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“Ah, worse luck! The gentleman, that relative of yours, was right all the same in saying that they are stronger than we.”

Maurice was beside himself, could have strangled him. The Prussians stronger than the French! The thought made his blood boil. The peasant calmly and stubbornly added:

“That don’t matter, mind you. A man don’t give up whipped at the first knock-down he gets. We shall have to keep hammering away at them all the same.”

But a tall figure arose before them. They recognized Rochas, still wrapped in his long mantle, whom the fugitive sounds about him, or it may have been the intuition of disaster, had awakened from his uneasy slumber. He questioned them, insisted on knowing all. When he was finally brought, with much difficulty, to see how matters stood, stupor, immense and profound, filled his boyish, inexpressive eyes. More than ten times in succession he repeated:

“Beaten! How beaten? Why beaten?”

And that was the calamity that had lain hidden in the blackness of that night of agony. And now the pale dawn was appearing at the portals of the east, heralding a day heavy with bitterest sorrow and striking white upon the silent tents, in one of which began to be visible the ashy faces of Loubet and Lapoulle, of Chouteau and of Pache, who were snoring still with wide-open mouths. Forth from the thin mists that were slowly creeping upward from the river off yonder in the distance came the new day, bringing with it mourning and affliction.

Part I
Chapter II

About eight o’clock the sun dispersed the heavy clouds, and the broad, fertile plain about Mulhausen lay basking in the warm, bright light of a perfect August Sunday. From the camp, now awake and bustling with life, could be heard the bells of the neighboring parishes, pealing merrily in the limpid air. The cheerful Sunday following so close on ruin and defeat had its own gayety, its sky was as serene as on a holiday.

Gaude suddenly took his bugle and gave the call that announced the distribution of rations, whereat Loubet appeared astonished. What was it? What did it mean? Were they going to give out chickens, as he had promised Lapoulle the night before? He had been born in the Halles, in the Rue de la Cossonerie, was the unacknowledged son of a small huckster, had enlisted “for the money there was in it,” as he said, after having been a sort of Jack-of-all-trades, and was now the gourmand, the epicure of the company, continually nosing after something good to eat. But he went off to see what was going on, while Chouteau, the company artist, house-painter by trade at Belleville, something of a dandy and a revolutionary republican, exasperated against the government for having called him back to the colors after he had served his time, was cruelly chaffing Pache, whom he had discovered on his knees, behind the tent, preparing to say his prayers. There was a pious man for you! Couldn’t he oblige him, Chouteau, by interceding with God to give him a hundred thousand francs or some such small trifle? But Pache, an insignificant little fellow with a head running up to a point, who had come to them from some hamlet in the wilds of Picardy, received the other’s raillery with the uncomplaining gentleness of a martyr. He was the butt of the squad, he and Lapoulle, the colossal brute who had got his growth in the marshes of the Sologne, so utterly ignorant of everything that on the day of his joining the regiment he had asked his comrades to show him the King. And although the terrible tidings of the disaster at Froeschwiller had been known throughout the camp since early morning, the four men laughed, joked, and went about their usual tasks with the indifference of so many machines.

But there arose a murmur of pleased surprise. It was occasioned by Jean, the corporal, coming back from the commissary’s, accompanied by Maurice, with a load of firewood. So, they were giving out wood at last, the lack of which the night before had deprived the men of their soup! Twelve hours behind time, only!