At midnight, Maurice had not yet got to sleep. Feverish insomnia, fraught with ugly dreams, made him turn over and over in the tent. At last he ended by coming outside, and felt relieved on standing up and inhaling the cold, wind-swept air. The sky was covered with huge clouds, the night was becoming very dense, with an infinitely mournful darkness, which the last expiring fires along the camp front faintly illumined with star-like lights. And amidst the black, silent peacefulness one could detect the slow breathing of the hundred thousand men who were lying there. Then Maurice's anguish became quieted, and a feeling of fraternity came to him, of indulgent affection for all those living sleepers, thousands of whom would soon be sleeping the sleep of death. After all, they were good fellows. They were scarcely disciplined; they got drunk, and they robbed; but what sufferings had they not already endured, and what excuses there were for them in the Downfall of the entire nation! Among them there remained but a small number of the glorious veterans of Sebastopol and Solferino, mingled with men who were but lads, and incapable of any prolonged resistance. These four army corps, hastily assembled and reorganised, without any solid ties to bind them together, formed, so to say, the army of despair, the expiatory flock which was to be sent to the sacrifice in an endeavour to avert the anger of Destiny. And this army must climb its Calvary to the bitter end, paying, with the red flood of its blood, for the faults of everyone, and attaining to fame by the very horror of the disasters that awaited it. Meditating thus in the depths of the quivering darkness, Maurice became conscious of the great duty that lay before him. He no longer indulged the braggart hope of repeating the legendary victories. This march upon Verdun was a march to Death, and he accepted it with stout and cheerful resignation, since die he must. CHAPTER IV ON THE MARCH--THE SPY The camp was raised on Tuesday, August 23, at six o'clock in the morning, and the hundred thousand men of the army of Châlons set out on the march, flowing away in an immense stream, like some human river resuming its torrential course after expanding for a time into a lake. Despite the rumours current the evening before, it was a thorough surprise to many of the men to find that, instead of continuing their movement of retreat, they now had to turn their backs on Paris, and march towards the East--towards the Unknown.