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It was just striking six from the steeple of the little church of Dontrien when Loubet shouted:

“Come to supper!”

The squad lost no time in seating themselves in a circle. At the very last moment Loubet had succeeded in getting some vegetables from a peasant who lived hard by. That made the crowning glory of the feast: a soup perfumed with carrots and onions, that went down the throat soft as velvet–what could they have desired more? The spoons rattled merrily in the little wooden bowls. Then it devolved on Jean, who always served the portions, to distribute the beef, and it behooved him that day to do it with the strictest impartiality, for hungry eyes were watching him and there would have been a growl had anyone received a larger piece than his neighbors. They concluded by licking the porringers, and were smeared with soup up to their eyes.

“Ah, nom de Dieu!” Chouteau declared when he had finished, throwing himself flat on his back; “I would rather take that than a beating, any day!”

Maurice, too, whose foot pained him less now that he could give it a little rest, was conscious of that sensation of well-being that is the result of a full stomach. He was beginning to take more kindly to his rough companions, and to bring himself down nearer to their level under the pressure of the physical necessities of their life in common. That night he slept the same deep sleep as did his five tent-mates; they all huddled close together, finding the sensation of animal warmth not disagreeable in the heavy dew that fell. It is necessary to state that Lapoulle, at the instigation of Loubet, had gone to a stack not far away and feloniously appropriated a quantity of straw, in which our six gentlemen snored as if it had been a bed of down. And from Auberive to Hentregiville, along the pleasant banks of the Suippe as it meandered sluggishly between its willows, the fires of those hundred thousand sleeping men illuminated the starlit night for fifteen miles, like a long array of twinkling stars.

At sunrise they made coffee, pulverizing the berries in a wooden bowl with a musket-butt, throwing the powder into boiling water, and settling it with a drop of cold water. The luminary rose that morning in a bank of purple and gold, affording a spectacle of royal magnificence, but Maurice had no eye for such displays, and Jean, with the weather-wisdom of a peasant, cast an anxious glance at the red disk, which presaged rain; and it was for that reason that, the surplus of bread baked the day before having been distributed and the squad having received three loaves, he reproved severely Loubet and Pache for making them fast on the outside of their knapsacks; but the tents were folded and the knapsacks packed, and so no one paid any attention to him. Six o’clock was sounding from all the bells of the village when the army put itself in motion and stoutly resumed its advance in the bright hopefulness of the dawn of the new day.

The 106th, in order to reach the road that leads from Rheims to Vouziers, struck into a cross-road, and for more than an hour their way was an ascending one. Below them, toward the north, Betheniville was visible among the trees, where the Emperor was reported to have slept, and when they reached the Vouziers road the level country of the preceding day again presented itself to their gaze and the lean fields of “lousy Champagne” stretched before them in wearisome monotony. They now had the Arne, an insignificant stream, flowing on their left, while to the right the treeless, naked country stretched far as the eye could see in an apparently interminable horizon. They passed through a village or two: Saint-Clement, with its single winding street bordered by a double row of houses, Saint-Pierre, a little town of miserly rich men who had barricaded their doors and windows. The long halt occurred about ten o’clock, near another village, Saint-Etienne, where the men were highly delighted to find tobacco once more. The 7th corps had been cut up into several columns, and the 106th headed one of these columns, having behind it only a battalion of chasseurs and the reserve artillery. Maurice turned his head at every bend in the road to catch a glimpse of the long train that had so excited his interest the day before, but in vain; the herds had gone off in some other direction, and all he could see was the guns, looming inordinately large upon those level plains, like monster insects of somber mien.