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
