Only half the regiment was to halt at Bar-le-Duc.  But six batteries, thirty-six guns, their men, horses, apparatus, forges, and waggons occupying and advancing in streams over a valley are a wonderful sight.  Clouds of dust and the noise of the metal woke the silent places of the Meuse, and sometimes river birds would rise and wheel in the air as the clamour neared them.  Far off a lonely battery was coming down the western slope to join the throng in its order, and for some reason their two trumpets were still playing the march and lending to this great display the unity of music.  We dismounted and watched from the turf of the roadside a pageant which the accident of an ordered and servile life afforded us; for it is true of armies that the compensation of their drudgery and miserable subjection is the continual opportunity of these large emotions; and not only by their vastness and arrangement, but by the very fact that they merge us into themselves, do armies widen the spirit of a man and give it communion with the majesty of great numbers.  One becomes a part of many men.

The seventh battery, with which we had little to do (for in quarters they belonged to the furthest corner from our own), first came by and passed us, with that interminable repetition of similar things which is the note of a force on the march, and makes it seem like a river flowing.  We recognised it by the figure of one Chevalier, a major attached to them.  He was an absent-minded man of whom many stories were told—­kindly, with a round face; and he wore eyeglasses, either for the distinction they afforded or because he was short of sight.  The seventh passed us, and their forge and waggon ended the long train.  A regulation space between them and the next allowed the dust to lie a little, and then the ninth came by; we knew them well, because in quarters they were our neighbours.  At their head was their captain, whose name was Levy.  He was a Jew, small, very sharp-featured, and a man who worked astonishingly hard.  He was very popular with his men, and his battery was happy and boasted.  He cared especially for their food, and would go into their kitchen daily to taste the soup.  He was also a silent man.  He sat his horse badly, bent and crouched, but his eyes were very keen; and he again was a character of whom the men talked and told stories.  I believe he was something of a mathematician; but we knew little of such things where our superiors were concerned.

As the ninth battery passed us we were given the order to mount, and knew that our place came next.  The long-drawn Ha-a-lte! and the lifted swords down the road contained for a while the batteries that were to follow, and we filed out of our side road into the long gap they had left us.  Then, taking up the trot, ourselves, we heard the order passing down infinitely till it was lost in the length of the road; the trumpets galloped past us and formed at the head of the column; a much more triumphant noise of brass than we had yet heard heralded us with a kind of insolence, and the whole train with its two miles and more of noisy power gloried into the old town of Bar-le-Duc, to the great joy of its young men and women at the windows, to the annoyance of the householders, to the stupefaction of the old, and doubtless to the ultimate advantage of the Republic.