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Underneath the King’s position the long line of batteries, stretching with hardly an interval from Remilly to Frenois, kept up an unintermittent fire, pouring their shells into Daigny and la Moncelle, sending them hurtling over Sedan city to sweep the northern plateaus. It was barely eight o’clock, and with eyes fixed on the gigantic board he directed the movements of the game, awaiting the inevitable end, calmly controlling the black cloud of men that beneath him swept, an array of pigmies, athwart the smiling landscape.

Part II
Chapter II

In the dense fog up on the plateau of Floing Gaude, the bugler, sounded reveille at peep of day with all the lung-power he was possessed of, but the inspiring strain died away and was lost in the damp, heavy air, and the men, who had not had courage even to erect their tents and had thrown themselves, wrapped in their blankets, upon the muddy ground, did not awake or stir, but lay like corpses, their ashen features set and rigid in the slumber of utter exhaustion. To arouse them from their trance-like sleep they had to be shaken, one by one, and, with ghastly faces and haggard eyes, they rose to their feet, like beings summoned, against their will, back from another world. It was Jean who awoke Maurice.

“What is it? Where are we!” asked the younger man. He looked affrightedly around him, and beheld only that gray waste, in which were floating the unsubstantial forms of his comrades. Objects twenty yards away were undistinguishable; his knowledge of the country availed him not; he could not even have indicated in which direction lay Sedan. Just then, however, the boom of cannon, somewhere in the distance, fell upon his ear. “Ah! I remember; the battle is for to-day; they are fighting. So much the better; there will be an end to our suspense!”

He heard other voices around him expressing the same idea. There was a feeling of stern satisfaction that at last their long nightmare was to be dispelled, that at last they were to have a sight of those Prussians whom they had come out to look for, and before whom they had been retreating so many weary days; that they were to be given a chance to try a shot at them, and lighten the load of cartridges that had been tugging at their belts so long, with never an opportunity to burn a single one of them. Everyone felt that, this time, the battle would not, could not be avoided.

But the guns began to thunder more loudly down at Bazeilles, and Jean bent his ear to listen.

“Where is the firing?”

“Faith,” replied Maurice, “it seems to me to be over toward the Meuse; but I’ll be hanged if I know where we are.”

“Look here, youngster,” said the corporal, “you are going to stick close by me to-day, for unless a man has his wits about him, don’t you see, he is likely to get in trouble. Now, I have been there before, and can keep an eye out for both of us.”

The others of the squad, meantime, were growling angrily because they had nothing with which to warm their stomachs. There was no possibility of kindling fires without dry wood in such weather as prevailed then, and so, at the very moment when they were about to go into battle, the inner man put in his claim for recognition, and would not be denied. Hunger is not conducive to heroism; to those poor fellows eating was the great, the momentous question of life; how lovingly they watched the boiling pot on those red-letter days when the soup was rich and thick; how like children or savages they were in their wrath when rations were not forthcoming!

“No eat, no fight!” declared Chouteau. “I’ll be blowed if I am going to risk my skin to-day!”

The radical was cropping out again in the great hulking house-painter, the orator of Belleville, the pothouse politician, who drowned what few correct ideas he picked up here and there in a nauseous mixture of ineffable folly and falsehood.

“Besides,” he went on, “what good was there in making fools of us as they have been doing all along, telling us that the Prussians were dying of hunger and disease, that they had not so much as a shirt to their back, and were tramping along the highways like ragged, filthy paupers!”