At this moment we receive collectively a tremendous bump.  “Hey, look out!  Out of the way!” cries a man, by way of apology, who is being assisted by several others to push a cart towards the wagons.  The work is hard, for the ground slopes up, and so soon as they cease to buttress themselves against the cart and adhere to the wheels, it slips back.  The sullen men crush themselves against it in the depth of the gloom, grinding their teeth and growling, as though they fell upon some monster.

Barque, all the while rubbing his back, questions one of the frantic gang:  “Think you’re going to do it, old duckfoot?”

“Nom de Dieu!” roars he, engrossed in his job, “mind these setts!  You’re going to wreck the show!” With a sudden movement he jostles Barque again, and this time turns round on him:  “What are you doing there, dung-guts, numskull?”

“Non, it can’t be that you’re drunk?” Barque retorts. “’What am I doing here?’ It’s good, that!  Tell me, you lousy gang, wouldn’t you like to do it too!”

“Out of the way!” cries a new voice, which precedes some men doubled up under burdens incongruous, but apparently overwhelming.

One can no longer remain anywhere.  Everywhere we are in the way.  We go forward, we scatter, we retire in the turmoil.

“In addition, I tell you,” continues Cocon, tranquil as a scientist, “there are the Divisions, each organized pretty much like an Army Corps—­”

“Oui, we know it; miss the deal!”

“He makes a fine to-do about it all, that mountebank in the horse-box on casters.  What a mother-in-law he’d make!”

“I’ll bet that’s the Major’s wrong-headed horse, the one that the vet said was a calf in process of becoming a cow.”

“It’s well organized, all the same, all that, no doubt about it,” says Lamuse admiringly, forced back by a wave of artillerymen carrying boxes.

“That’s true,” Marthereau admits; “to get all this lot on the way, you’ve not got to be a lot of turnip-heads nor a lot of custards—­Bon Dieu, look where you’re putting your damned boots, you black-livered beast!”

“Talk about a flitting!  When I went to live at Marcoussis with my family, there was less fuss than this.  But then I’m not built that way myself.”

We are silent; and then we hear Cocon saying, “For the whole French Army that holds the lines to go by—­I’m not speaking of those who are fixed up at the rear, where there are twice as many men again, and services like the ambulance that cost nine million francs and can clear you seven thousand cases a day—­to see them go by in trains of sixty coaches each, following each other without stopping, at intervals of a quarter of an hour, it would take forty days and forty nights.”

“Ah!” they say.  It is too much effort for their imagination; they lose interest and sicken of the magnitude of these figures.  They yawn, and with watering eyes they follow, in the confusion of haste and shouts and smoke, of roars and gleams and flashes, the terrible line of the armored train that moves in the distance, with fire in the sky behind it.