At these words Maurice felt a sunray glide into his heart. He was disturbed, humiliated. So this Jean was not a mere rustic. Maurice remembered the fearful hatred that had consumed him when he picked up his gun after throwing it down in a moment of self-abandonment. But he also remembered how startled he had been at seeing the two large tears that stood in the corporal's eyes when the old grandmother, with streaming grey hair, was insulting them and pointing to the Rhine afar off beyond the horizon. Was it the fraternity born of fatigue and pain, endured in common, that was carrying his rancour away? Belonging as he did to a Bonapartist family, Maurice had never dreamt of the Republic otherwise than in theory; his inclinations were rather in favour of the Emperor personally, and he was a partisan of the war, war being in his mind an essential condition of the life of nations. Now, all of a sudden, hope was coming back to him in one of those veerings of the mind to which he was so subject; whilst the enthusiasm which one evening had impelled him to enlist again beat within him, filling his heart with confidence in victory. 'Certainly, corporal,' he answered gaily, 'we'll lick them!' With its load of men, enveloped in the dense smoke of their pipes, and the stifling heat of their closely packed bodies, the cattle truck rolled and rolled along, greeting the anxious crowds at the stations and the haggard peasants posted along the hedges with obscene songs and drunken clamour. On August 20 they reached the Pantin station, just outside Paris, and the same night they started off again, quitting the train on the morrow at Rheims, _en route_ for the camp of Châlons. CHAPTER III TALES OF TWO BATTLES--THE EMPEROR Maurice was greatly surprised when, on detraining at Rheims, the 106th received orders to encamp there. Were they not going to join the army at Châlons then? And a couple of hours later, when his regiment had piled arms at a league from the city, over towards Courcelles, amid the vast plain skirting the canal from the Aisne to the Marne, his astonishment increased on learning that the entire army of Châlons had been falling back since the morning and would bivouac on this very spot. And, indeed, tents were being pitched from one end of the horizon to the other, as far away as St. Thierry and La Meuvillette, and even beyond the high road to Laon; and the fires of all four army corps would be blazing there that same evening. Evidently enough, the plan of taking up a position under Paris, there to await the Prussians, had prevailed, and Maurice was delighted, for was not this plan the wisest?