XXXIII…

XXXIII

P. C. Breagh never heard the order given, but next moment his aching wrists were released from the huge, hard grip of Privates Braun and Kleiss, and the muscular legs that had affectionately twined about his own, were withdrawn. Subsequently, singly, and in silence, the Sergeant handed back the watch, pipe, tobacco-pouch, purse, and note-case. Last of all, Valverden, making a long arm, returned the half-sheet of Chancellory note, bearing the signature that had worked the miracle, without words, and looking coldly in its owner's face.

"Thanks tremendously! ... I've no doubt I'm to blame for not producing my credentials earlier," said Carolan. "But I'd no notion of the rather serious turn things were going to take. However, all's well that ends----"

His smile froze upon his lips, and died out of his eyes as he encountered the stare the other turned upon him, answering haughtily:

"I regret that you have suffered some rough handling from my comrades, under the wrong impression that you were an agent of the French Secret Service. Admitting that our own side act advisedly in employing persons like you, I must say that to me, personally, a spy is--a spy!"

"But, hang it! you don't suppose----" Carolan choked out after a moment of angry bewilderment. And with the Sergeant's piggish little eyes curiously fixed on him, Valverden answered curtly:

"I suppose nothing. Excuse me from further conversation."

The revolver with its cartridges had not been returned with the other articles. Its owner asked the Sergeant for it, getting in reply only a glare. Thenceforward the long night's journey for one traveler was performed in unbroken silence. P. C. Breagh had been dispatched to Coventry by one and all.

Men who conversed spoke in barely-audible whispers, their covert glances, like the frigid indifference of Valverden's regard, and the extra six inches of seat-space accorded to the holder of the States Chancellor's written guarantee, testified to the aroma of suspicion that personage's document exhaled.

So at breathless, baking midnight the troop-train clanked into Cologne, no longer throbbing with the beat of drums, roaring with iron-shod wheels, swarming with men in brass-spiked helmets, choked with continuously shouting patriots, as it had been a few hours earlier when the Headquarter Staff trains had passed through,--and in the close, gray dawn of a thundery day, jolted into Bingen.

Here miles of rolling-stock and numberless engines blocked up the metal roads. Shuttered windows and barricaded doors testified that house-owners had temporarily abandoned their property. Strings of barges, laden with Commissariat stores and live-stock, were being towed up the Rhine by the gaily painted, white-awninged, paddle-wheel steamers familiar to the British tourist, while others were conveying voluntarily exiled residents and fugitive visitors down the classic stream out of harm's way.

Conveyance by railway--of a kind--was to be had upon terms prohibitory to all but the opulent. And disheveled ladies, pale or red with panic, besieged the station-master and his master, the Halt Commandant--with prayers, commands and entreaties, for places, but for places on some Northward-going train....

Something was in the air besides the short, staccato bugle-calls, the scream of signal-whistles and the ceaseless beating of the Prussian side-drums. P. C. Breagh knew it, even as a tall, lean, red-faced Inspector caught his eye and beckoned him imperiously to quit his cage, asking:

"You have a Legitimation to proceed with the troops to Kreuznach? No? Then be good enough to stand aside until I have an opportunity of ascertaining why you were originally permitted. Here is the Commandant."

Standing on the whitewashed platform, hot, dusty, unbrushed and unwashed, burdened with his unstrapped knapsack, a stout walking-stick, a leather-covered, screw topped sling water-bottle, some crumpled newspapers and a package of solid sandwiches--thrust upon him at one of the previous stopping-places, P. C. Breagh was conscious of cutting a sorry figure. Conscious, too, of Valverden's supercilious eye-glass, glittering a few yards off, as he stretched his long legs on the platform and talked eagerly with some comrades of his own standing, straight-backed, long-legged youngsters, with arrogant manners, clear eyes, budding mustaches, newly fledged whiskers, broad shoulders and regulation waists.

No new pupil at a young ladies' boarding school, smarting under the double stigma of plainness and poverty, no cheaply arrayed debutante at a suburban subscription-ball, ever blushed more hotly or winced more painfully under the scrutiny of prettier and richer girls, than did P. C. Breagh under the glances of these young men.

Not the memory of the Army Service examinations he had failed in galled him, or that missed shot for the I.C.S., or the University career foregone. It was the word "spy" that rankled in his memory and took the starch out of his self-conceit.

