“Hallo there, comrades, this way!  You are 7th corps men, aren’t you?”

“Right you are, sir; 1st division—­at least I am, more by token that I was at Froeschwiller, where it was warm enough, I can tell you.  The comrade, here, belongs in the 1st corps; he was at Wissembourg, another beastly hole.”

They told their story, how they had been swept away in the general panic, had crawled into a ditch half-dead with fatigue and hunger, each of them slightly wounded, and since then had been dragging themselves along in the rear of the army, compelled to lie over in towns when the fever-fits came on, until at last they had reached the camp and were on the lookout to find their regiments.

Maurice, who had a piece of Gruyere before him, noticed the hungry eyes fixed on his plate.

“Hi there, mademoiselle! bring some more cheese, will you—­and bread and wine.  You will join me, won’t you, comrades?  It is my treat.  Here’s to your good health!”

They drew their chairs up to the table, only too delighted with the invitation.  Their entertainer watched them as they attacked the food, and a thrill of pity ran through him as he beheld their sorry plight, dirty, ragged, arms gone, their sole attire a pair of red trousers and the capote, kept in place by bits of twine and so patched and pieced with shreds of vari-colored cloth that one would have taken them for men who had been looting some battle-field and were wearing the spoil they had gathered there.

“Ah! foutre, yes!” continued the taller of the two as he plied his jaws, “it was no laughing matter there!  You ought to have seen it, —­tell him how it was, Coutard.”

And the little man told his story with many gestures, describing figures on the air with his bread.

“I was washing my shirt, you see, while the rest of them were making soup.  Just try and picture to yourself a miserable hole, a regular trap, all surrounded by dense woods that gave those Prussian pigs a chance to crawl up to us before we ever suspected they were there.  So, then, about seven o’clock the shells begin to come tumbling about our ears. Nom de Dieu! but it was lively work! we jumped for our shooting-irons, and up to eleven o’clock it looked as if we were going to polish ’em off in fine style.  But you must know that there were only five thousand of us, and the beggars kept coming, coming as if there was no end to them.  I was posted on a little hill, behind a bush, and I could see them debouching in front, to right, to left, like rows of black ants swarming from their hill, and when you thought there were none left there were always plenty more.  There’s no use mincing matters, we all thought that our leaders must be first-class nincompoops to thrust us into such a hornet’s nest, with no support at hand, and leave us to be crushed there without coming to our assistance.  And then our General, Douay,[*] poor devil! neither a fool nor a coward, that man,—­a