k 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 a