swarming mob that filled the boulevards on that midsummer night of
frenzied madness when he had determined to enlist. The gentle breeze had
become a devastating hurricane; there had been a terrific explosion,
and all the sanguine temper of his nation had manifested itself in his
absolute, enthusiastic confidence, which had vanished utterly at the
very first reverse, before the unreasoning impulse of despair that was
sweeping him away among those vagrant soldiers, vanquished and dispersed
before they had struck a stroke.

"This confounded blunderbuss must weigh a ton, I think," Loubet went on.
"This is fine music to march by!" And alluding to the sum he received as
substitute: "I don't care what people say, but fifteen hundred 'balls'
for a job like this is downright robbery. Just think of the pipes he'll
smoke, sitting by his warm fire, the stingy old miser in whose place I'm
going to get my brains knocked out!"

"As for me," growled Chouteau, "I had finished my time. I was going to
cut the service, and they keep me for their beastly war. Ah! true as I
stand here, I must have been born to bad luck to have got myself into
such a mess. And now the officers are going to let the Prussians knock
us about as they please, and we're dished and done for." He had been
swinging his piece to and fro in his hand; in his discouragement he gave
it a toss and landed it on the other side of the hedge. "Eh! get you
gone for a dirty bit of old iron!"

The musket made two revolutions in the air and fell into a furrow, where
it lay, long and motionless, reminding one somehow of a corpse. Others
soon flew to join it, and presently the field was filled with abandoned
arms, lying in long winrows, a sorrowful spectacle beneath the blazing
sky. It was an epidemic of madness, caused by the hunger that was
gnawing at their stomach, the shoes that galled their feet, their weary
march, the unexpected defeat that had brought the enemy galloping at
their heels. There was nothing more to be accomplished; their leaders
were looking out for themselves, the commissariat did not even feed
them; nothing but weariness and worriment; better to leave the whole
business at once, before it was begun. And what then? why, the musket
might go and keep the knapsack company; in view of the work that was
before them they might at least as well keep their arms free. And all
down the long line of stragglers that stretched almost far as the eye
could reach in the smo