That was only the mild beginning of our trials. After a morning's rest we started again, with a charitable warning that we should have to keep at it until nightfall. We had to keep at it all night too, and the next day.... A forced march of thirty hours, the stiffest in the campaign! I may mention further that we had not slept or had a bite of food since two days before.... A miracle of human endurance. As long as it was light I vaguely noticed the road we covered. The noise of the firing was growing weaker. We were falling back on the Meuse, as De Valpic had predicted. Back there already! I lamented so much lost territory. This thought pained me. I looked with the aching heart with which one salutes abandoned patrimony, at these fields and valleys, these woods, which I examined with such a cold and detached gaze a few weeks ago. Lorraine was actually becoming dear to me! I began to realise that each part of the world has its own particular character.... The tender green of these pastures which not even the ardour of a torrid summer had been able to alter! The calm and haughty harmony of this billowing ground.... I was seized with affection for this pensive and laborious race by whose property the whole of the French lineage is enriched. The names recurred to me of authors born in these parts, who wove their noble blossoms for our literary crown, of painters who had grown up and erected their easels here, attracted by the enchantment of the mist. And all that belonged there of our history: Varennes, the flight of Louis XVI., the romantic episode on the threshold of a troubled and magnificent epopee!... Valmy, Sedan close at hand! We were, as I have said, drawing near to the Meuse. Fifteen or twenty miles up-stream lay Domrémy and Vaucouleurs. Were these hamlets full of sacred memories destined to crumble within a few days beneath the Teuton howitzers? And if we had to retreat still farther! My gaze took in the hills, and the expanse of pale sky. Fortin's brutal warning recurred to my mind. "What they needed first was what remained to us of Lorraine, Champagne, and the Franche-Comté...." My heart contracted. I murmured, "No, no!" * * * * *