When they passed through Bazeilles Jean and Maurice thought of Weiss, and cast their eyes about in an effort to distinguish the site of the little house that had been defended with such bravery.  While they were at Camp Misery they had heard the woeful tale of slaughter and conflagration that had blotted the pretty village from existence, and the abominations that they now beheld exceeded all they had dreamed of or imagined.  At the expiration of twelve days the ruins were smoking still; the tottering walls had fallen in, there were not ten houses standing.  It afforded them some small comfort, however, to meet a procession of carts and wheelbarrows loaded with Bavarian helmets and muskets that had been collected after the conflict.  That evidence of the chastisement that had been inflicted on those murderers and incendiaries went far toward mitigating the affliction of defeat.

The column was to halt at Douzy to give the men an opportunity to eat breakfast.  It was not without much suffering that they reached that place; already the prisoners’ strength was giving out, exhausted as they were by their ten days of fasting.  Those who the day before had availed of the abundant supplies to gorge themselves were seized with vertigo, their enfeebled legs refused to support their weight, and their gluttony, far from restoring their lost strength, was a further source of weakness to them.  The consequence was that, when the train was halted in a meadow to the left of the village, these poor creatures flung themselves upon the ground with no desire to eat.  Wine was wanting; some charitable women who came, bringing a few bottles, were driven off by the sentries.  One of them in her affright fell and sprained her ankle, and there ensued a painful scene of tears and hysterics, during which the Prussians confiscated the bottles and drank their contents amid jeers and insulting laughter.  This tender compassion of the peasants for the poor soldiers who were being led away into captivity was manifested constantly along the route, while it was said the harshness they displayed toward the generals amounted almost to cruelty.  At that same Douzy, only a few days previously, the villagers had hooted and reviled a number of paroled officers who were on their way to Pont-a-Mousson.  The roads were not safe for general officers; men wearing the blouse—­escaped soldiers, or deserters, it may be—­fell on them with pitch-forks and endeavored to take their life as traitors, credulously pinning their faith to that legend of bargain and sale which, even twenty years later, was to continue to shed its opprobrium upon those leaders who had commanded armies in that campaign.