low-ceiled room, sitting stupidly on
a bench, watching with dull, lack-luster eyes the passing of the troops
whose retreat would give his ripe grain over to be the spoil of the
enemy. Standing beside him was his wife, still a young woman, holding
in her arms a child, while another was hanging by her skirts; all three
were weeping bitterly. Suddenly the door was thrown open with violence
and in its enframement appeared the grandmother, a very old woman, tall
and lean of form, with bare, sinewy arms like knotted cords that she
raised above her head and shook with frantic gestures. Her gray, scanty
locks had escaped from her cap and were floating about her skinny face,
and such was her fury that the words she shouted choked her utterance
and came from her lips almost unintelligible.

At first the soldiers had laughed. Wasn't she a beauty, the old crazy
hag! Then words reached their ears; the old woman was screaming:

"Scum! Robbers! Cowards! Cowards!"

With a voice that rose shriller and more piercing still she kept lashing
them with her tongue, expectorating insult on them, and taunting them
for dastards with the full force of her lungs. And the laughter ceased,
it seemed as if a cold wind had blown over the ranks. The men hung their
heads, looked any way save that.

"Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!"

Then all at once her stature seemed to dilate; she drew herself up,
tragic in her leanness, in her poor old apology for a gown, and sweeping
the heavens with her long arm from west to east, with a gesture so broad
that it seemed to fill the dome:

"Cowards, the Rhine is not there! The Rhine lies yonder! Cowards,
cowards!"

They got under way again at last, and Maurice, whose look just then
encountered Jean's, saw that the latter's eyes were filled with
tears, and it did not alleviate his distress to think that those rough
soldiers, compelled to swallow an insult that they had done nothing
to deserve, were shamed by it. He was conscious of nothing save the
intolerable aching in his poor head, and in after days could never
remember how the march of that day ended, prostrated as he was by his
terrible suffering, mental and physical.

The 7th corps had spent the entire day in getting over the fourteen or
fifteen miles between Dannemarie and Belfort, and it was night again
before the troops got settled in their bivouacs under the walls of the
town, in the very same place whence they had started four days before
to march aga