His tears choked further utterance, the words came from his lips unintelligible, and the three shadows vanished, swallowed up in the obscurity.

Maurice rose to his feet; a shudder ran through his frame.

“Good God!” he stammeringly exclaimed.

And he could think of nothing else to say, while Jean, in whose bones the very marrow seemed to be congealing, murmured in his resigned manner: 

“Ah, worse luck!  The gentleman, that relative of yours, was right all the same in saying that they are stronger than we.”

Maurice was beside himself, could have strangled him.  The Prussians stronger than the French!  The thought made his blood boil.  The peasant calmly and stubbornly added: 

“That don’t matter, mind you.  A man don’t give up whipped at the first knock-down he gets.  We shall have to keep hammering away at them all the same.”

But a tall figure arose before them.  They recognized Rochas, still wrapped in his long mantle, whom the fugitive sounds about him, or it may have been the intuition of disaster, had awakened from his uneasy slumber.  He questioned them, insisted on knowing all.  When he was finally brought, with much difficulty, to see how matters stood, stupor, immense and profound, filled his boyish, inexpressive eyes.  More than ten times in succession he repeated: 

“Beaten!  How beaten?  Why beaten?”

And that was the calamity that had lain hidden in the blackness of that night of agony.  And now the pale dawn was appearing at the portals of the east, heralding a day heavy with bitterest sorrow and striking white upon the silent tents, in one of which began to be visible the ashy faces of Loubet and Lapoulle, of Chouteau and of Pache, who were snoring still with wide-open mouths.  Forth from the thin mists that were slowly creeping upward from the river off yonder in the distance came the new day, bringing with it mourning and affliction.

II.

About eight o’clock the sun dispersed the heavy clouds, and the broad, fertile plain about Mulhausen lay basking in the warm, bright light of a perfect August Sunday.  From the camp, now awake and bustling with life, could be heard the bells of the neighboring parishes, pealing merrily in the limpid air.  The cheerful Sunday following so close on ruin and defeat had its own gayety, its sky was as serene as on a holiday.

Gaude suddenly took his bugle and gave the call that announced the distribution of rations, whereat Loubet appeared astonished.  What was it?  What did it mean?  Were they going to give out chickens, as he had promised Lapoulle the night before?  He had been born in the Halles, in the Rue de la Cossonerie, was the unacknowledged son of a small huckster, had enlisted “for the money there was in it,” as he said, after having been a sort of Jack-of-all-trades, and was now the gourmand, the epicure of the company, continually nosing after something good to eat.