They had had to make do with chewing some biscuit cold, helped down with generous lashings of brandy, which finally put paid to legs already giving way with fatigue. But just behind the piled rifles, near the cookhouse, two soldiers were doggedly trying to ignite a heap of green sticks, trunks of young saplings they had slashed down with their bayonets, and which obstinately refused to catch. Dense smoke was rising black and slow into the evening air, infinitely depressing.

There were only twelve thousand men there, all General Fielix Douay had with him out of the 7th army corps. The first division had been summoned the day before and had set off for Froeschwiller; the third was still in Lyons, and he had decided to leave Belfort and advance like this with the second division, the reserve artillery and a division of cavalry not up to full strength. Lights had been reported at Lorrach. A wire from the sub-prefect of Schlestadt said that the Prussians were about to cross the Rhine at Markolsheim. Feeling he was too isolated from the extreme right flank of the other corps and out of communication, the general had been all the more anxious to speed up his advance towards the frontier because news had come the previous day of the disastrous surprise at Wissembourg. At any moment, unless he was himself occupied in repulsing the enemy, he might have reason to fear being called on to support the 1st corps. On that uneasy thundery Saturday, 6 of August, there must have been fighting somewhere over in the Froeschwiller direction: you could see it in the anxious, louring sky, across which great shudderings and sudden gusts of wind passed, heavy with foreboding. And for the last two days the division had thought it was marching into battle, the soldiers had expected to see the Prussians there in front of them at the end of this long forced march from Belfort to Mulhouse.

The light was fading and retreat was heard in some distant corner of the camp, a drum-roll and sound of bugles, still faint and carried away into the air. And Jean Macquart, who had been busy strengthening the tent by driving the pegs further in, straightened up. At the first rumour of war he had left Rognes, the wound still raw from the drama in which he had lost his wife Françoise and the land she had brought as dowry. He had re-enlisted at the age of thirty-nine, got back his corporal’s stripes and been at once drafted to the 106th foot, which was then being brought up to full strength, and he was still amazed sometimes to find himself once again with his cape on his shoulders, for he had been overjoyed to get out of the services after Solferino and not be a sword-waver and killer any more. But what is a chap to do when he hasn’t a job, a wife or a bean left under the sun and his heart is turning over inside him with grief and rage? You might just as well have it out on the enemy if they get you down. And now he recalled the exclamation he had made – Oh bugger it, as he hadn’t got the guts left to till this old French soil he might as well defend it!

Standing there, Jean looked round the camp in which the retreat was producing a last-minute flurry of activity. A few men were running about, but others, already dropping with sleep, were getting up and stretching, looking tired and irritated. But he was patiently waiting for roll-call with that good-natured, equable reasonableness which made him such an excellent soldier. His mates said that with a bit of education he might have gone a long way. But being just able to read and write, he didn’t even covet the rank of sergeant. Once a peasant always a peasant.

But his eye was caught by the greenstick fire which was still smoking, and he hailed the two men still slaving away at it, Loubet and Lapoulle, both in his own squad.

‘Oh, turn it up! You’re smothering us all.’

Loubet, thin and wiry, who looked a bit of a joker, grinned.

‘It’s catching, corporal, it really is… Go on, you, blow!’

He bullied Lapoulle, a great giant of a man who was busting himself, blowing up a hurricane, with his cheeks puffed out like a pair of bellows and purple in the face, his eyes red and streaming.

Two other soldiers of the squad, Chouteau and Pache, the former flat on his back, being a lazy-bones fond of his comfort, the latter squatting and diligently mending a tear in his trousers, burst into laughter, tickled by the fearful face that great clot of a Lapoulle was making.

‘Why not turn round and blow from your backside, it’ll burn better,’ yelled Chouteau.

Jean let them laugh. There might not be many more chances, and for all the serious look of the man, with his full face and regular features, he wasn’t in favour of melancholy and deliberately shut his eyes when the men had their bit of fun. But another group caught his attention, yet another soldier in his squad, Maurice Levasseur, who had been talking for the last hour to a civilian, a red-haired gentleman of about thirty-six, with a face like a good-natured dog, with huge blue popping eyes – the short-sighted eyes that had got him exempted from military service. They had been joined by a reserve artilleryman, a sergeant, smart and self-assured with his dark moustache and goatee beard, and all three were chatting away quite oblivious of time as though they were at home.

Out of kindness, to save them from being told off, Jean felt he ought to intervene.

‘You had better be going, sir. This is retreat, and if the lieutenant should find you…’

Maurice cut him short.

‘You stay, Weiss.’

And to the corporal he snapped:

‘This gentleman is my brother-in-law. He had a permit from the colonel, who is a friend of his.’

What business was it of this yokel whose hands still smelt of dung? He himself had passed his law exams the previous autumn, enlisted as a volunteer and thanks to the colonel’s influence had been drafted direct to the 106th without going through the square-bashing, though he deigned to wear the knapsack. But from the first minute he had been put off by this illiterate clodhopper in command over him and felt a sullen resentment.

‘All right,’ Jean quietly answered, ‘get yourself run in, it’s all the same to me.’

Then he turned away as he saw that Maurice really wasn’t lying, for the colonel, Monsieur de Vineuil, happened to come along, with his grand manner, his long sallow face divided in two by his thick white moustache, and he had greeted Weiss and the soldier with a smile. The colonel was hurrying over to a farmhouse that could be seen two or three hundred metres to the left, surrounded by plum orchards, where headquarters had been set up for the night. Nobody knew whether the commanding officer of the 7th corps was there, in the awful grief over the death of his brother, killed at Wissembourg. But Brigadier Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who had the 106th under his command, was certainly there, yapping as usual, quite untroubled by his lack of brains, his skin florid with so much high living, and his heavy body rolling on his stumpy legs. There was increasing activity round the farm; dispatch-riders were coming and going every minute, and yet there was feverish waiting for dispatches, always too slow with news about this great battle which everybody sensed to be decisive and imminent ever since morning.