e meet soon again! Be good!
Above all write to me!" They squeezed hands for a last time, the train
whistled, we had left the station. We were a regular shovelful of fifty
men in that box that rolled away with us. Some were weeping freely,
jeered at by the others who, completely lost in drink, were sticking
lighted candles into their provisions and bawling at the top of their
voices: "Down with Badinguet! and long live Rochefort!" {2}

2 "Badinguet, nickname given to Napoleon III; Henri
Rochefort, anti-Napoleon journalist and agitator.

Others, in a corner by themselves, stared silently and sullenly at the
broad floor that kept vibrating in the dust. All at once the convoy
makes a halt--I got out. Complete darkness--twenty-five minutes after
midnight.

On all sides stretch the fields, and in the distance lighted up by sharp
flashes of lightning, a cottage, a tree sketch their silhouette against
a sky swollen by the tempest. Only the grinding and rumbling of the
engine is heard, whose clusters of sparks flying from the smokestack
scatter like a bouquet of fireworks the whole length of the train. Every
one gets out, goes forward as far as the engine, which looms up in the
night and becomes huge. The stop lasted quite two hours. The signal
disks flamed red, the engineer was waiting for them to reverse. They
turn; again we get back into the wagons, but a man who comes up on the
run and swinging a lantern, speaks a few words to the conductor, who
immediately backs the train into a siding where we remain motionless.
Not one of us knows where we are. I descend again from the carriage, and
sitting on an embankment, I nibble at a bit of bread and drink a drop or
two, when the whirl of a hurricane whistles in the distance, approaches,
roaring and vomiting fire, and an interminable train of artillery passed
at full speed, carrying along horses, men, and cannon whose bronze necks
sparkle in a confusion of light. Five minutes after we take up our slow
advance, again interrupted by halts that grow longer and longer. The
journey ends with daybreak, and leaning from the car window, worn out by
the long watch of the night, I look out upon the country that surrounds
us: a succession of chalky plains, closing in the horizon, a band of
pale green like the color of a sick turquoise, a flat country, gloomy,
meagre, the beggarly Champagne Pouilleuse!

Little by little the sun brightens, we, rumbling on the while, end,
however, by