Tears rose to his eyes at the remembrance of his misdeeds. The brother-in-law, who was also deeply affected, ended the painful scene by turning to Honore Fouchard, the artilleryman.
“The first time I am anywhere in the neighborhood,” he said, “I will run up to Remilly and tell Uncle Fouchard that I saw you and that you are well.”
Uncle Fouchard, a peasant, who owned a bit of land and plied the trade of itinerant butcher, serving his customers from a cart, was a brother of Henriette's and Maurice's mother. He lived at Remilly, in a house perched upon a high hill, about four miles from Sedan.
“Good!” Honore calmly answered; “the father don't worry his head a great deal on my account, but go there all the same if you feel inclined.”
At that moment there was a movement over in the direction of the farmhouse, and they beheld the straggler, the man who had been arrested as a spy, come forth, free, accompanied only by a single officer. He had likely had papers to show, or had trumped up a story of some kind, for they were simply expelling him from the camp. In the darkening twilight, and at the distance they were, they could not make him out distinctly, only a big, square-shouldered fellow with a rough shock of reddish hair. And yet Maurice gave vent to an exclamation of surprise.
“Honore! look there. If one wouldn't swear he was the Prussian—you know, Goliah!”
The name made the artilleryman start as if he had been shot; he strained his blazing eyes to follow the receding shape. Goliah Steinberg, the journeyman butcher, the man who had set him and his father by the ears, who had stolen from him his Silvine; the whole base, dirty, miserable story, from which he had not yet ceased to suffer! He would have run after, would have caught him by the throat and strangled him, but the man had already crossed the line of stacked muskets, was moving off and vanishing in the darkness.
“Oh!” he murmured, “Goliah! no, it can't be he. He is down yonder, fighting on the other side. If I ever come across him—”
He shook his fist with an air of menace at the dusky horizon, at the wide empurpled stretch of eastern sky that stood for Prussia in his eyes. No one spoke; they heard the strains of retreat again, but very distant now, away at the extreme end of the camp, blended and lost among the hum of other indistinguishable sounds.
“Fichtre!” exclaimed Honore, “I shall have the pleasure of sleeping on the soft side of a plank in the guard-house unless I make haste back to roll-call. Good-night—adieu, everybody!”
And grasping Weiss by both his hands and giving them a hearty squeeze, he strode swiftly away toward the slight elevation where the guns of the reserves were parked, without again mentioning his father's name or sending any word to Silvine, whose name lay at the end of his tongue.
The minutes slipped away, and over toward the left, where the 2d brigade lay, a bugle sounded. Another, near at hand, replied, and then a third, in the remote distance, took up the strain. Presently there was a universal blaring, far and near, throughout the camp, whereon Gaude, the bugler of the company, took up his instrument. He was a tall, lank, beardless, melancholy youth, chary of his words, saving his breath for his calls, which he gave conscientiously, with the vigor of a young hurricane.
Forthwith Sergeant Sapin, a ceremonious little man with large vague eyes, stepped forward and began to call the roll. He rattled off the names in a thin, piping voice, while the men, who had come up and ranged themselves in front of him, responded in accents of varying pitch, from the deep rumble of the violoncello to the shrill note of the piccolo. But there came a hitch in the proceedings.
“Lapoulle!” shouted the sergeant, calling the name a second time with increased emphasis.
There was no response, and Jean rushed off to the place where Private Lapoulle, egged on by his comrades, was industriously trying to fan the refractory fuel into a blaze; flat on his stomach before the pile of blackening, spluttering wood, his face resembling an underdone beefsteak, the warrior was now propelling dense clouds of smoke horizontally along the surface of the plain.
“Thunder and ouns! Quit that, will you!” yelled Jean, “and come and answer to your name.”
Lapoulle rose to his feet with a dazed look on his face, then appeared to grasp the situation and yelled: “Present!” in such stentorian tones that Loubet, pretending to be upset by the concussion, sank to the ground in a sitting posture. Pache had finished mending his trousers and answered in a voice that was barely audible, that sounded more like the mumbling of a prayer. Chouteau, not even troubling himself to rise, grunted his answer unconcernedly and turned over on his side.
Lieutenant Rochas, the officer of the guard, was meantime standing a few steps away, motionlessly awaiting the conclusion of the ceremony. When Sergeant Sapin had finished calling the roll and came up to report that all were present, the officer, with a glance at Weiss, who was still conversing with Maurice, growled from under his mustache:
“Yes, and one over. What is that civilian doing here?”
“He has the colonel's pass, Lieutenant,” explained Jean, who had heard the question.
Rochas made no reply; he shrugged his shoulders disapprovingly and resumed his round among the company streets while waiting for taps to sound. Jean, stiff and sore after his day's march, went and sat down a little way from Maurice, whose murmured words fell indistinctly upon his unlistening ear, for he, too, had vague, half formed reflections of his own that were stirring sluggishly in the recesses of his muddy, torpid mind.
Maurice was a believer in war in the abstract; he considered it one of the necessary evils, essential to the very existence of nations. This was nothing more than the logical sequence of his course in embracing those theories of evolution which in those days exercised such a potent influence on our young men of intelligence and education. Is not life itself an unending battle? Does not all nature owe its being to a series of relentless conflicts, the survival of the fittest, the maintenance and renewal of force by unceasing activity; is not death a necessary condition to young and vigorous life? And he remembered the sensation of gladness that had filled his heart when first the thought occurred to him that he might expiate his errors by enlisting and defending his country on the frontier. It might be that France of the plebiscite, while giving itself over to the Emperor, had not desired war; he himself, only a week previously, had declared it to be a culpable and idiotic measure. There were long discussions concerning the right of a German prince to occupy the throne of Spain; as the question gradually became more and more intricate and muddled it seemed as if everyone must be wrong, no one right; so that it was impossible to tell from which side the provocation came, and the only part of the entire business that was clear to the eyes of all was the inevitable, the fatal law which at a given moment hurls nation against nation. Then Paris was convulsed from center to circumference; he remembered that burning summer's night, the tossing, struggling human tide that filled the boulevards, the bands of men brandishing torches before the Hotel de Ville, and yelling: “On to Berlin! on to Berlin!” and he seemed to hear the strains of the Marseillaise, sung by a beautiful, stately woman with the face of a queen, wrapped in the folds of a flag, from her elevation on the box of a coach. Was it all a lie, was it true that the heart of Paris had not beaten then? And then, as was always the case with him, that condition of nervous excitation had been succeeded by long hours of doubt and disgust; there were all the small annoyances of the soldier's life; his arrival at the barracks, his examination by the adjutant, the fitting of his uniform by the gruff sergeant, the malodorous bedroom with its fetid air and filthy floor, the horseplay and coarse language of his new comrades, the merciless drill that stiffened his limbs and benumbed his brain. In a week's time, however, he had conquered his first squeamishness, and from that time forth was comparatively contented with his lot; and when the regiment was at last ordered forward to Belfort the fever of enthusiasm had again taken possession of him.
For the first few days after they took the field Maurice was convinced that their success was absolutely certain. The Emperor's plan appeared to him perfectly clear: he would advance four hundred thousand men to the left bank