But the guns began to thunder more loudly down at Bazeilles, and Jean
bent his ear to listen.

"Where is the firing?"

"Faith," replied Maurice, "it seems to me to be over toward the Meuse;
but I'll be hanged if I know where we are."

"Look here, youngster," said the corporal, "you are going to stick
close by me to-day, for unless a man has his wits about him, don't you
see, he is likely to get in trouble. Now, I have been there before,
and can keep an eye out for both of us."

The others of the squad, meantime, were growling angrily because they
had nothing with which to warm their stomachs. There was no
possibility of kindling fires without dry wood in such weather as
prevailed then, and so, at the very moment when they were about to go
into battle, the inner man put in his claim for recognition, and would
not be denied. Hunger is not conducive to heroism; to those poor
fellows eating was the great, the momentous question of life; how
lovingly they watched the boiling pot on those red-letter days when
the soup was rich and thick; how like children or savages they were in
their wrath when rations were not forthcoming!

"No eat, no fight!" declared Chouteau. "I'll be blowed if I am going
to risk my skin to-day!"

The radical was cropping out again in the great hulking house-painter,
the orator of Belleville, the pothouse politician, who drowned what
few correct ideas he picked up here and there in a nauseous mixture of