Nothing new happened until seven in the evening. A few fugitives were still gaining the town; but at nightfall began the passage of the 5th army corps, commanded by General de Failly. So, then, these thirty thousand men, instead of descending into Alsace by Niederbronn, were now coming behind us by the road to Metz, on this side of the mountains. They were not even thinking of defending our passes, but were taking flight into Lorraine! Half our village had turned out, astonished to see this army moving in a compact mass, upon Sarrebourg and Fenetrange. Until then it had been thought that a second battle would be fought at Saverne. People had been speaking of defending the Falberg, the Vachberg, and all the narrow, rock-strewn passes; the roads through which might have been broken up and defended with abatis, from which a few good shots might have kept whole regiments in check; but the sight of these thousands of men who were forsaking us without having fought--their guns, their mitrailleuses, and the cavalry galloping and rolling in a cloud along the highway, to get farther out of the enemy's reach--made our hearts bleed. Nobody could understand it. Then a poor disabled soldier, lying on the grass, told me that they had been ordered from Bitche to Niederbronn, from Niederbronn to Bitche, and then from Bitche to Petersbach and Ottwiller, by dreadful roads, and that now they could hold on no longer: they were all exhausted! And in spite of myself, I thought that if men worn out to this degree were obliged to fight against fresh troops continually reinforced, they would be beaten before they could strike a blow! Yes, indeed, the want of knowledge of the country is one of the causes of our miseries. Gredel, Catherine, and I, returned to the mill in the greatest distress. It had at last begun to rain, after two months' drought. It was a heavy rain, which lasted all the night. My wife and Gredel had gone to bed, but I could not close my eyes. I walked up and down in the mill, listening to this down-pour, the heavy rumbling of the guns, the pattering of endless footsteps in the mud. It was march, march--marching without a pause. How melancholy! and how I pitied these unhappy soldiers, spent with hunger and fatigue, and compelled to retreat thus. Now and then I looked at them through the window-panes, down which the rain was streaming. They were marching on foot, on horseback, one by one, by companies, in troops, like shadows. And every time that I opened the window to let in fresh air, in the midst of this vast trampling of feet, those neighings, and sometimes the curses of the soldiers of the artillery-train, or the horseman whose horse had dropped from fatigue or refused to move farther, I could hear in the far distance, across the plain two or three leagues from us, the whistle of the trains still coming and going in the passes.