With a sudden start he sat up in bed: 'Well, give me my gun, then. I'll blow my brains out. Like that it will be sooner over.' Then, stretching out his arm and pointing to Weiss, who sat there motionless and silent, he added: 'There, he's the only sensible one; yes, he alone saw clearly into all this--don't you remember, Jean, what he said to me a month ago at Mulhausen?'
'That's true,' the corporal replied; 'this gentleman said we should be beaten.'
A vision of the scene rose up before him; that anxious night, the long waiting fraught with so much anguish, the mournful sky already pregnant with the disaster of Frœschweiler, whilst Weiss so quietly expressed his fears: Germany ready, better commanded, better armed, sustained by a great outburst of patriotism, and France scared, a prey to disorder, behind the times, perverted, having neither the commanders, nor the men, nor the arms she needed. And now the fearful prophecy was being fulfilled.
Weiss raised his trembling hands. An expression of intense grief had come over his good-natured face. 'Ah! I assure you,' he muttered, 'it gives me no pleasure at all to find that I was in the right. I am a mere stupid; but all this was so clear and patent to those who knew anything at all. At the same time, however, even if we are beaten, we can still kill some of those baleful Prussians. That's our consolation. I still think our men will leave their lives here, and I should like to see the Prussians leave theirs too; yes, I should like to see them lying in heaps, covering all the ground yonder!'
He had risen to his feet, and he pointed to the valley of the Meuse. Those large, short-sighted eyes of his which had prevented him from serving in the army were now illumined by a vivid flame. 'Thunder!' he exclaimed, 'yes, I'd fight readily enough if I were my own master. I don't know whether it's because they are now in possession of my native province, the province where the Cossacks already did such frightful things years ago, but I can't think of them or picture them in our country and our houses without feeling a furious longing to go and bleed a dozen of them! Ah! if I hadn't been invalided, if I were only a soldier!' Then after a short pause he added: 'But, after all, who can tell what will happen?'