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By Root 2046 0

that everything was altered once again. They were not now going to fall back on Paris but march to Verdun to link up with Bazaine. There was a rumour that a dispatch had come from him during the day indicating that he was putting into effect his movement of retreat; and then Maurice remembered Prosper and the officer who had come from Monthois, it might well have been to bring a copy of that dispatch. So, thanks to the continual vacillation of Marshal MacMahon, it was the Empress-Regent and the council of ministers who were having their way, in their fear of seeing the Emperor return to Paris and their obstinate determination to drive the army forward at all costs in order to make a supreme attempt to salvage the dynasty. And the wretched Emperor, this poor man who no longer had a job in his own empire, was to be carried round like some useless clutter in the baggage of his troops, condemned to drag after him the irony of his imperial establishment, his lifeguards, coaches, horses, cooks, vanloads of silver utensils and champagne, all the pomp of his robe of state, embroidered with imperial bees, trailing the roads of defeat in the blood and mire.

Midnight came and Maurice was still not asleep. A feverish dozing with nightmare dreams kept him tossing and turning in his tent. In the end he got up and went out, and was relieved to be on his feet and breathing the cool air, feeling the wind lash his face. The sky was now overcast with thick clouds and the night was very dark, an endless waste of shadows lit only occasionally by the dying fires of the colour-lines, like stars. Yet in this black peace, heavy with silence, you could sense the steady breathing of the hundred thousand men lying there. Then Maurice’s distress melted away and there came upon him a feeling of brotherhood, full of indulgent affection for all these living, sleeping men, thousands of whom would soon sleep the sleep of death. They were a decent lot of chaps really. Not very well disciplined, and they stole and drank. But how much they were already going through, and what an excuse they had in the general break-up of their country! The glorious veterans of Sebastopol and Solferino were already only a small minority mixed in with troops who were too young and incapable of a long resistance. These four army corps, hastily bodged together, with no firm links between them, were the army of desperation, the scapegoats sent to the sacrifice in an effort to avert the wrath of destiny. That army was about to climb its Calvary to the very end and redeem the sins of all with the red stream of its blood and find its greatness in the very horror of disaster.

It was then, in that expectant darkness, that Maurice became aware of a great duty. He ceased entertaining vainglorious hopes of winning fabulous victories. This march to Verdun was a march to death, and he accepted it with a cheerful, firm resignation, since one has to die anyway.

4

ON 23 August, a Tuesday, at six in the morning, camp was struck and a hundred thousand men of the army of Châlons were on the move and soon flowing in an immense stream, a river of men momentarily spreading out into a lake and then resuming its course. In spite of yesterday’s rumours it came as a great surprise to many of them that instead of continuing the retreat they were turning their backs on Paris and going somewhere eastwards into the unknown.

By five in the morning the 7th corps still had no ammunition. For the past two days the artillerymen had half killed themselves unloading the horses and supplies in the goods yard cluttered with material coming in from Metz. And it was only at the last minute that some trucks loaded with cartridges were discovered in the inextricable confusion of trains, and a fatigue party, including Jean, managed to shift two hundred and forty thousand of them in hastily requisitioned carts. Jean issued the regulation hundred rounds to each man in his squad at the very moment when the bugler Gaude sounded the order to march.

The 106th was not to go through Rheims itself, the order being to