forward. Further down, near the woolen mill, where the Emmane tumbles noisily over the dam, the road was choked with a long line of stranded baggage wagons, while close at hand, at the inn of the Maltese Cross, a constantly increasing crowd of angry soldiers pushed and struggled, and could not obtain so much as a glass of wine.
All this mad hurly-burly was going on at the southern end of the village, which is here separated from the Meuse by a little grove of trees, and where the engineers had that morning stretched a bridge of boats across the river. There was a ferry to the right; the ferryman's house stood by itself, white and staring, amid a rank growth of weeds. Great fires had been built on either bank, which, being replenished from time to time, glared ruddily in the darkness and made the stream and both its shores as light as day. They served to show the immense multitude of men massed there, awaiting a chance to cross, while the footway only permitted the passage of two men abreast, and over the bridge proper the cavalry and artillery were obliged to proceed at a walk, so that the crossing promised to be a protracted operation. It was said that the troops still on the left bank comprised a brigade of the 1st corps, an ammunition train, and the four regiments of cuirassiers belonging to Bonnemain's division, while coming up in hot haste behind them was the 7th corps, over thirty thousand strong, possessed with the belief that the enemy was at their heels and pushing on with feverish eagerness to gain the security of the other shore.
For a while despair reigned. What! they had been marching since morning with nothing to eat, they had summoned up all their energies to escape that deadly trap at Harancourt pass, only in the end to be landed in that slough of despond, with an insurmountable wall staring them in the face! It would be hours, perhaps, before it became the last comer's turn to cross, and everyone knew that even if the Prussians should not be enterprising enough to continue their pursuit in the darkness they would be there with the first glimpse of daylight. Orders came for them to stack muskets, however, and they made their camp on the great range of bare hills which slope downward to the meadows of the Meuse, with the Mouzon road running at their base. To their rear and occupying the level plateau on top of the range the guns of the reserve artillery were arranged in battery, pointed so as to sweep the entrance of the pass should there be necessity for it. And thus commenced another period of agonized, grumbling suspense.
When finally the preparations were all completed the 106th found themselves posted in a field of stubble above the road, in a position that commanded a view of the broad plain. The men had parted regretfully with their arms, casting timorous looks behind them that showed they were apprehensive of a night attack. Their faces were stern and set, and silence reigned, only broken from time to time by some sullen murmur of angry complaint. It was nearly nine o'clock, they had been there two hours, and yet many of them, notwithstanding their terrible fatigue, could not sleep; stretched on the bare ground, they would start and bend their ears to catch the faintest sound that rose in the distance. They had ceased to fight their torturing hunger; they would eat over yonder, on the other bank, when they had passed the river; they would eat grass if nothing else was to be found. The crowd at the bridge, however, seemed to increase rather than diminish; the officers that General Douay had stationed there came back to him every few minutes, always bringing the same unwelcome report, that it would be hours and hours before any relief could be expected. Finally the general determined to go down to the bridge in person, and the men saw him on the bank, bestirring himself and others and hurrying the passage of the troops.
Maurice, seated with Jean against a wall, pointed to the north, as he had done before. 'There is Sedan in the distance. And look! Bazeilles is over yonder-and then comes Douzy, and then Carignan, more to the right. We shall concentrate at Carignan, I feel sure we shall. Ah! there is plenty of room, as you would see if it were daylight!'
And his sweeping gesture embraced the entire valley that lay beneath them, enfolded in shadow. There was sufficient light remaining in the sky that they could distinguish the pale gleam of the river where it ran its course among the dusky meadows. The scattered trees made clumps of denser shade, especially a row of poplars to the left, whose tops were profiled on the horizon like the fantastic ornaments on some old castle gateway. And in the background, behind Sedan, dotted with countless little points of brilliant light, the shadows had mustered, denser and darker, as if all the forests of the Ardennes had collected the inky blackness of their secular oaks and cast it there.
Jean's gaze came back to the bridge of boats beneath them.
'Look there! everything is against us. We shall never get across.'
The fires upon both banks blazed up more brightly just then, and their light was so intense that the whole fearful scene was pictured on the darkness with vivid distinctness. The boats on which the longitudinal girders rested, owing to the weight of the cavalry and artillery that had been crossing uninterruptedly since morning, had settled to such an extent that the floor of the bridge was covered with water. The cuirassiers were passing at the time, two abreast, in a long unbroken file, emerging from the obscurity of the hither shore to be swallowed up in the shadows of the other, and nothing was to be seen of the bridge; they appeared to be marching on the bosom of the ruddy stream, that flashed and danced in the flickering firelight. The horses snorted and hung back, manifesting every indication of terror as they felt the unstable pathway yielding beneath their feet, and the cuirassiers, standing erect in their stirrups and clutching at the reins, poured onward in a steady, unceasing stream, wrapped in their great white mantles, their helmets flashing in the red light of the flames. One might have taken them for some spectral band of knights, with locks of fire, going forth to do battle with the powers of darkness.
Jean's suffering wrested from him a deep-toned exclamation:
'Oh! I am hungry!'
On every side, meantime, the men, notwithstanding the complainings of their empty stomachs, had thrown themselves down to sleep. Their fatigue was so great that it finally got the better of their fears and struck them down upon the bare earth, where they lay on their back, with open mouth and arms outstretched, like logs beneath the moonless sky. The bustle of the camp was stilled, and all along the naked range, from end to end, there reigned a silence as of death.
'Oh! I am hungry; I am so hungry that I could eat dirt!'
Jean, patient as he was and inured to hardship, could not restrain the cry; he had eaten nothing in thirty-six hours, and it was torn from him by sheer stress of physical suffering. Then Maurice, knowing that two or three hours at all events must elapse before their regiment could move to pass the stream, said:
'See here, I have an uncle not far from here-you know, Uncle Fouchard, of whom you have heard me speak. His house is five or six hundred yards from here; I didn't like the idea, but as you are so hungry-The deuce! the old man can't refuse us bread!'
His comrade made no objection and they went off together. Father Fouchard's little farm was situated just at the mouth of Harancourt pass, near the plateau where the artillery was posted. The house was a low structure, surrounded by quite an imposing cluster of dependencies; a barn, a stable, and cow-sheds, while across the road was a disused carriage-house which the old peasant had converted into an abattoir, where he slaughtered with his own hands the cattle which he afterward carried about the country in his wagon to his customers.
Maurice was surprised as he approached the house to see no light.
'Ah, the old miser! he has locked and barred everything tight and fast. Like as not he won't let us in.'
But something that he saw brought him to a standstill. Before the house a dozen soldiers were moving to and fro, hungry plunderers, doubtless, on the prowl in quest of something to eat. First they had called, then had knocked, and now, seeing that the place was dark and deserted, they were hammering at the door with the butts of their muskets in an attempt to force it open. A growling chorus of encouragement greeted them from the outsiders of the circle.
'
All at once the shutter of a window in the garret was thrown back and a tall old man presented himself, bare- headed, wearing the peasant's blouse, with a candle in one hand and a gun in the other. Beneath the thick shock of bristling white hair was a square face, deeply seamed and wrinkled, with a strong nose, large, pale eyes, and stubborn chin.
'You must be robbers, to smash things as you are doing!' he shouted in an angry tone. 'What do you want?'
The soldiers, taken by surprise, drew back a little way.
'We are perishing with hunger; we want something to eat.'
'I have nothing, not a crust. Do you suppose that I keep victuals in my house to fill a hundred thousand mouths? Others were here before you; yes, General Ducrot's men were here this morning, I tell you, and they cleaned me out of everything.'
