Just then Rochas gave the order to fall back. The Prussians had crept up on them and were only two or three hundred yards away; they were in danger of being captured. “Be cool, don’t hurry; face about and give ’em another shot. Rally behind that low wall that you see down there.” Maurice was in despair; he knew not what to do. “We are not going to leave our corporal behind, are we, lieutenant?” “What are we to do? he has turned up his toes.” “No, no! he is breathing still. Take him along!” Rochas shrugged his shoulders as if to say they could not bother themselves for every man that dropped. A wounded man is esteemed of little value on the battlefield. Then Maurice addressed his supplications to Lapoulle and Pache. “Come, give me a helping hand. I am not strong enough to carry him unassisted.” They were deaf to his entreaties; all they could hear was the voice that urged them to seek safety for themselves. The Prussians were now not more than a hundred yards from them; already they were on their hands and knees, crawling as fast as they could go toward the wall. And Maurice, weeping tears of rage, thus left alone with his unconscious companion, raised him in his arms and endeavored to lug him away, but he found his puny strength unequal to the task, exhausted as he was by fatigue and the emotions of the day. At the first step he took he reeled and fell with his burden. If only he could catch sight of a stretcher-bearer! He strained his eyes, thought he had discovered one among the crowd of fugitives, and made frantic gestures of appeal; no one came, they were left behind, alone. Summoning up his strength with a determined effort of the will he seized Jean once more and succeeded in advancing some thirty paces, when a shell burst near them and he thought that all was ended, that he, too, was to die on the body of his comrade. Slowly, cautiously, Maurice picked himself up. He felt his body, arms, and legs; nothing, not a scratch. Why should he not look out for himself and fly, alone? There was time left still; a few bounds would take him to the wall and he would be saved. His horrible sensation of fear returned and made him frantic. He was collecting his energies to break away and run, when a feeling stronger than death intervened and vanquished the base impulse. What, abandon Jean! he could not do it. It would be like mutilating his own being; the brotherly affection that had bourgeoned and grown between him and that rustic had struck its roots down into his life, too deep to be slain like that. The feeling went back to the earliest days, was perhaps as old as the world itself; it was as if there were but they two upon earth, of whom one could not forsake the other without forsaking himself, and being doomed thenceforth to an eternity of solitude. Molded of the same clay, quickened by the same spirit, duty imperiously commanded to save himself in saving his brother.