The soup had long since been made and eaten and everyone was waiting to see what would happen next, when, about half-past two o’clock, the smoldering excitement began to gain strength, and soon pervaded the entire camp.  Hurried orders came to abandon the meadows, and the troops ascended a line of hills between two villages, Chestres and Falaise, some two or three miles apart, and took position there.  Already the engineers were at work digging rifle-pits and throwing up epaulments; while over to the left the artillery had occupied the summit of a rounded eminence.  The rumor spread that General Bordas had sent in a courier to announce that he had encountered the enemy in force at Grand-Pre and had been compelled to fall back on Buzancy, which gave cause to apprehend that he might soon be cut off from retreat on Vouziers.  For these reasons, the commander of the 7th corps, believing an attack to be imminent, had placed his men in position to sustain the first onset until the remainder of the army should have time to come to his assistance, and had started off one of his aides-de-camp with a letter to the marshal, apprising him of the danger, and asking him for re-enforcements.  Fearing for the safety of the subsistence train, which had come up with the corps during the night and was again dragging its interminable length in the rear, he summarily sent it to the right about and directed it to make the best of its way to Chagny.  Things were beginning to look like fight.

“So, it looks like business this time—­eh, Lieutenant?” Maurice ventured to ask Rochas.

“Yes, thank goodness,” replied the Lieutenant, his long arms going like windmills.  “Wait a little; you’ll find it warm enough!”

The soldiers were all delighted; the animation in the camp was still more pronounced.  A feverish impatience had taken possession of the men, now that they were actually in line of battle between Chestres and Falaise.  At last they were to have a sight of those Prussians who, if the newspapers were to be believed, were knocked up by their long marches, decimated by sickness, starving, and in rags, and every man’s heart beat high with the prospect of annihilating them at a single blow.

“We are lucky to come across them again,” said Jean.  “They’ve been playing hide-and-seek about long enough since they slipped through our fingers after their battle down yonder on the frontier.  But are these the same troops that whipped MacMahon, I wonder?”

Maurice could not answer his question with any degree of certainty.  It seemed to him hardly probable, in view of what he had read in the newspapers at Rheims, that the third army, commanded by the Crown Prince of Prussia, could be at Vouziers, when, only two days before, it was just on the point of going into camp at Vitry-le-Francois.  There had been some talk of a fourth army, under the Prince of Saxony, which was to operate on the line of the Meuse; this was doubtless