Before the discovery of the Minister's written guarantee, Valverden had gossiped with him as an equal--the other Guardsmen had been friendly in their rougher way. The fateful half-sheet of Chancellory note had changed everything. "As though one had blossomed out in plague or smallpox," P. C. Breagh had said to himself bitterly. "And I feel like a kind of Ali Baba or somebody, whose talisman would only work upside down!"

Even his parting salute had met with grudging acknowledgment. The Sergeant had grunted. Braun and Kleiss had spat, and looked the other way. Valverden's finger had barely brushed the narrow peak of his forage-cap. Only Kunz, the spectacled ex-chemist's assistant, had civilly bidden the parting guest good-day.

He was horribly sore at the treatment received from Valverden. Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere in feeling, he had taken a liking to the brilliant youngster, three years his junior, his superior in social status and in cynical knowledge of the world. Was it disgraceful to belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret Intelligence Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible wires, reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe, and emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse, Berlin?

The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by Jingo! Had not scraps of conversation reached the ears of P. C. Breagh no later than the previous day, relative to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian Field Artillery, who for the past two years had filled the well-paid post of lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon Marche.

Then why on earth.... But at this juncture the Halt Inspector returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered, potty officer, in blue infantry uniform with distinctive white shoulder-straps, beside whom stalked a tall, middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes, unshaded by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar meerschaum--and whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked better in the dark blue cavalry uniform with its yellow plastron and white cross-belt, than in Herr von Rosius's Berlin-made private clothes.

For it was undoubtedly Miss Ling's quiet-mannered first-floor lodger, who had resigned his post of teacher at the Berners Street Institute of Languages when the wire had come from Headquarters, bidding him come back and be a cog-wheel in Moltke's big war-machine. What Mr. Knewbit would have called "the blank expression" appeared behind his spectacles when they showed him his young fellow-lodger from Coram Street. But he paused when the Commandant halted and began to ask questions--which Carolan answered in the German so frequently tested on Herr von Rosius.

"How came you to travel from Berlin in a train set apart for the use of the Guard Infantry? Show me your Legitimations-Kart and military ticket, if you have one!--You have neither? ... Then how did you, against the regulations, obtain permission of the authorities to enter a militär-zug? It is inconceivable that you should have managed to conceal yourself without connivance of some kind!"

Things were getting close to the Chancellory half-sheet, but it would never be displayed with the consent of P. C. Breagh. He had wild ideas of feigning idiocy, of appealing to Von Rosius, but the first resource savored of the theater too strongly for adoption, and the second--one glance at the hard, ignoring eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses disposed of that for good.

At his wits' end, a loud, genial voice hailed him in the English language, flavored with the County Dublin brogue.

"By the powers! and there's the face I'm looking for. Longer by a yard than it was when you capped me at Berlin. Faith! and I stared at you with all my eyes, wondering where in the world I'd last beheld ye? Till Chris Brotherton quizzed me and I bet him five shillings the place was Fleet Street. Now, on your honor, was it? Speak, or forever after hold your tongue!"

"Not quite Fleet Street, sir, but hardly a stone's throw from it!" A great wave of unreasonable hope lifted the sinking heart of P. C. Breagh.

The big, warm voice and the kind, bright glance that had wrought the miracle, belonged to a stout little bearded gentleman of fifty, topped with a hard gray Derby, and attired in a pepper-and-salt cutaway coat, brown holland vest and neat white hunting-stock, gray Bedford cords and shiny black spurred Blucher boots. Had you met him cantering on some plump and well-fed cob along a green lane in the Mother Country, you would have taken him--but for the revolver-pouch that depended from a neat black leather belt, and the wallet that, with its companioning field-glass, was slung across his shoulders--for a hard-riding country surgeon or solicitor, of the good old English kind. But P. C. Breagh knew better, and his drab world changed to rose-color, as the big voice rolled from the capacious chest:

"Hardly a minute's ... Hold on! For the life of you, don't refresh my memory! What would it be to find one's mental legs getting shaky at the start of a new campaign! Not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, did you say? ... By the Beadle of Old Trinity! if you don't mean the Maze at Hampton Court or the Nevski Prospect at Petersburg, or the garden of the Dilkusha at Lucknow, you're talking of Printing House Square! Am I right now?"

"You've hit the nail, sir! You were walking arm-in-arm with Mr. Sala--and I'd been introduced to him before, luckily! and he remembered my name and presented me to you!"

"And I'm five shillings the richer by the meeting. For if Chris Brotherton dares to say the Thunderbolt office and Fleet Street are anything but synonymous, he's a bolder man than I take him to be. But I'm interrupting a conversation...." He broke off, saluting the official. "Pray accept my apologies, Herr Commandant, I'll wait while you finish with my young friend."

