Jean beheld a circle of expectant eyes bent on him; the squad had been waiting for him with anxiety, Pache and Lapoulle in particular, luckless dogs, who had found nothing they could appropriate; they all relied on him, who, as they expressed it, could get bread out of a stone.  And the corporal’s conscience smote him for having abandoned his men; he took pity on them and divided among them half the bread that he had in his sack.

“Name o’ God!  Name o’ God!” grunted Lapoulle as he contentedly munched the dry bread; it was all he could find to say; while Pache repeated a Pater and an Ave under his breath to make sure that Heaven should not forget to send him his breakfast in the morning.

Gaude, the bugler, with his darkly mysterious air, as of a man who has had troubles of which he does not care to speak, sounded the call for evening muster with a glorious fanfare; but there was no necessity for sounding taps that night, the camp was immediately enveloped in profound silence.  And when he had verified the names and seen that none of his half-section were missing, Sergeant Sapin, with his thin, sickly face and his pinched nose, softly said: 

“There will be one less to-morrow night.”

Then, as he saw Jean looking at him inquiringly, he added with calm conviction, his eyes bent upon the blackness of the night, as if reading there the destiny that he predicted: 

“It will be mine; I shall be killed to-morrow.”

It was nine o’clock, with promise of a chilly, uncomfortable night, for a dense mist had risen from the surface of the river, so that the stars were no longer visible.  Maurice shivered, where he lay with Jean beneath a hedge, and said they would do better to go and seek the shelter of the tent; the rest they had taken that day had left them wakeful, their joints seemed stiffer and their bones sorer than before; neither could sleep.  They envied Lieutenant Rochas, who, stretched on the damp ground and wrapped in his blanket, was snoring like a trooper, not far away.  For a long time after that they watched with interest the feeble light of a candle that was burning in a large tent where the colonel and some officers were in consultation.  All that evening M. de Vineuil had manifested great uneasiness that he had received no instructions to guide him in the morning.  He felt that his regiment was too much “in the air,” too much advanced, although it had already fallen back from the exposed position that it had occupied earlier in the day.  Nothing had been seen of General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who was said to be ill in bed at the Hotel of the Golden Cross, and the colonel decided to send one of his officers to advise him of the danger of their new position in the too extended line of the 7th corps, which had to cover the long stretch from the bend in the Meuse to the wood of la Garenne.  There could be no doubt that the enemy would attack with the first glimpse of daylight; only for seven or eight hours now would that deep tranquillity remain unbroken.  And shortly after the dim light in the colonel’s tent was extinguished Maurice was amazed to see Captain Beaudoin glide by, keeping close to the hedge, with furtive steps, and vanish in the direction of Sedan.