Quite a stir suddenly arose in camp that evening after the roll call, the officers running hither and thither, transmitting orders, and arranging everything for the men's departure next morning at five o'clock. With mingled surprise and disquietude, Maurice learnt that everything was again changed, and that instead of falling back on Paris they were about to march on Verdun, in view of joining Bazaine. A rumour circulated that a despatch had arrived from the latter during the day, announcing that he was effecting his retreat; and Maurice then remembered Prosper and the officer he had come with from Monthois, perhaps to bring the Emperor a copy of this despatch. Thus the Empress-Regent and the Council of Ministers, so frightened at the thought of the Emperor's return to Paris, and so obstinately bent upon throwing the army forward at any cost in order that it might make a supreme attempt to save the dynasty, had triumphed at last over the perpetual hesitation of Marshal MacMahon. And that wretched Emperor, that poor devil who no longer had any place in his own empire, was to be carried off like a useless, cumbersome parcel among the baggage-train of his troops, condemned--oh! the irony of it--to drag after him all his Imperial household, his bodyguards, his carriages, his horses, his cooks, his vans full of silver saucepans and sparkling wine of Champagne--in a word, all the pomp of his bee-spangled, imperial robes, which could now only serve to sweep up the blood and mire that covered the high-roads of defeat!
At midnight, Maurice had not yet got to sleep. Feverish insomnia, fraught with ugly dreams, made him turn over and over in the tent. At last he ended by coming outside, and felt relieved on standing up and inhaling the cold, wind-swept air. The sky was covered with huge clouds, the night was becoming very dense, with an infinitely mournful darkness, which the last expiring fires along the camp front faintly illumined with star-like lights. And amidst the black, silent peacefulness one could detect the slow breathing of the hundred thousand men who were lying there. Then Maurice's anguish became quieted, and a feeling of fraternity came to him, of indulgent affection for all those living sleepers, thousands of whom would soon be sleeping the sleep of death. After all, they were good fellows. They were scarcely disciplined; they got drunk, and they robbed; but what sufferings had they not already endured, and what excuses there were for them in the Downfall of the entire nation! Among them there remained but a small number of the glorious veterans of Sebastopol and Solferino, mingled with men who were but lads, and incapable of any prolonged resistance. These four army corps, hastily assembled and reorganised, without any solid ties to bind them together, formed, so to say, the army of despair, the expiatory flock which was to be sent to the sacrifice in an endeavour to avert the anger of Destiny. And this army must climb its Calvary to the bitter end, paying, with the red flood of its blood, for the faults of everyone, and attaining to fame by the very horror of the disasters that awaited it.