Buche, pale as ashes, did not say a word. The officer looked at our guns and knapsacks and cartridge-boxes behind the bed in the corner. "You have deserted," said he. "No, lieutenant, we left, the last ones, at eight o'clock, from Mont-St.-Jean." "Go downstairs, we will see if that is true." We went downstairs. The officer followed us, and the sergeant went before with his lantern. The great hall below was full of officers of the 12th mounted chasseurs, and of the 6th light infantry. The commandant of the 4th battalion of the 6th was promenading up and down, smoking a little wooden pipe. They were all of them wet through and covered with mud. The officers said a few words to the commandant, who stopped, and fixed his black eyes upon us, while his crooked nose turned down into his gray mustache. His manner was not very gentle as he asked us half a dozen questions about our departure from Ligny, the road to Quatre-Bras, and the battle. He winked and compressed his lips. The others walked up and down dragging their sabres without listening to us. At last the commandant said, "Sergeant, these men will join the second company; go!" He took his pipe again from the edge of the mantel, and we went out with the sergeant, happy enough to get off so easily, for they might have shot us as deserters before the enemy. We followed the sergeant for two hundred paces to the other end of the village to a shed. Fires had been lighted farther on in the fields; men were sleeping under the shed, leaning against the doors of the stables, and the posts. A fine rain was falling and the puddles quivered in the gray uncertain moonlight. We stood up under a part of the roof at the corner of the old house thinking of our troubles. At the end of an hour, the drums began to beat with a dull sound; the men shook the straw from their clothes and we resumed our march. It was still dark--but we could hear the chasseurs sounding their signal to mount, behind us. Between three and four in the morning, at dawn, we saw a great many other regiments, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, on the march like ourselves by different roads, all the corps of Marshal Grouchy in retreat! The wet weather, the leaden sky, the long files of weary men, the disappointment of being retaken, and the thought that so many efforts and so much bloodshed had only terminated a second time in an invasion, all this made us hang down our heads. Nothing was heard but the sound of our own footsteps in the mud. I could not shake off my sadness for a long time, when a voice near me said: "Good-morning, Joseph." I was awakened, and looking at the man who spoke to me, I recognized the son of Martin the tanner, our neighbor at Pfalzbourg; he was corporal of the Sixth, and the file-closer, marching with arms at will. We shook hands. It was a real consolation for me to see some one from our own place.