Sac-Au-Dos | Page 2

corner of
the street; they arrived at last at the railway station of Aubervilliers.
There was a moment of silence broken by the sound of sobbing,
dominated again by a burst of the Marseillaise, then they stalled us like

cattle in the cars. "Good night, Jules! may we meet soon again! Be
good! Above all write to me!" They squeezed hands for a last time, the
train whistled, we had left the station. We were a regular shovelful of
fifty men in that box that rolled away with us. Some were weeping
freely, jeered at by the others who, completely lost in drink, were
sticking lighted candles into their provisions and bawling at the top of
their voices: "Down with Badinguet! and long live Rochefort!" {2}
2 "Badinguet, nickname given to Napoleon III; Henri Rochefort,
anti-Napoleon journalist and agitator.
Others, in a corner by themselves, stared silently and sullenly at the
broad floor that kept vibrating in the dust. All at once the convoy
makes a halt--I got out. Complete darkness--twenty-five minutes after
midnight.
On all sides stretch the fields, and in the distance lighted up by sharp
flashes of lightning, a cottage, a tree sketch their silhouette against a
sky swollen by the tempest. Only the grinding and rumbling of the
engine is heard, whose clusters of sparks flying from the smokestack
scatter like a bouquet of fireworks the whole length of the train. Every
one gets out, goes forward as far as the engine, which looms up in the
night and becomes huge. The stop lasted quite two hours. The signal
disks flamed red, the engineer was waiting for them to reverse. They
turn; again we get back into the wagons, but a man who comes up on
the run and swinging a lantern, speaks a few words to the conductor,
who immediately backs the train into a siding where we remain
motionless. Not one of us knows where we are. I descend again from
the carriage, and sitting on an embankment, I nibble at a bit of bread
and drink a drop or two, when the whirl of a hurricane whistles in the
distance, approaches, roaring and vomiting fire, and an interminable
train of artillery passed at full speed, carrying along horses, men, and
cannon whose bronze necks sparkle in a confusion of light. Five
minutes after we take up our slow advance, again interrupted by halts
that grow longer and longer. The journey ends with daybreak, and
leaning from the car window, worn out by the long watch of the night, I
look out upon the country that surrounds us: a succession of chalky

plains, closing in the horizon, a band of pale green like the color of a
sick turquoise, a flat country, gloomy, meagre, the beggarly
Champagne Pouilleuse!
Little by little the sun brightens, we, rumbling on the while, end,
however, by getting there! Leaving at eight o'clock in the evening, we
were delivered at three o'clock of the afternoon of the next day. Two of
the militia had dropped by the way, one who had taken a header from
the top of the car into the river, the other who had broken his head on
the ledge of a bridge. The rest, after having pillaged the hovels and the
gardens, met along the route wherever the train stopped, either yawned,
their lips puffed out with wine, and their eyes swollen, or amused
themselves by throwing from one side of the carriage to the other
branches of shrubs and hencoops which they had stolen.
The disembarking was managed after the same fashion as the departure.
Nothing was ready; neither canteen, nor straw, nor coats, nor arms,
nothing, absolutely nothing. Only tents full of manure and of insects,
just left by the troops off for the frontier. For three days we live at the
mercy of Mourmelon.{3} Eating a sausage one day and drinking a
bowl of café-au-lait the next, exploited to the utmost by the natives,
sleeping, no matter how, without straw and without covering. Truly
such a life was not calculated to give us a taste for the calling they had
inflicted on us.
3 A suburb of Chalons.
Once in camp, the companies separated; the laborers took themselves to
the tents of their fellows; the bourgeois did the same. The tent in which
I found myself was not badly managed, for we succeeded in driving out
by argument of wine the two fellows, the native odor of whose feet was
aggravated by a long and happy neglect.
One or two days passed. They made us mount guard with the pickets,
we drank a great deal of eau-de-vie, and the drink-shops of Mourmelon
were full without let, when suddenly Canrobert {4} passed us in review
along the front line of battle. I see him now