The Commandant stiffly returned the genial salute before he wheeled and walked off with the Inspector and Von Rosius, who, while the king of British War Correspondents chatted with his glowing vassal, had exchanged a few sentences with these personages apart. Then said the kindly little gentleman, with a humorous twirl of the eye at the three:

"I claimed your acquaintance because I saw you nearing the jaws of a German guardroom. Though I fancy you'd a friend at Court in that Uhlan Colonel there! ... I heard him tell the Commandant that he'd no earthly idea how you got here, but you were simply an English schoolboy who was crazy to see a war. And the Commandant said something about turning tail at the first whistle of a Bombensplitter--that's a shell-splinter. Though I'm pretty certain by the cut of your jib you'd do nothing of the kind!"

He added, as a familiar shout of "Entrain!" and a bugle-call brought the platform leg-stretchers scampering to their places and the long train of gray-painted wagons, officers' horse-boxes and baggage trucks, clanked into motion again:

"Your friends of the Guard have gone without you. Kreuznach will be their detraining-point--that's all I can tell you. For the reason--and it's an uncommonly sound one!--that the newly mobilized men of the infantry battalions want a march to limber their joints and stretch their new boots a bit. Begad! my own brogues would be the better of a day or two on the trees. But rheumatism and corns are the price one pays for experience--and the privilege of talking like a daddy to harum-scarum gossoons like yourself. You've no business to be here, boyo! but since you are--use your eyes and brains to observe with--never be ashamed of running away when you can get out of danger by doing it! and for your mother's sake, if she's living--don't be dragged into fighting on a side. Forget that you have a revolver, if that bulge under your jacket means that you carry one,--and keep your temper cool and your opinions strictly neutral, if a fellow with a drop of Irish blood in him can! Twit me with Bull Run, now, and you'll get the historic answer: 'Do as I advise you to do, not what I do!'"

He pulled out the battered gold hunting-watch at the end of its short, strong leather guard, and glanced at it, saying with a sigh of relief:

"Seven o'clock. Breakfast ought to be ready at the Victoria--barrack of a hostelry, packed with cocky Prussian officers. Suppose you come back there with me and have a bite and sup?"

Dazzling prospect! to a young man given to hero-worship, which the historian of "Cromwell" had positively asserted to be good for youthful bodies and souls. P. C. Breagh would have given a great deal if Valverden could have heard the invitation.... However, it was more likely than not that he had beheld the object of his scorn in familiar conversation with the most famous of British War Correspondents, as the gray-painted troop-train carried him away.

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XXXIV

That was an enchanted walk for P. C. Breagh, back to the big, bare, barrack-like Victoria. It was the Doctor's generous amends for an unintentional slight. Two days previously, at the Potsdam Railway Station, Berlin, when a companion had said to him: "Who's the enthusiastic young admirer who kowtowed to you? English, I should say, and you cut him unmercifully,"--he had answered, out of the whirl of great affairs:

"I've no notion; but I'll make amends if ever he crosses my path again. It's not my way to hurt a boy."

"Bet you five bob he hails from Fleet Street," the friend had cried; and the Doctor had answered:

"If so, he has a claim on me I'm not going to deny."

Dust underfoot made the tread fall as on velvet. Dust in the air parched the throat and got in the eyes. And the incessant rolling of the Prussian side-drums, lanced through with signal whistles and sharp bugle-calls, made the hot baked atmosphere quiver, and the play of early sunshine on myriads of brass helmet-spikes made the eyes water and blink, as the battalions of blue infantry that had marched into Bingen on the previous day mustered from their billets, were entrained and conjured away; and other battalions that had marched fifteen miles since cock-crow tramped in with the thick white dust turned to mud upon them by the heavy Rhineland dews that had soaked their boots and damped their uniforms, halted but to breakfast--and were off, almost on the heels of the first.

Division after Division of Cavalry--Uhlans in light or dark blue piped with red, and shiny black Lancer schapkas, Cuirassiers in white uniforms, with steel breast and back plates, and steel helmets simple in design as those of Cromwell's Ironsides; light blue Dragoons, Hussars with tufted shakos of miniver, and braided jackets of red, black, green, brown and pale blue, with their flying batteries of Horse Artillery, their proviant columns and ammunition-trains, had been rushed to the frontier with astounding speed. Now the blue deluge of marching men with needle-guns came rolling after. With thunder of heavy siege-trains, with patches of green upon the monotonous blue, that stood for picked battalions of sharpshooters; sons of gamekeepers and forest-rangers; bred from childhood to woodcraft and hunter's lore; experts in the use of the rifle, scouts and trackers of daring and skill.

