'There's a nasty stone there, and no mistake.' And then he completed his diagnosis in two words, 'Done for!'
Jean, with his narrow-minded common-sense, had shaken his head sorrowfully; what fearful bad luck for an army to have such a chief as that! Ten minutes later, when Maurice, after shaking hands with Prosper, went off delighted with his nicely served breakfast, to stroll about and smoke some more cigarettes, he carried away with him the recollection of that pale, dim-eyed Emperor, passing by on horseback at a jog-trot. So that was the conspirator, the dreamer deficient in energy at the decisive moment. He was said to be kind-hearted, to be quite capable of great and generous ideas, and, silent man that he was, to have a very tenacious will; and he was also undoubtedly very brave, disdainful of danger, like a fatalist always ready to accept his destiny. But in great crises he seemed struck with stupor, paralysed as it were in presence of accomplished facts; and thenceforward he was unable to contend against evil fortune. Maurice wondered if this were not some special physiological condition which agony had aggravated; if the disease from which the Emperor was evidently suffering were not the cause of the growing indecision and incapacity that he had displayed since the outset of the campaign. In that way, everything would have been explained. A grain of sand in a man's flesh, and empires totter and fall!
Quite a stir suddenly arose in camp that evening after the roll call, the officers running hither and thither, transmitting orders, and arranging everything for the men's departure next morning at five o'clock. With mingled surprise and disquietude, Maurice learnt that everything was again changed, and that instead of falling back on Paris they were about to march on Verdun, in view of joining Bazaine. A rumour circulated that a despatch had arrived from the latter during the day, announcing that he was effecting his retreat; and Maurice then remembered Prosper and the officer he had come with from Monthois, perhaps to bring the Emperor a copy of this despatch. Thus the Empress-Regent and the Council of Ministers, so frightened at the thought of the Emperor's return to Paris, and so obstinately bent upon throwing the army forward at any cost in order that it might make a supreme attempt to save the dynasty, had triumphed at last over the perpetual hesitation of Marshal MacMahon. And that wretched Emperor, that poor devil who no longer had any place in his own empire, was to be carried off like a useless, cumbersome parcel among the baggage-train of his troops, condemned—oh! the irony of it—to drag after him all his Imperial household, his bodyguards, his carriages, his horses, his cooks, his vans full of silver saucepans and sparkling wine of Champagne—in a word, all the pomp of his bee-spangled, imperial robes, which could now only serve to sweep up the blood and mire that covered the high-roads of defeat!
At midnight, Maurice had not yet got to sleep. Feverish insomnia, fraught with ugly dreams, made him turn over and over in the tent. At last he ended by coming outside, and felt relieved on standing up and inhaling the cold, wind-swept air. The sky was covered with huge clouds, the night was becoming very dense, with an infinitely mournful darkness, which the last expiring fires along the camp front faintly illumined with star-like lights. And amidst the black, silent peacefulness one could detect the slow breathing of the hundred thousand men who were lying there. Then Maurice's anguish became quieted, and a feeling of fraternity came to him, of indulgent affection for all those living sleepers, thousands of whom would soon be sleeping the sleep of death. After all, they were good fellows. They were scarcely disciplined; they got drunk, and they robbed; but what sufferings had they not already endured, and what excuses there were for them in the Downfall of the entire nation! Among them there remained but a small number of the glorious veterans of Sebastopol and Solferino, mingled with men who were but lads, and incapable of any prolonged resistance. These four army corps, hastily assembled and reorganised, without any solid ties to bind them together, formed, so to say, the army of despair, the expiatory flock which was to be sent to the sacrifice in an endeavour to avert the anger of Destiny. And this army must climb its Calvary to the bitter end, paying, with the red flood of its blood, for the faults of everyone, and attaining to fame by the very horror of the disasters that awaited it.
Meditating thus in the depths of the quivering darkness, Maurice became conscious of the great duty that lay before him. He no longer indulged the braggart hope of repeating the legendary victories. This march upon Verdun was a march to Death, and he accepted it with stout and cheerful resignation, since die he must.
CHAPTER IV
ON THE MARCH—THE SPY
The camp was raised on Tuesday, August 23, at six o'clock in the morning, and the hundred thousand men of the army of Châlons set out on the march, flowing away in an immense stream, like some human river resuming its torrential course after expanding for a time into a lake. Despite the rumours current the evening before, it was a thorough surprise to many of the men to find that, instead of continuing their movement of retreat, they now had to turn their backs on Paris, and march towards the East—towards the Unknown.
At five o'clock in the morning, the Seventh Army Corps had not received any cartridges. For two days past the artillerymen had been exhausting themselves in removing their horses and matériel from the railway station, which was encumbered with supplies sent back from Metz. And it was only at the last moment that the vans laden with the ammunition were discovered among the fearful jumble of trains, and that a fatigue company, of which Jean formed part, was able to remove some 240,000 cartridges in hastily requisitioned vehicles. Jean distributed the regulation hundred cartridges to each of the men of his squad at the very moment when Gaude, the company's bugler, began to sound the march.
The 106th did not have to pass through Rheims. Its orders were to skirt the town and make for the Châlons high road. Once again, however, the commanders had neglected to regulate the men's departure at proper intervals, and, as the four army corps set out at the same time, extreme confusion arose when they debouched from the various bye-roads into the highways they were to follow in common. At every moment the artillery and cavalry intercepted the infantry, and compelled the latter to halt. Entire brigades had to wait for an hour in ploughed fields, and with arms grounded, until the roads should become clear. The worst was that a frightful storm burst some ten minutes after the start—a perfect deluge, which fell during more than an hour, soaking the men to the skin and rendering their heavy capotes and knapsacks still more oppressive. The 106th, however, was able to resume its march just as the rain was ceasing; whilst some Zouaves, who were still obliged to wait in a field hard by, devised, by way of taking patience, a little pastime to amuse themselves—that of assailing one another with balls of earth, huge lumps of mud, the splashing of which on the uniforms of those who were hit provoked uproarious laughter. Almost immediately afterwards the sun reappeared, the triumphant sun of a warm August morning. Then gaiety returned, the men steamed—much as washing steams before the fire—and they were soon dry, looking like so many dirty dogs pulled out of a pond, and joking with one another respecting the hard crusty mud that dangled from their red trousers. It was still necessary to stop and wait at each cross road, but at last there came a final halt at the end of one of the Rheims suburbs, just in front of a tavern, which never seemed to empty.
It then occurred to Maurice to stand treat to the squad by way of wishing them all good luck—'if you'll allow it, corporal,' said he.
After hesitating for a moment, Jean accepted a drop of something short. Loubet and Chouteau were there, the latter slyly respectful since he had seen Jean's fists so near his face; and Pache and Lapoulle were there also, good fellows both of them, when others did not set them agog. 'To your health, corporal!' said Chouteau, in an unctuous voice.
'To yours, and may we all bring our heads and feet back,' politely replied Jean, amid an approving titter.
The others were starting, however, and Captain Beaudoin had already drawn near, apparently greatly shocked, and bent on reprimanding the tipplers, whereas Lieutenant Rochas, indulgent when his men were thirsty, affected to look in another direction. And now they sped along the road to Châlons, an endless ribbon, edged with trees and stretching in a straight line right across the vast plain,
