Suddenly Loubet brought the others to a halt.

“It’s idiotic to run like this; let’s decide where we shall go to cook the stuff.”

Jean, who was beginning to recover his self-possession, proposed the quarries.  They were only three hundred yards distant, and in them were secret recesses in abundance where they could kindle a fire without being seen.  When they reached the spot, however, difficulties of every description presented themselves.  First, there was the question of wood; fortunately a laborer, who had been repairing the road, had gone home and left his wheelbarrow behind him; Lapoulle quickly reduced it to fragments with the heel of his boot.  Then there was no water to be had that was fit to drink; the hot sunshine had dried up all the pools of rain-water.  True there was a pump at the Tour a Glaire, but that was too far away, and besides it was never accessible before midnight; the men forming in long lines with their bowls and porringers, only too happy when, after waiting for hours, they could escape from the jam with their supply of the precious fluid unspilled.  As for the few wells in the neighborhood, they had been dry for the last two days, and the bucket brought up nothing save mud and slime.  Their sole resource appeared to be the water of the Meuse, which was parted from them by the road.

“I’ll take the kettle and go and fill it,” said Jean.

The others objected.

“No, no!  We don’t want to be poisoned; it is full of dead bodies!”

They spoke the truth.  The Meuse was constantly bringing down corpses of men and horses; they could be seen floating with the current at any moment of the day, swollen and of a greenish hue, in the early stages of decomposition.  Often they were caught in the weeds and bushes on the bank, where they remained to poison the atmosphere, swinging to the tide with a gentle, tremulous motion that imparted to them a semblance of life.  Nearly every soldier who had drunk that abominable water had suffered from nausea and colic, often succeeded afterward by dysentery.  It seemed as if they must make up their mind to use it, however, as there was no other; Maurice explained that there would be no danger in drinking it after it was boiled.

“Very well, then; I’ll go,” said Jean.  And he started, taking Lapoulle with him to carry the kettle.

By the time they got the kettle filled and on the fire it was quite dark.  Loubet had peeled the beets and thrown them into the water to cook—­a feast fit for the gods, he declared it would be—­and fed the fire with fragments of the wheelbarrow, for they were all suffering so from hunger that they could have eaten the meat before the pot began to boil.  Their huge shadows danced fantastically in the firelight on the rocky walls of the quarry.  Then they found it impossible longer to restrain their appetite, and threw themselves upon the unclean mess, tearing the flesh with eager, trembling fingers and dividing it