On the seventeenth of July the Warlock had said to his King, "Give me to the third of August and we are safe." This was the third of August. And the air was thick with something besides dust.

Conscious of this, they talked, the neophyte and the adept discussing things that had happened during the pregnant interval. How Forbes of the Daily News, who tramped it up to Saarbrück by the Nahe Valley Road from Kreuznach, had seen the first blood flow, when a couple of infantrymen of the garrison were brought in in a chipped condition, having been sniped at by red-breeched French marksmen across the frontier-line.

With a single battalion of the Hohenzollerns, the 7th Regiment of Rhineland Uhlans had hitherto constituted Saarbrück's garrison. And the French being reported in force at Forbach, some fifteen or sixteen thousand men being said to be strung out along the frontier, a detachment of Uhlans with spare troop-horses had ridden into Neunkirchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July, and borrowed from the collieries a dozen stout miners, armed with picks, and supplied with blasting cartridges, fuses, and so on. These grimy stalwarts they tied on troop-horses; crossed the frontier, and blew up the viaduct on the railway-line branching from the Forbach-Metz railway near Cocheren and connecting Metz with Saarguemines, Bitche, Hagenau and Strasbourg.

Thenceafter, nothing of note happened until the twenty-eighth of July, when the Emperor Napoleon III. entered Metz with his Staff and the heir to the Throne Imperial, and formally took command of the seven corps d'armée known as the "Army of the Rhine." Upon the same day, a party of the Hohenzollerns, commanded by an N.C.O., reconnoitering on the right front, flushed a French vidette, in a wood covering a knoll of rising ground, over the top of which went the imaginary frontier-line.

Being shot at, the Hohenzollerns retired to garrison. But about regimental soup-time, twelve or thereabouts, a battery of six French field-pieces came over the slope of the Spicherenberg heights, getting into position on a plateau half-way down.

And while the Prussian drummers beat to arms; while the Hohenzollerns hastily posted their four companies, one on each of the town's three bridges, and sent one forward on the heels of a squadron of Uhlans, up the Forbach Road, which runs through Saarbrück, rising as it trends to the west;--while the rest of the Uhlans stood to their horses in the Markt-platz, and the civilian population stopped to look on, or scuttled for cover, six shells were fired, three of them hitting a little beerhouse on the hill-brow, just off the Forbach Road--and the Imperial cannonade was over, the artillerists retired, and nothing more had happened,--though the videttes and patrols, Gallic and Teuton, had cracked away at each other from high noon till batlight.

Discussing these things, the adept and the neophyte came to the Victoria, every window of which was crowded with Prussian officers, eating, drinking and smoking, or shouting for breakfast, coffee, beer, wine and tobacco in every key of the human register.

Distracted waiters ran about like ants, and before the packed and roaring caravanserai--keeping guard over one of the little decrepit iron tables that stood under the dusty acacias--a little table that had a fly-spotted cloth upon it, and a great glass basin filled with sugar cubes, and was further adorned with brown rings made by the bottoms of coffee-cups and beer-glasses, were the two friends referred to by P. C. Breagh's Good Samaritan.

One was a handsome, fair-haired, smiling man in the scarlet, yellow-faced, gold-adorned uniform of a crack regiment of British Light Dragoons, "a swell of the haw-haw type" Mr. Ticking would have termed him. With this splendid personage, who was generally referred to as "Major Brotherton," was a shorter, plainer individual with fluffy whiskers, attired as for the sports of the field, in a white, low-crowned felt, large checked tweeds, in which orange and pink predominated, drab leggings and heavily nailed highlows. A Dolland field-glass was slung from his shoulders, and over a neighboring chair lay a huge box-coat, the multitudinous pockets of which appeared to contain his luggage, for a bath-sponge in a rubber bag rolled out of one as he rose up to welcome the leader of the party, and a box of areca-nut tooth-paste, and a hairbrush with a patent collapsible handle had to be shifted before the sponge could be replaced; just as though Mr. Toole had thought out the costume and the comic business for some traveling Briton in a new farce.

