It was thus that Jean found himself in the rear, adrift with his squad, which he had not cared to leave, in the depths of a hollow road. The 106th had disappeared, not another man nor an officer of the company was to be seen--only solitary soldiers, a medley of strange men exhausted at the very outset of the march, and who were walking along leisurely wheresoever the paths might lead them. The sunrays were overpowering, it was extremely hot, and the knapsacks, rendered the heavier by the tents and all the complicated paraphernalia that swelled them out, weighed terribly on the men's shoulders. Many of these stragglers were not habituated to carrying them, and were inconvenienced too by their thick, campaigning great-coats, which seemed to them like leaden vestments. All at once a pale little linesman, whose eyes were full of tears, stopped short and flung his knapsack into a ditch with a deep sigh of relief, the long breath which the man who has been agonising draws as he feels himself coming back to life. 'He's in the right,' muttered Chouteau, though he himself continued marching along with his shoulders bending under the knapsack's weight. Two other men, however, having disburdened themselves, he could no longer hold out. 'Ah: curse it!' he cried, and with a jerk of his shoulders he tossed his knapsack on to the bank. Half a hundredweight on his shoulders--no, thanks. He had had enough of it. They were not beasts of burden that they should have to drag such things about. Immediately afterwards Loubet imitated him, and compelled Lapoulle to do the same. Pache, who crossed himself each time they came upon a wayside cross, unfastened the straps of his knapsack, and carefully deposited it at the foot of a low wall, as if intending to come back and fetch it. And Maurice alone was still laden when Jean, on turning round, saw what his men had done. 'Take up your knapsacks. I shall have to pay for it if you don't.' The men, however, without as yet openly revolting, trudged on silently, with an evil expression on their faces, as they pushed the corporal before them along the narrow road. 'Take them up or I shall report you!' These words stung Maurice as though he had been lashed with a whip across the face. Report them! What! that brute of a peasant report them, because the poor fellows, feeling their muscles quite crushed, had eased themselves? And in a fit of feverish irritation he also unbuckled his straps, and with a defiant look at Jean, let his knapsack fall by the roadside. 'All right,' calmly said the corporal, realising the futility of a struggle; 'we will settle all that this evening.'