rporal continued
with extraordinary force and dignity:

"When a man has learning he shows it by his actions. If we are brutes
and peasants, you owe us the benefit of your example, since you know
more than we do. Take up your musket, or _Nom de Dieu!_ I will have you
shot the first halt we make."

Maurice was daunted; he stooped and raised the weapon in his hand. Tears
of rage stood in his eyes. He reeled like a drunken man as he labored
onward, surrounded by his comrades, who now were jeering at him for
having yielded. Ah, that Jean! he felt that he should never cease to
hate him, cut to the quick as he had been by that bitter lesson,
which he could not but acknowledge he had deserved. And when Chouteau,
marching at his side, growled: "When corporals are that way, we just
wait for a battle and blow a hole in 'em," the landscape seemed red
before his eyes, and he had a distinct vision of himself blowing Jean's
brains out from behind a wall.

But an incident occurred to divert their thoughts; Loubet noticed that
while the dispute was going on Pache had also abandoned his musket,
laying it down tenderly at the foot of an embankment. Why? What were
the reasons that had made him resist the example of his comrades in
the first place, and what were the reasons that influenced him now? He
probably could not have told himself, nor did he trouble his head about
the matter, chuckling inwardly with silent enjoyment, like a schoolboy
who, having long been held up as a model for his mates, commits his
first offense. He strode along with a self-contented, rakish air,
swinging his arms; and still along the dusty, sunlit roads, between
the golden grain and the fields of hops that succeeded one another with
tiresome monotony, the human tide kept pouring onward; the stragglers,
without arms or knapsacks, were now but a shuffling, vagrant mob,
a disorderly array of vagabonds and beggars, at whose approach the
frightened villagers barred their doors.

Something that happened just then capped the climax of Maurice's misery.
A deep, rumbling noise had for some time been audible in the distance;
it was the artillery, that had been the last to leave the camp and whose
leading guns now wheeled into sight around a bend in the road, barely
giving the footsore infantrymen time to seek safety in the fields.
It was an entire regiment of six batteries, and came up in column, in
splendid order, at a sharp trot, the colonel riding on the flank at th