l the car kept rolling onward with its load of human freight,
filled with reeking smoke of pipes and emanations of the crowded men,
belching its ribald songs and drunken shouts among the expectant throngs
of the stations through which it passed, among the rows of white-faced
peasants who lined the iron-way. On the 20th of August they were at the
Pantin Station in Paris, and that same evening boarded another train
which landed them next day at Rheims _en route_ for the camp at Chalons.

III.

Maurice was greatly surprised when the 106th, leaving the cars at
Rheims, received orders to go into camp there. So they were not to go to
Chalons, then, and unite with the army there? And when, two hours later,
his regiment had stacked muskets a league or so from the city over in
the direction of Courcelles, in the broad plain that lies along the
canal between the Aisne and Marne, his astonishment was greater still
to learn that the entire army of Chalons had been falling back all that
morning and was about to bivouac at that place. From one extremity of
the horizon to the other, as far as Saint Thierry and Menvillette, even
beyond the Laon road, the tents were going up, and when it should
be night the fires of four army-corps would be blazing there. It was
evident that the plan now was to go and take a position under the walls
of Paris and there await the Prussians; and it was fortunate that that
plan had received the approbation of the government, for was it not the
wisest thing they could do?

Maurice devoted the afternoon of the 21st to strolling about the camp in
search of news. The greatest freedom prevailed; discipline appeared
to have been relaxed still further, the men went and came at their own
sweet will. He found no obstacle in the way of his return to the city,
where he desired to cash a money-order for a hundred francs that his
sister Henriette had sent him. While in a cafe he heard a sergeant
telling of the disaffection that existed in the eighteen battalions of
the garde mobile of the Seine, which had just been sent back to Paris;
the 6th battalion had been near killing their officers. Not a day passed
at the camp that the generals were not insulted, and since Froeschwiller
the soldiers had ceased to give Marshal MacMahon the military salute.
The cafe resounded with the sound of voices in excited conversation;
a violent dispute arose between two sedate burghers in respect to the
number of men that MacMahon w