And still the car kept rolling onward with its load of human freight,
filled with reeking smoke of pipes and emanations of the crowded men,
belching its ribald songs and drunken shouts among the expectant
throngs of the stations through which it passed, among the rows of
white-faced peasants who lined the iron-way. On the 20th of August
they were at the Pantin Station in Paris, and that same evening
boarded another train which landed them next day at Rheims _en route_
for the camp at Chalons.



III.

Maurice was greatly surprised when the 106th, leaving the cars at
Rheims, received orders to go into camp there. So they were not to go
to Chalons, then, and unite with the army there? And when, two hours
later, his regiment had stacked muskets a league or so from the city
over in the direction of Courcelles, in the broad plain that lies
along the canal between the Aisne and Marne, his astonishment was
greater still to learn that the entire army of Chalons had been
falling back all that morning and was about to bivouac at that place.
From one extremity of the horizon to the other, as far as Saint
Thierry and Menvillette, even beyond the Laon road, the tents were
going up, and when it should be night the fires of four army-corps
would be blazing there. It was evident that the plan now was to go and
take a position under the walls of Paris and there await the
Prussians; and it was fortunate that that plan had received the
approbation of the government, for was it not the wisest thing they
could do?