But it was all far worse than he had pictured it to himself, even in those first few hours of disappointment and despair. The last Sunday afternoon which he and Rosalie passed, hand in hand, seated by the Calvary in Plougastel cemetery, striving dumbly to realize that they should see each other no more for three long years; the following morning, chill and bleak for that time of year, when he and the Little Mother, standing on the platform of the station at Brest, could barely see each others' faces, for the sea-fog and their own hot tears; the shouts and laughter and noisy farewells of the classe, crowding out of the windows of their third-class carriages; and, finally, the interminable journey to Paris,--all of these were to Jean-Marie like the successive stages of a feverish, uneasy dream. He knew none of the noisy Breton peasant lads about him, but sat by himself in the centre of the compartment, too far from either window to catch more than fleeting glimpses of the fog-wrapped landscape through which the train crept at thirty kilometres the hour. At long intervals, they stopped in great stations, of which little Jean-Marie remembered to have heard,--Morlaix, St. Brieuc, Rennes, and Laval, where the recruits bought cakes and bottles of cheap wine, and joked with white-capped peasant women on the platforms; and twice during the long night he was roused from a fitful, troubled sleep to a consciousness of raucous voices crying "Le Mans!" and "Chartres!" and gasped in sudden terror--before he could remember where he was--at the faces of his slumbering companions, ghastly and distorted in the wretched light of the compartment lamp. So, as the dawn was breaking over Paris, they came into the gare Montparnasse, and, too drowsy to realize what was demanded of them, were herded together by the drill sergeants in charge, and marched away across the city to the barracks of La Pépinière. The weeks that followed were to Jean-Marie hideous beyond any means of expression. From the first he had been assigned to the drum-corps, and spent hours daily, under command of a corporal expert in the art, laboriously learning double rolls and ruffles in the fosse of the fortifications. For they are not in the way of enduring martyrdom, the Parisians, and even while they cry "Vive l'armée!" with their hats off, and their eyes blazing, the drummers and buglers are sent out of hearing, to practice the music that later, when the regiments parade, will stir the patriotism of the throng.