g the rumors that had been current
since the preceding day, it was a great surprise to most to see that
instead of continuing their retrograde movement they were leaving Paris
behind them and turning their faces toward the unknown regions of the
East.

At five o'clock in the morning the 7th corps was still unsupplied with
cartridges. For two days the artillerymen had been working like beavers
to unload the _materiel_, horses, and stores that had been streaming
from Metz into the overcrowded station, and it was only at the very last
moment that some cars of cartridges were discovered among the tangled
trains, and that a detail which included Jean among its numbers was
enabled to bring back two hundred and forty thousand on carts that they
had hurriedly requisitioned. Jean distributed the regulation number, one
hundred cartridges to a man, among his squad, just as Gaude, the company
bugler, sounded the order to march.

The 106th was not to pass through Rheims, their orders being to turn the
city and debouch into the Chalons road farther on, but on this occasion
there was the usual failure to regulate the order and time of marching,
so that, the four corps having commenced to move at the same moment,
they collided when they came out upon the roads that they were to
traverse in common and the result was inextricable confusion. Cavalry
and artillery were constantly cutting in among the infantry and bringing
them to a halt; whole brigades were compelled to leave the road and
stand at ordered arms in the plowed fields for more than an hour,
waiting until the way should be cleared. And to make matters worse, they
had hardly left the camp when a terrible storm broke over them, the
rain pelting down in torrents, drenching the men completely and adding
intolerably to the weight of knapsacks and great-coats. Just as the rain
began to hold up, however, the 106th saw a chance to go forward, while
some zouaves in an adjoining field, who were forced to wait yet for
a while, amused themselves by pelting one another with balls of moist
earth, and the consequent condition of their uniforms afforded them much
merriment.

The sun suddenly came shining out again in the clear sky, the warm,
bright sun of an August morning, and with it came returning gayety; the
men were steaming like a wash of linen hung out to dry in the open air:
the moisture evaporated from their clothing in little more time than it
takes to tell it, and when they were