getting there! Leaving at eight o'clock in the evening, we
were delivered at three o'clock of the afternoon of the next day. Two of
the militia had dropped by the way, one who had taken a header from the
top of the car into the river, the other who had broken his head on the
ledge of a bridge. The rest, after having pillaged the hovels and the
gardens, met along the route wherever the train stopped, either yawned,
their lips puffed out with wine, and their eyes swollen, or amused
themselves by throwing from one side of the carriage to the other
branches of shrubs and hencoops which they had stolen.

The disembarking was managed after the same fashion as the departure.
Nothing was ready; neither canteen, nor straw, nor coats, nor arms,
nothing, absolutely nothing. Only tents full of manure and of insects,
just left by the troops off for the frontier. For three days we live at
the mercy of Mourmelon.{3} Eating a sausage one day and drinking a
bowl of cafe-au-lait the next, exploited to the utmost by the natives,
sleeping, no matter how, without straw and without covering. Truly such
a life was not calculated to give us a taste for the calling they had
inflicted on us.

3 A suburb of Chalons.

Once in camp, the companies separated; the laborers took themselves
to the tents of their fellows; the bourgeois did the same. The tent in
which I found myself was not badly managed, for we succeeded in driving
out by argument of wine the two fellows, the native odor of whose feet
was aggravated by a long and happy neglect.

One or two days passed. They made us mount guard with the pickets, we
drank a great deal of eau-de-vie, and the drink-shops of Mourmelon were
full without let, when suddenly Canrobert {4} passed us in review along
the front line of battle. I see him now on his big horse, bent over the
saddle, his hair flying, his waxed mustaches in a ghastly face. A mutiny
was breaking out. Deprived of everything, and hardly convinced by that
marshal that we lacked nothing, we growled in chorus when he talked of
repressing our complaints by force: "Ran, plan, plan, a hundred thousand
men afoot, to Paris, to Paris!"

4 Canrobert, a brave and distinguished veteran, head of
the Sixth Corps of the Army of the Rhine.

Canrobert grew livid, and shouted, planting his horse in the midst of
us. "Hats off to a marshal of France!" Again a howl goes up from the
ranks; then turning bridle, followed in confusion by hi