You may suppose P. C. Breagh blushing from consciousness of the contrast of his own travel-stained griminess with the Major's dazzling brilliancy, when that personage shook hands with him and said it was going to be a hot day. Introduced by his kindly patron to the sportsman in pink and orange tweeds with:

"Tower, this is a young countryman of mine--picked up at the station--just tumbled out of a troop-wagon full of Guards Infantry----"

The fluffy whiskered sportsman civilly nodded and observed: "And dashed good luck for him!" He added: "Doctor, if you recognized your baggage-van by that confounded goat you've had painted on it, I'll admit it's served some purpose besides frightening German crows!"

"Begad! it frightened me when I saw it on the siding this morning!" avowed the genial Doctor. "But how was I to know that the Berlin painter who undertook to copy the crest from my family coat-of-arms had got a magnifying eye?"

Said the man in cavalry uniform, smoothing his drooping mustache, and speaking with the drawl of Robertsonian comedy:

"At any rate, the size of the animal testifies to the antiquity of your race, and so on. For in prehistoric days, I take it, goats were as big as cows are now!"

"My thanks to you, Brotherton, for supplying so plausible an explanation. I'll salve my pride of pedigree with it next time I'm taken for a traveling quack, and Prussian soldiers suffering with indigestion apply to me for pills and black-dose." He added, with his pleasant laugh, catching P. C. Breagh's glance of incredulity: "Actual fact, and no embroidery, I assure you! You understand that to emphasize the strictly pacific nature of my calling, I'm exploiting my honorary degree for all it's worth!" He added, rather pointedly addressing the handsome cavalryman, "I've no special ambition to be shot as a combatant!"

"Nor have I," said the man in sporting checks, warmly. "And, Brotherton, my dear fellow, if this 'ere 'umble individual may add his advice to the counsel you've already had from the man, by Jove! who of all men knows best what he's talkin' about, you'll stow that 'ere lady-killing uniform, and the silver helmet with the flowin' plume away in some spare portmanteau, and leave 'em with your saber and the dazzlin' horse-furniture you showed me this morning in charge of the landlord here, until you come back from the war-path safe and sound. Am I talking 'oss sense, Doctor?"

"Indeed you are, Tower!" agreed the Doctor. "And, Chris, if you'll listen to him, I'll be eternally grateful to you, for your own sake. You've too much of what Tower and the Yankees call 'horse sense' not to know you're handicapped as a war correspondent by your glorious panoply!"

The Major smiled, and said, smoothing the drooping mustache with a fine white hand that wore a diamond-set signet:

"You can't blame me for thirsting to carry the harness I've worn in sham fights for nearly half my lifetime, where bullets are flying in real earnest?"

"Not a bit, dear fellow," said the Doctor, with a twinkle, "so long as you thirst to do it and don't! That letter 'R' on your shoulder-cord is hardly big enough to serve as cover where those bullets are plentiful. And with your influence, prospects in life, and position, you'd be an ingrate to Fate if you were anxious to die at thirty-four."

Said Brotherton, knitting his fair eyebrows over the restless fire in his handsome eyes:

"Influence has been my bane, and the two other things have stood in my light ever since I was an urchin in knickerbockers. I've been Queen's page, and Prince's Equerry, and aide-de-camp on the Duke's Staff, and I've never seen an army in the field, or smelt powder, except at Aldershot, or Shorncliffe, or the Curragh of Kildare, or at carbine-practice. What luck do you call that?"

"Dashed hard!" said Tower.

Brotherton went on:

"I was a callow cadet at Sandhurst when the Regiment covered itself with glory at Balaclava, and as it has seen no active service since--I've had no chance to find out whether I'm a real soldier, or a kid-glove one."

"Why not have exchanged----" began Tower. The Major shook his head.

"It wasn't to be done, for a very solid reason. My father, who served with Redlett's Brigade in the Crimea, was killed on Balaclava Day; and I was an only son. And my mother was a confidential Lady-in-Waiting, and knew where to apply, by Jove! when my youthful ambition was to be cold-watered.... And now that the dear soul has gone, and I'm on the Retired list--after fifteen years of Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Pall Mall and Hyde Park--out breaks the war that I've been sighing for. And, after hovering about the Thunderbolt office till every printer's devil knows me by name, and cooling my heels on the doorstep of your chambers in the Albion so persistently that your housekeeper believed me a bailiff with a writ--I managed to knock over Opportunity on the wing--and secured, thanks to you, Doctor! the chance of my life!"

He stood up, a handsome, martial figure in his scarlet and golden uniform, his eyes ablaze under the silver, gold-starred, white-plumed helmet, his fine face flushed with the battle-lust. And as he stretched out his hand across the spotty tablecloth, the feasting flies rose in a buzzing cloud.

