Now and again Roy would recur in thought to Ivor’s long march from Valenciennes to Verdun, all the way on foot, though weakened by illness, and then Denham’s pale face at the moment of their parting would come up; was it only that same morning? Already it began to look like months ago. Roy felt years older than when he had stood on the ramparts, watching a crowd at the gate. Was that indeed only two days earlier? Later in the day, when another halt was made, a third company seemed to be waiting to join them. A company of—were they prisoners? Impossible. Roy gazed in perplexity. For these were French faces, sullen and downcast, with French manners, and French style of dress. Yet they too were coupled together, like the English sailors, two and two, by connecting chains. They too were under an escort of gendarmes. “Are they convicts?” Roy exclaimed, and the merchantman-master, Captain Boyce, replied— “Bless you, sir, no. Those are conscripts for the Emperor’s grand army, dragged from their homes, belike, without a will-he nor a nill-he, and driven to war like sheep to the shambles.” “Poor wretches,” Will remarked, with his experienced air. “I’ve seen a lot of them before, on our way across France.” “Sure enough, sir, and so have I—times and again. Looking as sheepish too and as down in the mouth as ever a man need look. It don’t make much wonder neither, seeing they’re dragged away from their homes and their sweethearts, and never a chance of getting off. O they’ll make smart soldiers enough, I’ll be bound, and good food for shot too, with a few months of drilling, and be as ready to rave as any Frenchman of them all for ‘le petit Caporal,’ as they’re pleased to call the Emperor. And the mothers and sweethearts may bear the sorrow as they can, and the land may go uncultivated, and what does Boney care, so long as he has his way?” “But—conscripts for Napoleon! French soldiers—chained!”[1] uttered Roy. “Well, you see, sir, it’s this way. They’ve got to be taken from their homes to the dépôt; and scarce a man among ’em wouldn’t desert on the road, if he’d a chance of doing so. When they’ve been in the army a few weeks or months, disciplined and turned into proper soldiers, they’ll learn a pride in their new position, and things’ll be different; but at the first ’tis hard upon the poor chaps. Why, look you, I’ve heard of a young fellow being taken straight off, just as he was on the point of being married, and the marriage put off, nobody knew how long. As like as not, in six months he’d be in a soldier’s grave.” Roy thought of Lucille. “’Tis not our English way with our soldiers,” he said, in reference to the sight before them.