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By Root 2162 0

troop movements. On the following night the 115th was one of the first to cross the river, and by ten, under a withering fire, Maurice reached the village of Champigny. He was half crazy, his rifle burned his hands in spite of the intense cold. His one desire since he had been advancing was to go straight ahead like this, without stopping, until the link-up had been made with their comrades from the country over there. But outside Champigny and Bry the army had come up against the walls of the estates of Coeuilly and Villiers, walls half a kilometre long, which the Prussians had turned into impregnable fortresses. That was the breaker on which all courage dashed itself to pieces. From that moment there was nothing left but hesitation and withdrawal; the third corps had been held up, the first and second, already immobilized, defended Champigny for two days but had to abandon it during the night of 2 December after their fruitless victory. That night the whole army came back and camped under the trees of the Bois de Vincennes, which were white with frost, and there Maurice, his feet dead with cold, and his face pressed to the frozen ground, wept.

What dreary, melancholy days after the fiasco of that immense effort! The grand sortie that had been in preparation for so long, the irresistible thrust that was to deliver Paris, had petered out, and three days later a letter from General von Moltke brought the news that the army of the Loire had been defeated and had once again abandoned Orleans. The ring was tightening still more and could not now be broken. But Paris, in a fever of despair, seemed to find new strength to resist. Threats of famine were beginning. Meat had been rationed since mid-October. By December there was not one animal left out of the huge herds of cattle and flocks of sheep that had been turned loose in the Bois de Boulogne and had galloped round in a continual cloud of dust, and they had begun slaughtering horses. Stocks of flour and corn, and subsequent requisitions, were to supply bread for four months. When flour had run out mills had had to be fitted up in the railway stations. Fuel also was running low, and was being reserved for milling grain, baking bread or making weapons. Paris, with no gas, lit by a few oil-lamps, Paris shivering under its covering of ice, Paris, with its rationed black bread and horsemeat, still went on hoping and talked of Faidherbe in the north, Chanzy on the Loire, Bourbaki in the east, as though some miracle were going to bring them victorious beneath her walls. The long queues waiting in the snow in front of bakers’ and butchers’ shops still sometimes cracked jokes at the news of imaginary great victories. After the consternation of each defeat illusion was born again, tenacious, burning ever brighter in this mob drugged with suffering and hunger. On the Place du Château d’Eau a soldier who had spoken of surrender had almost been lynched by passers-by. While the army, totally discouraged and seeing the end coming, was suing for peace, the civilians were demanding another mass sortie, a sortie like a flood, with the whole population, women and children, hurling themselves at the Prussians like a river in spate, carrying all before it. Maurice cut himself off from his comrades and developed a growing hatred for his job as a soldier which kept him in the shelter of the Mont-Valérien, idle and useless. And so he found pretexts and escaped as soon as he could to get into Paris, where his heart was. He only felt at peace in the heart of the crowd, wanting to force himself to hope, like them. He often went to watch the balloons go up every other day from the Gare du Nord, taking carrier pigeons and dispatches. The balloons rose and disappeared into the dull wintry sky, and hearts ached with distress when the wind blew them towards Germany. Many must have come to grief. He himself had written twice to his sister Henriette without knowing whether she had his letters. The memory of his sister and of Jean was so remote, away in that great world from which nothing now came, that he