The others roared, thinking this very droll, though they could not say why. However, the slightest incidents of the journey--the sight of some peasants posted beside the line, of the groups of anxious people who, in the hope of obtaining news, were waiting at the smaller stations for the trains to pass, the view, too, of all that region of France scared and quivering in presence of the invasion--sufficed to provoke hooting, shouting, and deafening laughter. And in the gust of wind that swept by as the engine forged onward, amid the rapid view they obtained of the train enveloped in smoke and noise, those that had hastened to the stations received full in the face the howls of these men, all food for powder, who were being carried along at express speed. At one station, however, where they stopped, three well-dressed ladies, rich _bourgeoises_ of the town, who distributed bowls of broth to the soldiers, met with great success. The men cried as they thanked them, and kissed their hands. But farther on, the filthy songs and the savage yells burst forth again. Shortly after passing Chaumont the train met another one full of some artillerymen who were no doubt being taken to Metz. Speed had just been slackened, and the soldiers of the two trains fraternised amid a fearful clamour. It was, however, the artillerymen, doubtless more intoxicated than the others, who carried off the palm by shaking their fists out of the trucks and raising this cry with such despairing violence that it drowned everything else: 'To the slaughter! slaughter! slaughter!' It seemed as if a great chill, an icy wind from a charnel-house were passing by. There was a sudden brief silence, amid which one heard Loubet jeering: 'The comrades are not gay.' 'But they are in the right,' rejoined Chouteau, in his tavern-orator's voice; 'it's disgusting to send a lot of brave chaps to get their heads cracked on account of some dirty business they don't know a word about.' And he continued talking in the same strain. This incapable workman of Montmartre, this lounging, dissipated house-painter, who had badly digested some scraps of speeches heard at public meetings, and who mingled revolutionary clap-trap with the great principles of equality and liberty, played the part of the perverter. He knew everything, and indoctrinated his comrades, especially Lapoulle, whom he had promised to make a man of: 'Eh, old fellow? It's simple enough. If Badinguet and Bismarck have a row together let them settle it between them with their fists, instead of troubling hundreds of thousands of men who don't even know one another, and have no wish to fight.' The whole truck-load laughed, feeling amused and subjugated, and Lapoulle, who did not even know who Badinguet[11] was, and who could not even have said whether he was fighting for an Emperor or a King, repeated, with that overgrown-baby air of his: 'Of course, with their fists--and a glass of wine together afterwards.'