go no further; the trees would
afford him some protection in case it came on to rain again.

The strangeness of his situation, however, and the thought of his vast
prison house, open to the winds of heaven, would not let him sleep. It
had been an extremely clever move on the part of the Prussians to select
that place of confinement for the eighty thousand men who constituted
the remnant of the army of Chalons. The peninsula was approximately
three miles long by one wide, affording abundant space for the broken
fragments of the vanquished host, and Maurice could not fail to observe
that it was surrounded on every side by water, the bend of the Meuse
encircling it on the north, east and west, while on the south, at the
base, connecting the two arms of the loop at the point where they drew
together most closely, was the canal. Here alone was an outlet, the
bridge, that was defended by two guns; wherefore it may be seen that the
guarding of the camp was a comparatively easy task, notwithstanding its
great extent. He had already taken note of the chain of sentries on the
farther bank, a soldier being stationed by the waterside at every fifty
paces, with orders to fire on any man who should attempt to escape by
swimming. In the rear the different posts were connected by patrols of
uhlans, while further in the distance, scattered over the broad fields,
were the dark lines of the Prussian regiments; a threefold living,
moving wall, immuring the captive army.

Maurice, in his sleeplessness, lay gazing with wide-open eyes into the
blackness of the night, illuminated here and there by the smoldering
watch-fires; the motionless forms of the sentinels were dimly visible
beyond the pale ribbon of the Meuse. Erect they stood, duskier spots
against the dusky shadows, beneath the faint light of the twinkling
stars, and at regular intervals their guttural call came to his ears, a
menacing watch-cry that was drowned in the hoarse murmur of the river in
the distance. At sound of those unmelodious phrases in a foreign tongue,
rising on the still air of a starlit night in the sunny land of France,
the vision of the past again rose before him: all that he had beheld in
memory an hour before, the plateau of Illy cumbered still with dead, the
accursed country round about Sedan that had been the scene of such dire
disaster; and resting on the ground in that cool, damp corner of a wood,
his head pillowed on a root, he again yielded to the feelin