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By Root 1998 0

reported that the army had had to evacuate Woerth and was in full retreat. Oh, what a night! Rochas, knocked out with fatigue, had wrapped his greatcoat round him and was asleep on the ground, not bothering about a shelter, as often happened with him. Maurice and Jean had crawled into the tent where Loubet, Chouteau, Pache and Lapoulle were already huddled together with their heads on their knapsacks. There was room for six so long as you kept your knees bent. At first Loubet had made them all laugh away their hunger by giving Lapoulle to believe that there would be chicken at tomorrow’s issue of rations, but they were too tired and were soon snoring – let the Prussians come. Jean lay still for a moment close against Maurice; although he was dead tired he couldn’t get off to sleep, for what this gent had said was going round and round in his head – the Germans under arms, innumerable and insatiable – and he felt that his companion was not asleep either, but was thinking about the same things. Then Maurice made an impatient movement away from him and Jean realized that he was annoying him. Between the peasant and the intellectual the instinctive hostility, the dislike born of class and education, were like a physical discomfort; yet the former felt a sort of shame at this, an inner unhappiness, and shrank away, trying to escape from the hostile contempt he sensed was there. Although the night was now getting chilly outside, it was so stifling in the tent with all these bodies piled on each other that Maurice, feeling unbearably hot, suddenly jumped up, went out and lay down a few steps away. Jean, feeling wretched, tossed about in a nightmarish half-sleep in which sadness at not being liked mingled with fear of some immense disaster which he thought he could hear galloping out yonder in the unknown.

Hours must have passed, and the whole black, motionless camp seemed crushed beneath the pressure of this limitless, evil darkness laden with something horrible but as yet nameless. Little stirrings could be felt in a lake of blackness, a sudden snore would come from some invisible tent. Or again sounds you didn’t recognize – a snorting horse, a sabre rattling, the movement of some late prowler – all quite ordinary noises which took on menacing overtones. Then all of a sudden, near the cookhouse, a great light flared up. It threw the battle front into strong relief in which you caught a glimpse of rows of stacked arms, polished rifle-barrels over which red reflections passed like trickles of fresh blood, and the dark, stiff figures of sentries loomed up in this sudden fire. Was this the enemy whom the officers had been promising for two days and they had been searching for all the way from Belfort to Mulhouse? Then the flame went out in a great fountain of sparks. It was only the heap of green sticks that Lapoulle had worried at for so long, and which after hours of smouldering had flared up like straw.

Frightened by this bright light Jean also rushed out of the tent and nearly tripped over Maurice who was propped on one elbow, watching. The darkness had already returned blacker than ever, and the two men stayed there stretched out on the bare earth, a few metres apart. The only thing visible in the thick darkness was the farmhouse window over yonder in which the light was still burning, the solitary candle that seemed to mark a vigil over the dead. What could the time be? Perhaps two or three. But the headquarters over there was certainly not asleep. The yapping voice of General Bourgain-Desfeuilles could be heard cursing this sleepless night in which he had only been able to keep going with the help of drinks and cigars. New telegrams kept coming in, things must be going wrong, shadowy dispatch-riders could just be discerned galloping madly about. Running feet could be heard, oaths, a sound like a stifled death-cry, then a terrible silence. Was this the end, then? An icy breath blew over the exhausted and anguished camp.

It was then that Jean and Maurice realized that a tall, thin shadow rushing by was Colonel de Vineuil.