When, in the outstreaming torrent of the three divisions that striped the plain with columns of marching men, the 106th left Boult-aux-Bois in the rear of the cavalry and artillery, the sky was again overspread with a pall of dull leaden clouds that further lowered the spirits of the soldiers.  Its route was along the Buzancy highway, planted on either side with rows of magnificent poplars.  When they reached Germond, a village where there was a steaming manure-heap before every one of the doors that lined the two sides of the straggling street, the sobbing women came to their thresholds with their little children in their arms, and held them out to the passing troops, as if begging the men to take them with them.  There was not a mouthful of bread to be had in all the hamlet, nor even a potato, After that, the regiment, instead of keeping straight on toward Buzancy, turned to the left and made for Authe, and when the men turned their eyes across the plain and beheld upon the hilltop Belleville, through which they had passed the day before, the fact that they were retracing their steps was impressed more vividly on their consciousness.

“Heavens and earth!” growled Chouteau, “do they take us for tops?”

And Loubet chimed in: 

“Those cheap-John generals of ours are all at sea again!  They must think that men’s legs are cheap.”

The anger and disgust were general.  It was not right to make men suffer like that, just for the fun of walking them up and down the country.  They were advancing in column across the naked plain in two files occupying the sides of the road, leaving a free central space in which the officers could move to and fro and keep an eye on their men, but it was not the same now as it had been in Champagne after they left Rheims, a march of song and jollity, when they tramped along gayly and the knapsack was like a feather to their shoulders, in the belief that soon they would come up with the Prussians and give them a sound drubbing; now they were dragging themselves wearily forward in angry silence, cursing the musket that galled their shoulder and the equipments that seemed to weigh them to the ground, their faith in their leaders gone, and possessed by such bitterness of despair that they only went forward as does a file of manacled galley-slaves, in terror of the lash.  The wretched army had begun to ascend its Calvary.

Maurice, however, within the last few minutes had made a discovery that interested him greatly.  To their left was a range of hills that rose one above another as they receded from the road, and from the skirt of a little wood, far up on the mountain-side, he had seen a horseman emerge.  Then another appeared, and then still another.  There they stood, all three of them, without sign of life, apparently no larger than a man’s hand and looking like delicately fashioned toys.  He thought they were probably part of a detachment of our hussars out on a reconnoissance, when all at once he was surprised to behold little points of light flashing from their shoulders, doubtless the reflection of the sunlight from epaulets of brass.