A thousand men, splendidly mounted and armed, rode through the forest.  The moonlight fell on von Boehlen’s face and showed it set and grim.  John felt that he was bound to recognize in him a stern and resolute man, carrying out his own conceptions of duty.  Nor had von Boehlen been discourteous to him, although he might have felt cause for much resentment.  The Prussian glanced at him as he passed, but said nothing.  Soon he and his horsemen passed out of sight in the dusk.

John, wondering how late it might be, suddenly remembered that he had a watch and found it was eleven o’clock.

“An hour of midnight,” he said to Fleury.

Most all the French stretched upon the ground were now in deep slumber, wounded and unwounded alike.  The sounds of cannon fire were sinking away, but they did not die wholly.  The faint thunder of the distant guns never ceased to come.  But the campfire, where he knew the German generals slept or planned, went out, and darkness trailed its length over all this land which by night had become a wilderness.

John was able to trace dimly the sleeping figures of Germans in the dusk, sunk down upon the ground and buried in the sleep or stupor of exhaustion.  As they lay near him so they lay in the same way in hundreds of thousands along the vast line.  Men and horses, strained to their last nerve and muscle, were too tired to move.  It seemed as if more than a million men lay dead in the fields and woods of Northeastern France.

John, who had been wide awake, suddenly dropped on the ground where the others were stretched.  He collapsed all in a moment, as if every drop of blood had been drained suddenly from his body.  Keyed high throughout the day, his whole system now gave way before the accumulated impact of events so tremendous.  The silence save for the distant moaning that succeeded the roar of a million men or more in battle was like a powerful drug, and he slept like one dead, never moving hand or foot.

He was roused shortly before morning by some one who shook him gently but persistently, and at last he sat up, looking around in the dim light for the person who had dragged him back from peace to a battle-mad world.  He saw an unkempt, bearded man in a French uniform, one sleeve stained with blood, and he recognized Weber, the Alsatian.

“Why, Weber!” he exclaimed, “they’ve got you, too!  This is bad!  They may consider you, an Alsatian, a traitor, and execute you at once!”

Weber smiled in rather melancholy fashion, and said in a low tone: 

“It’s bad enough to be captured, but I won’t be shot Nobody here knows that I’m an Alsatian, and consequently they will think I’m a Frenchman.  If you call me anything, call me Fernand, which is my first name, but which they will take for the last.”

“All right, Fernand.  I’ll practice on it now, so I’ll make no slip.  How did you happen to be taken?”