their torturing hunger; they would eat over yonder, on the other bank, when they had passed the river; they would eat grass if nothing else was to be found.  The crowd at the bridge, however, seemed to increase rather than diminish; the officers that General Douay had stationed there came back to him every few minutes, always bringing the same unwelcome report, that it would be hours and hours before any relief could be expected.  Finally the general determined to go down to the bridge in person, and the men saw him on the bank, bestirring himself and others and hurrying the passage of the troops.

Maurice, seated with Jean against a wall, pointed to the north, as he had done before.  “There is Sedan in the distance.  And look!  Bazeilles is over yonder—­and then comes Douzy, and then Carignan, more to the right.  We shall concentrate at Carignan, I feel sure we shall.  Ah! there is plenty of room, as you would see if it were daylight!”

And his sweeping gesture embraced the entire valley that lay beneath them, enfolded in shadow.  There was sufficient light remaining in the sky that they could distinguish the pale gleam of the river where it ran its course among the dusky meadows.  The scattered trees made clumps of denser shade, especially a row of poplars to the left, whose tops were profiled on the horizon like the fantastic ornaments on some old castle gateway.  And in the background, behind Sedan, dotted with countless little points of brilliant light, the shadows had mustered, denser and darker, as if all the forests of the Ardennes had collected the inky blackness of their secular oaks and cast it there.

Jean’s gaze came back to the bridge of boats beneath them.

“Look there! everything is against us.  We shall never get across.”

The fires upon both banks blazed up more brightly just then, and their light was so intense that the whole fearful scene was pictured on the darkness with vivid distinctness.  The boats on which the longitudinal girders rested, owing to the weight of the cavalry and artillery that had been crossing uninterruptedly since morning, had settled to such an extent that the floor of the bridge was covered with water.  The cuirassiers were passing at the time, two abreast, in a long unbroken file, emerging from the obscurity of the hither shore to be swallowed up in the shadows of the other, and nothing was to be seen of the bridge; they appeared to be marching on the bosom of the ruddy stream, that flashed and danced in the flickering firelight.  The horses snorted and hung back, manifesting every indication of terror as they felt the unstable pathway yielding beneath their feet, and the cuirassiers, standing erect in their stirrups and clutching at the reins, poured onward in a steady, unceasing stream, wrapped in their great white mantles, their helmets flashing in the red light of the flames.  One might have taken them for some spectral band of knights, with locks of fire, going forth to do battle with the powers of darkness.