"And glad am I if word of mine helped to get that chance for you, and you know it, Chris, and that it's a pleasure to have you with me," said the genial voice, as the Doctor took the offered hand. "But the military array, my dear fellow! The wampum and war-paint--that's what I kick at, with my gouty toe of fifty-two." He added: "But here comes the waiter with the coffee and eggs, and bread and butter, and something like the cold sliced ham I'm dying for--if only it doesn't happen to be raw! So sit down and we'll fortify ourselves against possible short-commons at Mayence. For that's where the King is, with Moltke and the Great Headquarters. And that's the destination we take rail for at twelve noon."

He added, as Brotherton and Tower started in their chairs, and P. C. Breagh quivered like a fox-terrier shown a rat: "As for the other chiefs, the Red Prince is--no one seems able to tell where--and the Crown Prince is on the frontier. Maybe we'll hear of him at Wissembourg by-and-by!"

"We should be there ourselves, in the thick of it," asserted Brotherton, savagely slashing at a pallid pat of butter, as Tower poured boiling milk and coffee into cups half-an-inch thick.

"We would be, Chris, me dear man!" said the Doctor, liberally piling slices of cold veal and ham-sausage on his guests' plates, cutting bread and passing the pickles, "if the authorities panted to have English correspondents at their elbows while they're posting their pawns and pieces for the opening game!"

Brotherton retorted with a touch of pomposity:

"You take it lightly, sir. But for the honor of our profession, we should extort recognition at the hands of these foreigners. We should, as representatives of a great Power, submit to no belittling. Wielding as we do----"

"Keep all that toffee for the speechmaking end of a Newspaper Press dinner, Chris, my boy," drolled the Doctor. "Sure, 'tis we ourselves are the foreigners here--hard as it is of conception to a true-born Briton. And--since we're permitted on sufferance to accompany the forces of United Germany--the least we can do is to extract the necessary information painlessly!"

"But, my God! when I think of what may be doing at this moment!" broke out Brotherton, hitting the table, "I feel as if I should go stark, staring crazy! Have I sacrificed what I have sacrificed--and--and borne what I have borne, to trot like a stray tyke at the tail of a moving Army--picking up such scraps as may be thrown me from day to day? I tell you, sir, the mere idea is horrible to me! I cannot put it more mildly. My blood is not yet chilled by age, or my susceptibilities blunted...." He pushed away his plate and rose, pulling his gloves from his belt, and taking up the cloak that had been thrown over a neighboring chair. "I will ask you to excuse me! I have not yet received my papers back from the Halt Commandant. I will call upon him now!"

"Come with you, if you've no objection to walking in civilian company?" said Tower, swallowing a mouthful, emptying his coffee-cup, and reaching for the white felt hat and the box-coat.

"Come back about ten--I may have a scrap or two of news worth hearing," said the Doctor, with imperturbable good temper; and with a horsey touch of the hat on Tower's part, and a sulkily dignified salute from the Major, the tall soldierly figure in its scarlet and blue and gold, and the less dignified personality in the clothes that might have been worn by Toole in the part of a horsey squire, went away together, over the yellow-burnt grass and the dusty sun-baked gravel, dotted with little breakfasting groups of officers, who had been crowded out of the Hotel.

"I'm glad Tower's gone with him. He's in a frame of mind that won't make for pleasant relations with Prussian transport-officers," quoth the Doctor, looking after the retreating couple with something like a twinkle and something like a sigh. "But he's a grand fellow!--a splendid fellow is Brotherton!--even if he sometimes reminds me of the Quaker wife who said to her husband: 'Friend Timothy, all the world is wrong except thee and me, and thou is a little wrong sometimes, Friend Timothy!'"

And having got rid of his vexation in one gentle gibe at the idiosyncrasy of the petulant Brotherton, he fell to his breakfast again, urging his guest to a renewed attack on the strong ham-sausage and weak coffee, with the words:

"Bad policy--neglecting rations. Must stoke when fuel for the human engine is to be had, if you're going to chronicle the deeds of an army that fights as it marches. And when you've cleaned your plate, and drunk another cup of coffee, you shall tell me why you came here and what you want to do."

He commented, when P. C. Breagh, duly replete, had stated the nature of his aims and ambitions; touching upon his discouragements as briefly as might be:

"War Correspondence! ... Well, I'll admit I guessed that you'd set your heart on something of the kind, when I saw you tumble out of that troop-wagon with a note book sticking out of your jacket-pocket. And so old Knewbit financed? Sporting of him!--and he deserves that his letters should be worth reading. Call 'em 'Experiences of a Tyke at the Tail of an Army.'" He added, his bright brown eyes twinkling through their gold-rimmed glasses. "For that's where you've got to be!"

