dropped his burden except Maurice.

"Take up your knapsacks unless you want to have me put under arrest!"

But the men, although they did not mutiny as yet, were silent and looked
ugly; they kept advancing along the narrow road, pushing the corporal
before them.

"Will you take up your knapsacks! if you don't I will report you."

It was as if Maurice had been lashed with a whip across the face. Report
them! that brute of a peasant would report those poor devils for easing
their aching shoulders! And looking Jean defiantly in the face, he, too,
in an impulse of blind rage, slipped the buckles and let his knapsack
fall to the road.

"Very well," said the other in his quiet way, knowing that resistance
would be of no avail, "we will settle accounts to-night."

Maurice's feet hurt him abominably; the big, stiff shoes, to which he
was not accustomed, had chafed the flesh until the blood came. He was
not strong; his spinal column felt as if it were one long raw sore,
although the knapsack that had caused the suffering was no longer there,
and the weight of his piece, which he kept shifting from one shoulder
to the other, seemed as if it would drive all the breath from his body.
Great as his physical distress was, however, his moral agony was greater
still, for he was in the depths of one of those fits of despair to which
he was subject. At Paris the sum of his wrongdoing had been merely the
foolish outbreaks of "the other man," as he put it, of his weak, boyish
nature, capable of more serious delinquency should he be subjected to
temptation, but now, in this retreat that was so like a rout, in which
he was dragging himself along with weary steps beneath a blazing sun, he
felt all hope and courage vanishing from his heart, he was but a beast
in that belated, straggling herd that filled the roads and fields.
It was the reaction after the terrible disasters at Wissembourg and
Froeschwiller, the echo of the thunder-clap that had burst in the remote
distance, leagues and leagues away, rattling at the heels of those
panic-stricken men who were flying before they had ever seen an enemy.
What was there to hope for now? Was it not all ended? They were beaten;
all that was left them was to lie down and die.

"It makes no difference," shouted Loubet, with the _blague_ of a child
of the Halles, "but this is not the Berlin road we are traveling, all
the same."

To Berlin! To Berlin! The cry rang in Maurice's ears, the yell of the