In that easy way in which crowds change sides, the soldiers now began to acclaim Jean as he repeated his oath to break the skull of the first man in his squad who talked of not fighting. Bravo, corporal! That was the style! Bismarck's hash would soon be settled! In the midst of the savage ovation, Jean, who had calmed down, said to Maurice politely, as though he were not addressing one of his men, 'You can't be on the side of the cowards, sir--we haven't fought yet, but we'll end by licking them some day, those Prussians.'
At these words Maurice felt a sunray glide into his heart. He was disturbed, humiliated. So this Jean was not a mere rustic. Maurice remembered the fearful hatred that had consumed him when he picked up his gun after throwing it down in a moment of self-abandonment. But he also remembered how startled he had been at seeing the two large tears that stood in the corporal's eyes when the old grandmother, with streaming grey hair, was insulting them and pointing to the Rhine afar off beyond the horizon. Was it the fraternity born of fatigue and pain, endured in common, that was carrying his rancour away? Belonging as he did to a Bonapartist family, Maurice had never dreamt of the Republic otherwise than in theory; his inclinations were rather in favour of the Emperor personally, and he was a partisan of the war, war being in his mind an essential condition of the life of nations. Now, all of a sudden, hope was coming back to him in one of those veerings of the mind to which he was so subject; whilst the enthusiasm which one evening had impelled him to enlist again beat within him, filling his heart with confidence in victory.
'Certainly, corporal,' he answered gaily, 'we'll lick them!'
With its load of men, enveloped in the dense smoke of their pipes, and the stifling heat of their closely packed bodies, the cattle truck rolled and rolled along, greeting the anxious crowds at the stations and the haggard peasants posted along the hedges with obscene songs and drunken clamour. On August 20 they reached the Pantin station, just outside Paris, and the same night they started off again, quitting the train on the morrow at Rheims, _en route_ for the camp of Châlons.