way were undistinguishable; his knowledge of the country availed him
not; he could not even have indicated in which direction lay Sedan. Just
then, however, the boom of cannon, somewhere in the distance, fell upon
his ear. "Ah! I remember; the battle is for to-day; they are fighting.
So much the better; there will be an end to our suspense!"

He heard other voices around him expressing the same idea. There was a
feeling of stern satisfaction that at last their long nightmare was to
be dispelled, that at last they were to have a sight of those Prussians
whom they had come out to look for, and before whom they had been
retreating so many weary days; that they were to be given a chance to
try a shot at them, and lighten the load of cartridges that had been
tugging at their belts so long, with never an opportunity to burn a
single one of them. Everyone felt that, this time, the battle would not,
could not be avoided.

But the guns began to thunder more loudly down at Bazeilles, and Jean
bent his ear to listen.

"Where is the firing?"

"Faith," replied Maurice, "it seems to me to be over toward the Meuse;
but I'll be hanged if I know where we are."

"Look here, youngster," said the corporal, "you are going to stick close
by me to-day, for unless a man has his wits about him, don't you see, he
is likely to get in trouble. Now, I have been there before, and can keep
an eye out for both of us."

The others of the squad, meantime, were growling angrily because they
had nothing with which to warm their stomachs. There was no possibility
of kindling fires without dry wood in such weather as prevailed then,
and so, at the very moment when they were about to go into battle, the
inner man put in his claim for recognition, and would not be denied.
Hunger is not conducive to heroism; to those poor fellows eating was
the great, the momentous question of life; how lovingly they watched the
boiling pot on those red-letter days when the soup was rich and thick;
how like children or savages they were in their wrath when rations were
not forthcoming!

"No eat, no fight!" declared Chouteau. "I'll be blowed if I am going to
risk my skin to-day!"

The radical was cropping out again in the great hulking house-painter,
the orator of Belleville, the pothouse politician, who drowned what
few correct ideas he picked up here and there in a nauseous mixture of
ineffable folly and falsehood.

"Besides," he went on, "what good was there in ma