f course I am not in position to
say what passed between them, but I am told by all the officers that
there is to be no more retreating, and the advance to the Meuse is to be
resumed at once. We have been requisitioning all the ovens in the city
for the 1st corps, which will come up to-morrow morning and take the
place of the 12th, whose artillery you see at this moment starting for
la Besace. The matter is decided for good this time; you will smell
powder before you are much older."

He ceased. He also was gazing at the lighted window over in the notary's
house. Then he went on in a low voice, as if talking to himself, with an
expression on his face of reflective curiosity:

"I wonder what they had to say to each other? It strikes one as a rather
peculiar proceeding, all the same, to run away from a threatened danger
at six in the evening, and at midnight, when nothing has occurred to
alter the situation, to rush headlong into the very self-same danger."

Below them in the street Maurice still heard the gun-carriages rumbling
and rattling over the stones of the little sleeping city, that ceaseless
tramp of horse and man, that uninterrupted tide of humanity, pouring
onward toward the Meuse, toward the unknown, terrible fate that the
morrow had in store for them. And still upon the mean, cheap curtains of
that bourgeois dwelling he beheld the shadow of the Emperor passing and
repassing at regular intervals, the restless activity of the sick man,
to whom his cares made sleep impossible, whose sole repose was motion,
in whose ears was ever ringing that tramp of horses and men whom he was
suffering to be sent forward to their death. A few brief hours, then,
had sufficed; the slaughter was decided on; it was to be. What, indeed,
could they have found to say to each other, that Emperor and that
marshal, conscious, both of them, of the inevitable disaster that
lay before them? Assured as they were at night of defeat, from their
knowledge of the wretched condition the army would be in when the time
should come for it to meet the enemy, how, knowing as they did that the
peril was hourly becoming greater, could they have changed their mind in
the morning? Certain it was that General de Palikao's plan of a swift,
bold dash on Montmedy, which seemed hazardous on the 23d and was,
perhaps, still not impracticable on the 25th, if conducted with veteran
troops and a leader of ability, would on the 27th be an act of sheer
madness amid