He lighted a huge cigar, twisted round his green-painted iron chair and sat astride upon it, resting on its rickety back his folded arms, short and strong, with small muscular hands, sunburned like his bearded face and thick bull-neck.

"I am not joking, my young acquaintance. Can't you understand that to keep abreast with even a secondary Staff in the war-field you have to sweat out money at every pore? And--without gold for transport or thalers for trinkgelt--or seasoned knowledge to help you even if your pockets were full, what can you accomplish? I tell you frankly--nothing at all! But if you'll follow on the fringe of a Division, marching with the hangers-on and officers' servants--you'll get many a scrap of useful news and many a meaty bone of valuable information tossed to you day by day. And even with the rear of the Army Corps you elect to stick to, you'll sup your fill of raw-head and bloody bones--take the assurance from me. Will you--with the advice?"

The great man was so unassuming in his kindness that the little one hardly grasped the full extent of it, even as he said, blinking as though a cinder of the Lower Rhineland Railroad had got into his eye:

"Yes, sir, and thank you! I shall never forget how good you've been to me!" and got reply:

"You've no business to be here, boyo, but since you are, more by luck than grace, use your eyes and stuff your memory with things worth keeping. Now as my time is precious,--is there anything more you want to know?"

"Only one thing.... I have been puzzled by an--an incident that happened to a--fellow in my own position." P. C. Breagh boggled horribly: "Was regularly set on getting to the Front--hadn't a notion how to set about it--when he--accidentally--managed to get hold of a--kind of official authorization. An informal pass, certifying the bearer as trustworthy--written and signed by Count Bismarck himself...."

"And that wasn't half bad," the Doctor said, knocking the ash off the huge cigar, "for a beginner pretty well, it seems to me!"

Said P. C. Breagh:

"He was tremendously elated at having got the paper. It seemed to smooth away every difficulty. But later, when he found himself in touch with Prussian Army men--they,--not only the gentlemen privates qualifying for commissions, but the common rankers,--dropped him like a hot potato once they knew! And--I'd like to know the reason why they cut me--I mean him?--because they supposed him to belong to the Secret Intelligence Department? 'A spy is--a spy! Excuse me from further conversation!' His mouth twisted wryly, repeating the hateful words.

"I--understand." The Doctor stroked his beard. "And previously this young Englishman and the rank-and-file of the Guard Infantry"--P. C. Breagh kept as straight an upper-lip as was possible--"had chatted together upon friendly terms?"

"That was it. He had got on splendidly with them--one fellow especially. And--it hurt, being suddenly sent to Coventry!..."

"And does it strike you"--there was infinite sagacity in the clear brown eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, "that if you had been chatting freely with a supposed equal, about your own position, prospects, and opinions, you would have 'dropped him like a hot potato' if you had suspected him of being commissioned to sound you for French sympathies, predilections, and so forth--on the eve of hostilities with France?"

A light broke in upon the darkness in which Carolan had groped. His eyes became circular, and his mouth shaped for a whistle. He exploded:

"Oh, hang it! I never thought of anything so--so beastly.... I wondered why Valverden shied, supposing me a Secret Information agent, when the Army has shoals of 'em.... But that Government should set such fellows sniffing at the heels of the Army--of course I never thought of that. It's not--cricket, is it, sir?"

The Doctor's hearty laugh pulled round the heads of a breakfasting party of officers not far off. He said, lowering his voice:

"You remember the nigger's definitions of verse and prose, don't you? 'Go up mill-dam, fall down slam! dat verse. Go up mill-dam, fall down whoppo, dat blank verse.' Prussian military authority may hold, that between spying on the enemy before the Army and spying on the Army before the enemy, there is as little distinction. Though they'd think differently at the Horse Guards, thank the Lord! By the way, with regard to that gaunt, long-legged Lieutenant-Colonel of Uhlans of the Landwehr who claimed to know something of you, rather luckily for your ambitions!--where did you come across him? 'An English schoolboy,' he called you, 'crazy to see War!'"

P. C. Breagh explained:

"He did know something of me, sir!--though it was the merest chance--our meeting. Until a week ago he was a teacher of English at the Berners Street Institute of Languages, and lodged at my landlady's. And they recalled him to Berlin a few hours before the Declaration of War."

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XXXV

It was the Doctor's turn to whistle.

