“As for me,” growled Chouteau, “I had finished my time.  I was going to cut the service, and they keep me for their beastly war.  Ah! true as I stand here, I must have been born to bad luck to have got myself into such a mess.  And now the officers are going to let the Prussians knock us about as they please, and we’re dished and done for.”  He had been swinging his piece to and fro in his hand; in his discouragement he gave it a toss and landed it on the other side of the hedge.  “Eh! get you gone for a dirty bit of old iron!”

The musket made two revolutions in the air and fell into a furrow, where it lay, long and motionless, reminding one somehow of a corpse.  Others soon flew to join it, and presently the field was filled with abandoned arms, lying in long winrows, a sorrowful spectacle beneath the blazing sky.  It was an epidemic of madness, caused by the hunger that was gnawing at their stomach, the shoes that galled their feet, their weary march, the unexpected defeat that had brought the enemy galloping at their heels.  There was nothing more to be accomplished; their leaders were looking out for themselves, the commissariat did not even feed them; nothing but weariness and worriment; better to leave the whole business at once, before it was begun.  And what then? why, the musket might go and keep the knapsack company; in view of the work that was before them they might at least as well keep their arms free.  And all down the long line of stragglers that stretched almost far as the eye could reach in the smooth and fertile country the muskets flew through the air to the accompaniment of jeers and laughter such as would have befitted the inmates of a lunatic asylum out for a holiday.

Loubet, before parting with his, gave it a twirl as a drum-major does his cane.  Lapoulle, observing what all his comrades were doing, must have supposed the performance to be some recent innovation in the manual, and followed suit, while Pache, in the confused idea of duty that he owed to his religious education, refused to do as the rest were doing and was loaded with obloquy by Chouteau, who called him a priest’s whelp.

“Look at the sniveling papist!  And all because his old peasant of a mother used to make him swallow the holy wafer every Sunday in the village church down there!  Be off with you and go serve mass; a man who won’t stick with his comrades when they are right is a poor-spirited cur.”

Maurice toiled along dejectedly in silence, bowing his head beneath the blazing sun.  At every step he took he seemed to be advancing deeper into a horrid, phantom-haunted nightmare; it was as if he saw a yawning, gaping gulf before him toward which he was inevitably tending; it meant that he was suffering himself to be degraded to the level of the miserable beings by whom he was surrounded, that he was prostituting his talents and his position as a man of education.

“Hold!” he said abruptly to Chouteau, “what you say is right; there is truth in it.”