tray their identity, quietly took
their place in the ranks and soon had the satisfaction of crossing the
bridge and leaving the chain of sentries behind them. The same idea must
have presented itself to Loubet and Chouteau, for they caught sight of
them somewhat further to the rear, peering anxiously about them with the
guilty eyes of murderers.

Ah, what comfort there was for them in that first blissful moment!
Outside their prison the sunlight was brighter, the air more bracing; it
was like a resurrection, a bright renewal of all their hopes. Whatever
evil fortune might have in store for them, they dreaded it not; they
snapped their fingers at it in their delight at having seen the last of
the horrors of Camp Misery.

III.

That morning Maurice and Jean listened for the last time to the gay,
ringing notes of the French bugles, and now they were on their way to
Pont-a-Mousson, marching in the ranks of the convoy of prisoners, which
was guarded front and rear by platoons of Prussian infantry, while
a file of men with fixed bayonets flanked the column on either side.
Whenever they came to a German post they heard only the lugubrious,
ear-piercing strains of the Prussian trumpets.

Maurice was glad to observe that the column took the left-hand road and
would pass through Sedan; perhaps he would have an opportunity of seeing
his sister Henriette. All the pleasure, however, that he had experienced
at his release from that foul cesspool where he had spent nine days of
agony was dashed to the ground and destroyed during the three-mile march
from the peninsula of Iges to the city. It was but another form of his
old distress to behold that array of prisoners, shuffling timorously
through the dust of the road, like a flock of sheep with the dog at
their heels. There is no spectacle in all the world more pitiful than
that of a column of vanquished troops being marched off into captivity
under guard of their conquerors, without arms, their empty hands hanging
idly at their sides; and these men, clad in rags and tatters, besmeared
with the filth in which they had lain for more than a week, gaunt and
wasted after their long fast, were more like vagabonds than soldiers;
they resembled loathsome, horribly dirty tramps, whom the gendarmes
would have picked up along the highways and consigned to the lockup.
As they passed through the Faubourg of Torcy, where men paused on the
sidewalks and women came to their doors to regard t