In the meantime the squad was beginning to growl, furious at the thought that they had nothing warm to comfort their stomachs with. It was impossible to light any fires without any dry wood, and in such filthy weather too. Thus, at the very moment when the battle was about to commence, the great, imperious, paramount belly-question came to the fore once more. Perhaps they were heroes--some of them at any rate--but before and above everything else they were maws. Eating was indeed the one all-important question, and how lovingly they skimmed the pot on the days when there was some good _soupe_, and how angry they waxed, like children and savages, when there was a scarcity of rations!
'No grub, no fighting,' declared Chouteau; 'I'll be blowed if I risk my skin to-day!'
This big, lanky house-painter, this fine speechifier from Montmartre, this public-house theorist who marred the few reasonable ideas that he had picked up here and there, by blending them with a frightful mixture of trash and lies, was again showing himself in the colours of a revolutionist. 'Besides,' continued he, 'haven't they played the fool with us, telling us that the Prussians were dying of hunger and illness, that they hadn't even got any shirts left, and were to be met on the roads grimed with dirt and as tattered as paupers?'
This made Loubet laugh, like the _gamin_ he was whose life had been spent amid all the hole-and-corner avocations of the Paris markets.
'But it's all rot,' continued Chouteau, 'it's we who are kicking the bucket, dying of misery, with our shoes full of holes and our clothes so ragged that anyone might be tempted to give us a copper out of charity. And then too those big victories! Ah! the humbugs, to tell us that they had taken Bismarck prisoner and knocked a whole army head over heels into a stone quarry. Ah! they have played the fool with us and no mistake.'
Pache and Lapoulle listened, clenching their fists and nodding their heads with an air of fury. Others also were enraged, for the everlasting lies of the Paris newspapers had ended by having a disastrous effect. Confidence was dead; no belief remained in anything. The minds of these big children, at the outset so fertile in extraordinary hopes, were now filled with maddening nightmares.
