A quarter of an hour later, however, a despatch announced that the army had been obliged to abandon Wœrth,[8] and was in full retreat. Ah! What a night! Rochas, overcome by sleep, had wrapped himself in his cloak, and as often happened was slumbering on the ground, disdaining any shelter. Maurice and Jean had slipped into the tent, where, with their heads resting on their knapsacks, Loubet, Chouteau, Pache, and Lapoulle had already settled themselves. There was just room for six men, provided they curled up their legs. At the outset Loubet enlivened all these hungry fellows by convincing Lapoulle that some fowls would be given out at ration time, next day; they felt so tired, however, that they were soon snoring, careless whether the Prussians came or not. Jean remained for a moment quite motionless, pressed close against Maurice. Despite his great fatigue he could not get to sleep, for everything that Weiss had said of the innumerable, all-devouring German nation, that was up in arms against France, was revolving in his brain; and he realised that his companion also was awake, thinking of the self-same things. Suddenly Maurice drew back impatiently, and Jean divined that he inconvenienced him. The instinctive enmity and repugnance, due to difference of class and education, that separated the peasant from the young man of culture, assumed a form of physical dislike. It filled Jean with a feeling of shame and secret sadness, and he tried to make himself small, as it were, to escape the hostile contempt that he divined in Maurice. The night was freshening, but inside the tent, with all these closely packed bodies, the atmosphere became so stifling that Maurice, seized with feverish exasperation, at length bounded outside, and stretched himself on the ground a few paces off. Jean, feeling quite wretched, sank into a kind of semi-somnolence, full of unpleasant dreams, in which his sorrow that nobody cared for him was mingled with the apprehension of a terrible misfortune, which he fancied he could hear galloping along, afar off, in the depths of the Unknown.