In a more and more piercing voice she spat forth, as it were, that insulting epithet--coward. And then the laughter ceased, and a great chill sped through the ranks. The men lowered their heads and looked elsewhere.
Suddenly the old woman appeared to increase in stature. She raised her spare, tragic figure, draped in a shred of a dress, to its full height; and waving her long arm from west to east with so comprehensive a gesture that it seemed to embrace the entire heavens, she shouted: 'The Rhine is not there, you cowards--the Rhine is over _there_. Cowards! cowards!'
At last they were resuming their march, and Maurice, whose glance at this moment fell upon Jean's face, saw that the corporal's eyes were full of tears. He was thunderstruck, and his own suffering was increased at the thought that even this brutish peasant had felt the insult--an unmerited one, but to which they must needs submit. Everything then seemed to crumble away in Maurice's poor, aching head, and, overcome both by physical and moral suffering, he could never remember how he had finished the march.
The Seventh Army Corps had required an entire day to cover the fourteen or fifteen miles separating Dannemarie from Belfort; and night was again falling and it was very late when the troops were able to prepare their bivouacs under the walls of the fortress, on the very spot whence they had started four days previously to march against the enemy. Despite the lateness of the hour and their great weariness, the men insisted on lighting their fires and cooking their _soupe_. It was the first time, for four days, that they had something warm to swallow. And squatting around the fires in the freshening night air, they were all dipping their noses into their basins, and grunts of content were rising on all sides, when a rumour circulated, burst upon, spread through, and stupefied the camp. Two fresh telegrams had arrived at brief intervals. The Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim, and there was no longer a single Prussian at Huningen. The passage of the Rhine at Markolsheim, the pontoon bridge thrown across the river at night, thanks to powerful electric lights--all those alarming stories were mere dreams, the unaccountable hallucinations of the sub-prefect of Schelestadt. As for the army corps that threatened Huningen, the famous army corps of the Black Forest, which had made all Alsace tremble, this was composed of a petty detachment of Wurtembergers--two battalions of foot and a squadron of horse--who by skilful tactics, repeated marching and counter-marching, sudden and unforeseen apparitions, had created a belief in the presence of thirty or forty thousand men. To think the Dannemarie Viaduct had narrowly escaped being blown up that morning! Twenty leagues of prosperous country had been ravaged through an idiotic panic, for no reason whatever; and at thought of all they had seen that dreadful day--the inhabitants flying in terror, driving their cattle into the mountains, and the stream of furniture-laden vehicles flowing towards the town amid a troop of women and children--the soldiers felt thoroughly enraged, and vented their anger in exasperated jeers.