We were only children; but, all the same, that spectacle made us grave. As the regiment slowly mounted the steep, we would be taken by a great silence, our eyes fixed upon the troop, in despair at the thought of losing it, and when it had disappeared, something tightened in our throats, and for a moment or two we still watched the distant rock behind which it had just vanished. Would it ever come back? Would it some day come down this hillside again? These questions, stirring sadly within us, made us sad. Good-bye, beautiful regiment. Julien, in particular, always came home very tired. He only came so far in order not to leave his brother. These excursions knocked him up, and he had a mortal terror of the horses. I remember that one day we had lingered in the train of an artillery regiment, and spent the day in the open fields. Louis was wild with enthusiasm. When we had breakfasted on an omelette, in a village, he took us to a bend of the river, where he was set upon bathing. Then he talked of going for a soldier as soon as he was old enough. “No, no!” cried Julien, flinging his arms round his neck. He was quite pale. His brother laughed, and called him a great stupid. But he repeated: “You would be killed, I know you would.” On that day, Julien, excited, and jeered at by us, spoke his mind. He thought the soldiers horrid, he did not see what there was in them to attract us. It was all the soldiers’ fault, because if there were not any soldiers, there would not be any fighting. In fact, he hated war; it terrified him, and, later on, he would find some way to prevent his brother from going. It was a sort of morbid, unconquerable aversion which he felt. Weeks and months went by. We had got tired of the regiments; we had found out another sport, which was to go fishing, of a morning, for the little fresh-water fish, and to eat what we caught in a third-rate tavern. The water was icy. Julien got a cold on the chest, of which he nearly died. In college, war was no longer talked about. We had fallen back deeper than ever into Homer and Virgil. All at once, we learned that the French had conquered, which seemed to us quite natural. Then, regiments again began to pass, but in the other direction. They no longer interested us; still, we did see two or three. They did not seem to us so fine, diminished as they were by half--and the rest is lost in a mist. Such was the Crimean war, in France, for schoolboys shut up in a country college. II. In 1859 I was in Paris, finishing my studies at the Lycée St. Louis. As it happened, I was there with my two school-fellows from Aix, Louis and Julien. Louis was preparing for his entrance examination to the Ecole Polytechnique; Julien had decided to go in for law. We were all out-students.