at which they
quenched their thirst with great satisfaction.

But when Jean proposed that they should spend the remainder of the
afternoon there, Maurice negatived the motion with a great display of
violence.

"No, no; not here! I should be ill if I were to have that scene before
my eyes for any length of time--" With a hand that trembled he pointed
to the remote horizon, the hill of Hattoy, the plateaux of Floing
and Illy, the wood of la Garenne, those abhorred, detested fields of
slaughter and defeat. "While you were away just now I was obliged to
turn my back on it, else I should have broken out and howled with
rage. Yes, I should have howled like a dog tormented by boys--you can't
imagine how it hurts me; it drives me crazy!"

Jean looked at him in surprise; he could not understand that pride,
sensitive as a raw sore, that made defeat so bitter to him; he was
alarmed to behold in his eyes that wandering, flighty look that he had
seen there before. He affected to treat the matter lightly.

"Good! we'll seek another country; that's easy enough to do."

Then they wandered as long as daylight lasted, wherever the paths they
took conducted them. They visited the level portion of the peninsula
in the hope of finding more potatoes there, but the artillerymen had
obtained a plow and turned up the ground, and not a single potato had
escaped their sharp eyes. They retraced their steps, and again they
passed through throngs of listless, glassy-eyed, starving soldiers,
strewing the ground with their debilitated forms, falling by hundreds
in the bright sunshine from sheer exhaustion. They were themselves many
times overcome by fatigue and forced to sit down and rest; then their
deep-seated sensation of suffering would bring them to their feet again
and they would recommence their wandering, like animals impelled by
instinct to move on perpetually in quest of pasturage. It seemed to
them to last for years, and yet the moments sped by rapidly. In the more
inland region, over Donchery way, they received a fright from the horses
and sought the protection of a wall, where they remained a long time,
too exhausted to rise, watching with vague, lack-luster eyes the wild
course of the crazed beasts as they raced athwart the red western sky
where the sun was sinking.

As Maurice had foreseen, the thousands of horses that shared the
captivity of the army, and for which it was impossible to provide
forage, constituted a peril that gr