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They went out silently. There was a sort of step kept, but it was very loose. They sang no songs, they were a most unfortunate crowd.

We had been for two hours upon our horses, we who had started long after sunrise after our horses had been groomed and fed and watered, and treated like Christian men—for it was a saying of ours that the Republic was kinder to a horse than to a man, because a horse cost money. We had gone, I said, two hours also along the road, trotting and walking alternately, with the interminable clatter-clank-clank of the limber and the pieces behind us, and with the occasional oath of the sergeant or the corporal when a trace went loose or when a bit of bad riding on the part of some leader checked the column of guns; we had so pounded along into the heat of the day; the sun was beginning to offend us—we were more in a sweat than our horses—when we heard a long way off upon the road before us the faint noise of a song, and soon we saw from one of those recurring summits of the arrow-like French road, the jolly fellows of the Line. They were not more than a thousand yards before us; they made a little dust as they went, and as they went their rifles swinging on the shoulder gave them a false appearance of unity—for unity they were not caring at all. Somewhat before we reached them we saw their cohesion break, they became a doubled mob upon either side of the road, and we knew that they were making the regulation halt of five minutes, which is ordered at the end of every hour; but probably their commanding officer had somewhat advanced or retarded this in order to make a coincidence with the going by of the guns.