“Are you feeling so badly still?  What is it?  Does your foot pain you?”

Maurice shook his head.  His foot had ceased to trouble him, thanks to the big shoes.

“Then you are hungry.”  And Jean, seeing that he did not answer, took from his knapsack one of the two remaining biscuits, and with a falsehood for which he may be forgiven:  “Here, take it; I kept your share for you.  I ate mine a while ago.”

Day was breaking when the 7th corps marched out of Osches en route for Mouzon by way of la Besace, where they should have bivouacked.  The train, cause of so many woes, had been sent on ahead, guarded by the first division, and if its own wagons, well horsed as for the most part they were, got over the ground at a satisfactory pace, the requisitioned vehicles, most of them empty, delayed the troops and produced sad confusion among the hills of the defile of Stonne.  After leaving the hamlet of la Berliere the road rises more sharply between wooded hills on either side.  Finally, about eight o’clock, the two remaining divisions got under way, when Marshal MacMahon came galloping up, vexed to find there those troops that he supposed had left la Besace that morning, with only a short march between them and Mouzon; his comment to General Douay on the subject was expressed in warm language.  It was determined that the first division and the train should be allowed to proceed on their way to Mouzon, but that the two other divisions, that they might not be further retarded by this cumbrous advance-guard, should move by the way of Raucourt and Autrecourt so as to pass the Meuse at Villers.  The movement to the north was dictated by the marshal’s intense anxiety to place the river between his army and the enemy; cost what it might, they must be on the right bank that night.  The rear-guard had not yet left Osches when a Prussian battery, recommencing the performance of the previous day, began to play on them from a distant eminence, over in the direction of Saint-Pierremont.  They made the mistake of firing a few shots in reply; then the last of the troops filed out of the town.

Until nearly eleven o’clock the 106th slowly pursued its way along the road which zigzags through the pass of Stonne between high hills.  On the left hand the precipitous summits rear their heads, devoid of vegetation, while to the right the gentler slopes are clad with woods down to the roadside.  The sun had come out again, and the heat was intense down in the inclosed valley, where an oppressive solitude prevailed.  After leaving la Berliere, which lies at the foot of a lofty and desolate mountain surmounted by a Calvary, there is not a house to be seen, not a human being, not an animal grazing in the meadows.  And the men, the day before so faint with hunger, so spent with fatigue, who since that time had had no food to restore, no slumber, to speak of, to refresh them, were now dragging themselves listlessly along, disheartened, filled with sullen anger.