rakish air, swinging his arms; and still along the dusty, sunlit
roads, between the golden grain and the fields of hops that succeeded
one another with tiresome monotony, the human tide kept pouring
onward; the stragglers, without arms or knapsacks, were now but a
shuffling, vagrant mob, a disorderly array of vagabonds and beggars,
at whose approach the frightened villagers barred their doors.

Something that happened just then capped the climax of Maurice's
misery. A deep, rumbling noise had for some time been audible in the
distance; it was the artillery, that had been the last to leave the
camp and whose leading guns now wheeled into sight around a bend in
the road, barely giving the footsore infantrymen time to seek safety
in the fields. It was an entire regiment of six batteries, and came up
in column, in splendid order, at a sharp trot, the colonel riding on
the flank at the center of the line, every officer at his post. The
guns went rattling, bounding by, accurately maintaining their
prescribed distances, each accompanied by its caisson, men and horses,
beautiful in the perfect symmetry of its arrangement; and in the 5th
battery Maurice recognized his cousin Honore. A very smart and
soldierly appearance the quartermaster-sergeant presented on horseback
in his position on the left hand of the forward driver, a good-looking
light-haired man, Adolphe by name, whose mount was a sturdy chestnut,
admirably matched with the mate that trotted at his side, while in his
proper place among the six men who were seated on the chests of the
gun and its caisson was the gunner, Louis, a small, dark man,
Adolphe's comrade; they constituted a team, as it is called, in
accordance with the rule of the service that couples a mounted and an
unmounted man together. They all appeared bigger and taller to
Maurice, somehow, than when he first made their acquaintance at the
camp, and the gun, to which four horses were attached, followed by the