However, Lieutenant Rochas silenced them. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, always thinking of their stomachs! For his part, when he felt hungry he simply tightened his belt. Since affairs had been going from bad to worse, and a fusillade could occasionally be heard, the lieutenant had recovered all his stubborn confidence in victory. It was so simple now that the Prussians were there: the French would just give them a licking. And he shrugged his shoulders behind Captain Beaudoin, that whipper-snapper, as he called him, who, quite distracted by the loss of his baggage, was now always in a furious passion, with his lips set and his face extremely pale. Nothing to eat? A man could put up with that! What made the Captain so indignant was that he could not change his shirt. Maurice awoke, depressed and shivering. Thanks to his broad shoes, his foot had not again become inflamed; but the deluge of the previous day, which still made his great-coat very heavy, had again left him aching in every limb. When he was sent to fetch the water for the coffee he gazed for a moment over the plain at the edge of which Boult-aux-Bois is situated. Forests climb the hills on the west and the north, where a ridge extends as far as Belleville; whilst a vast open expanse, amid the gentle undulations of which various hamlets are hidden, stretches towards Buzancy on the east. Was it from that side that the enemy was expected? As he came back from the stream with his can full of water, a family of weeping peasants, clustering on the threshold of a little farmhouse, called him and asked him if the soldiers would stay there to defend them. Three times already, owing to contrary orders, had the Fifth Army Corps crossed this part of the country. A cannonade in the direction of Bar had been heard during the previous day, so that the Prussians could not now be more than a couple of leagues distant. When Maurice told these poor people that the Seventh Corps would in all probability soon set out again, they began to bewail their lot. So they were to be abandoned; so the soldiers did not come to fight, since they simply saw them appear and disappear, invariably fleeing from the foe. 'Those who want any sugar,' said Loubet, when he served the coffee, 'must suck their thumbs.' Nobody laughed, however. It was, indeed, vexatious, not even to have any sugar for their coffee. And if they had only had a scrap of biscuit to eat! However, during that long halt on the plateau of Quatre-Champs the day before, almost all of them, by way of passing the time, had nibbled the fragments, devoured even the crumbs remaining in their knapsacks. Fortunately, Jean's squad discovered that they possessed a dozen potatoes, and these were divided among the men. 'Ah! if I had only known, I would have bought some bread at Le Chêne,' regretfully said Maurice, whose stomach craved for food.