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Then came great herds of cattle raising thick, whirling clouds of dust in the narrow parts of the road, prodded on by the sticks and yells of the shepherds in kepis. His thoughts kept him wakeful all night.
Sometimes they took payment in kisses, quite simply and without any bashfulness, lifting their faces to the lips of bronzed young men who thrust their kepis back and leaned out of the carriage windows. "Come back safe and sound, my little one," said a girl. "Fight well for France!" "I do not hope to come back," said a soldier, "but I shall die fighting."
Tardieu was strolling in the gardens of the Luxembourg with his friend Léon Sonrel, a former pupil of the Higher Normal School and teacher of natural philosophy at the Paris Observatory, when the latter had a kind of vision in the course of which he predicted various precise and actual episodes of the war of 1870, such as the collection on behalf of the wounded at the moment of departure and the amount of the sum collected in the soldiers' képis; incidents of the journey to the frontier; the battle of Sedan, the rout of the French, the civil war, the siege of Paris, his own death, the birth of a posthumous child, the doctor's political career and so on: predictions all of which were verified, as is attested by numerous witnesses who are worthy of the fullest credence.
They were armed with old muskets, and were wearing the red kepis as their only military distinction. They were following the opposite course of the military trains. In the station at Bordeaux, the civilian crowds struggling to get out or to enter other cars, were mingling with the troops. The trumpets were incessantly sounding their brazen notes, calling the soldiers together.
Staff officers galloped about at full speed; soldiers of the garrison or of Vinoy's Corps, who had come in a day or two before, lounged about the streets looking in at the shops. No small proportion of the male population wore kepis, which showed that they belonged either to the National Guard or to the battalions that were springing into existence. "Why do we not register our names to-day!"
To offset it, we have taken to playing Patience morning, noon and night, and if this monotony keeps up much longer we shall certainly become imbeciles. From time to time, in the trains going back to Germany one sees French prisoners, easy to tell by their red képis, boxed up in cattle cars, peering out from a narrow slit at the top.
With their cloaks adorned with medals, their theatrical Moorish garments, their kepis and their African headdresses, this heroic band presented, nevertheless, a lamentable aspect. Very few still preserved the noble vertical carriage, the pride of the superior human being. They were walking along bent almost double, limping, dragging themselves forward by the help of a staff or friendly arm.
It was pretty to see the soldiers all mount when the bugle rang out, and in a moment the whole body was in motion. The rush of the soldiers over the wide plains and the drawbridge looked irresistible the men swarmed down the bank and over the ditch one saw a confused mass of red trousers and kepis. The cavalry came along very leisurely, guarding the rear. I looked for the general.
I put the strongest in the rear, with orders to quicken the pace of the sluggards with the points of their bayonets in the back. "The snow seemed as if it were going to bury us alive; it powdered our kepis and cloaks without melting, and made phantoms of us, a kind of spectres of dead, weary soldiers. I said to myself: 'We shall never get out of this except by a miracle.
The kepis and the red trousers, the stripes and the gold buttons, the shoulder-knots of the staff, the braid of the chasseurs and the hussars, passed through the midst of the tombs, whose crosses, white or black, opened their mournful arms their arms of iron, marble, or wood over the vanished race of the dead. Colonel Limousin's wife had just been buried.
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