“Will you take up your knapsacks! if you don’t I will report you.”

It was as if Maurice had been lashed with a whip across the face.  Report them! that brute of a peasant would report those poor devils for easing their aching shoulders!  And looking Jean defiantly in the face, he, too, in an impulse of blind rage, slipped the buckles and let his knapsack fall to the road.

“Very well,” said the other in his quiet way, knowing that resistance would be of no avail, “we will settle accounts to-night.”

Maurice’s feet hurt him abominably; the big, stiff shoes, to which he was not accustomed, had chafed the flesh until the blood came.  He was not strong; his spinal column felt as if it were one long raw sore, although the knapsack that had caused the suffering was no longer there, and the weight of his piece, which he kept shifting from one shoulder to the other, seemed as if it would drive all the breath from his body.  Great as his physical distress was, however, his moral agony was greater still, for he was in the depths of one of those fits of despair to which he was subject.  At Paris the sum of his wrongdoing had been merely the foolish outbreaks of “the other man,” as he put it, of his weak, boyish nature, capable of more serious delinquency should he be subjected to temptation, but now, in this retreat that was so like a rout, in which he was dragging himself along with weary steps beneath a blazing sun, he felt all hope and courage vanishing from his heart, he was but a beast in that belated, straggling herd that filled the roads and fields.  It was the reaction after the terrible disasters at Wissembourg and Froeschwiller, the echo of the thunder-clap that had burst in the remote distance, leagues and leagues away, rattling at the heels of those panic-stricken men who were flying before they had ever seen an enemy.  What was there to hope for now?  Was it not all ended?  They were beaten; all that was left them was to lie down and die.

“It makes no difference,” shouted Loubet, with the blague of a child of the Halles, “but this is not the Berlin road we are traveling, all the same.”

To Berlin!  To Berlin!  The cry rang in Maurice’s ears, the yell of the swarming mob that filled the boulevards on that midsummer night of frenzied madness when he had determined to enlist.  The gentle breeze had become a devastating hurricane; there had been a terrific explosion, and all the sanguine temper of his nation had manifested itself in his absolute, enthusiastic confidence, which had vanished utterly at the very first reverse, before the unreasoning impulse of despair that was sweeping him away among those vagrant soldiers, vanquished and dispersed before they had struck a stroke.

“This confounded blunderbuss must weigh a ton, I think,” Loubet went on.  “This is fine music to march by!” And alluding to the sum he received as substitute:  “I don’t care what people say, but fifteen hundred ‘balls’ for a job like this is downright robbery.  Just think of the pipes he’ll smoke, sitting by his warm fire, the stingy old miser in whose place I’m going to get my brains knocked out!”