally stirred the pot with a gravity fitted to the importance of his position. Like children and savages, their sole instinct was to eat and sleep, careless of the morrow, while advancing to face unknown risks and dangers.

But Maurice had unpacked his knapsack and come across a newspaper that he had bought at Rheims, and Chouteau asked:

"Is there anything about the Prussians in it? Read us the news!"

They were a happy family under Jean's mild despotism. Maurice good-naturedly read such news as he thought might interest them, while Pache, the seamstress of the company, mended his greatcoat for him and Lapoulle cleaned his musket. The first item was a splendid victory won by Bazaine, who had driven an entire Prussian corps into the quarries of Jaumont, and the trumped-up tale was told with an abundance of dramatic detail, how men and horses went over the precipice and were crushed on the rocks beneath out of all semblance of humanity, so that there was not one whole corpse found for burial. Then there were minute details of the pitiable condition of the German armies ever since they had invaded France: the ill-fed, poorly equipped soldiers were actually falling from inanition and dying by the roadside of horrible diseases. Another article told how the king of Prussia had the diarrhea, and how Bismarck had broken his leg in jumping from the window of an inn where a party of zouaves had just missed capturing him. Capital news! Lapoulle laughed over it as if he would split his sides, while Chouteau and the others, without expressing the faintest doubt, chuckled at the idea that soon they would be picking up Prussians as boys pick up sparrows in a field after a hail-storm. But they laughed loudest at old Bismarck's accident; oh! the zouaves and the turcos, they were the boys for one's money! It was said that the Germans were in an ecstasy of fear and rage, declaring that it was unworthy of a nation that claimed to be civilized to employ such heathen savages in its armies. Although they had been decimated at Froeschwiller, the foreign troops seemed to have a good deal of life left in them.