"Phew! So that's how they spy out and trap deserters from their Reserve and Landwehr. Clever--uncommonly! Possibly it's not business to tell you, but you've given away a genuine bit of information. And as a lesson in caution for the future, I shall annex your nugget--do you hear? In return--I've a pass for an extra groom who has shot the moon with three weeks' double pay in advance, the cowardly beggar! And--supposing you're not too proud--I'll take you with me as far as Mayence."

"I don't know how to thank you, sir!"

"Leave thanking for the present." He pulled out the gold chronometer, secured by its twisted thong. "Ten o'clock, and here come Towers and Brotherton, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 'with a kind of confession in their looks which their modesties have not craft enough to color.' No news to be had? No starting for Mayence before twelve sharp, in spite of honied entreaties lavished on the authorities?"

"Deuce a scrap!"

"Devil a minute!"

They threw themselves upon chairs, hot, dusty and panting. They had got their papers back, countersigned, from a kind of understrapper, after, to do him justice, very little delay. But of intelligence, not a modicum was obtainable, except that the Emperor was said to be close to the frontier near Saarbrück at the head of the Imperial Guards.

"Though they've been saying that for forty-eight hours," grumbled Tower, "and I'm dam' if I call it anything but Ancient History."

At which candid confession the Doctor's mouth twitched under the thick, curling mustache of rusty iron-gray. He said, his quick eye noting an excited stir and bustle about the thronged entrance of the hotel, and the crowding of officers about another, who had a paper in his hand:

"Those officers have heard--something that is not Ancient History. And look at the fellows who were eating at the tables in the windows; they've something tastier to discuss now than the landlord's indifferent grub!"

It was true. In the long dining-room, in the restaurant, and in the reading-room, which had been converted into a temporary coffee-room, men were swarming like bees and buzzing like them, while detached, staccato sentences shaped out of the buzz.

"Saarbrück ... Spicheren ... Frossard ... Colonel von Pestel...."

"Something up...." Towers adjusted his eyeglass. Brotherton, catching a sentence shouted by an officer of a jäger battalion to another green-coat leaning from a window on the second-floor, jumped as though he had been prodded with a bayonet, and turned a flaming face upon his friend:

"A telegram has come in... There has been serious fighting at Saarbrück. Did they lie to us at the station, then? Officers and gentlemen----"

"Softly, Chris!" The Doctor's hand upon his arm checked him on the verge of a fiery outburst. "I fancy they've a right to hold back intelligence dispatched from Headquarters when the senders mark the wire 'Delay.'"

"No doubt, but I had better interview the Commandant. Details would be worth having!" said Brotherton, adding with a peculiar smile, "Or at least I, in my inexperience, am inclined to think so."

Came the quick answer:

"You can have details now--without troubling the Commandant! Full--well, as fully as I got them--under a strict undertaking of secrecy for four hours--at six o'clock this morning!"

Brotherton turned as ashen-pale as he had hitherto been crimson. Towers called out gleefully, as active little thrills of excitement coursed down P. C. Breagh's spine:

"Bravo, Doctor! And you had it up youi sleeve all the time. 'Unfold, thou man of 'orrid mystery!' as Miss Le Grange says at Astley's in the Specter's Bride."

"There's not so much to unfold. But from, eight thousand to ten thousand French troops made an attack on Saarbrück yesterday. Some battalions of the 8th Prussian Army Corps had augmented the original garrison, and their nearest support was at Lebach, five miles to the rear. A mitrailleuse-battery and some field-guns posted on the Keppertsberg drove the Blue Uniforms out of the town!"

Towers said: "Then why the deuce..." and broke off. Brotherton gloomed heavily. The Doctor went on:

"The Emperor and the Prince Imperial were on the heights, with the Imperial Staff, to see the show--an astonishing spectacle it must have been. Frossard, in the center with supports drawn from the Second Corps--Marshal Bazaine on the right, with troops picked from the Third. And in command of the Fifth Corps, De Failly, who crossed the river at Saarguemines."

Queried Tower:

"And when the big bow-wow had made the little one drop the bone, he didn't stick to it?"

The Doctor returned:

"No--and that's the puzzle of the whole affair. The whole glorious display resolved itself into a cannonade, with occupation of the heights on the left bank, and nothing further. Though the French foreposts actually occupied the three bridges and held the town."

Tower said, his pale eyes sharp with intelligence:

"Bet you a tenner it was done for the boy. Got up to blood the young'un--cockerel of the Walk Imperial. Geewhillikins!--What telegrams Nap must have fired off to St. Cloud!"

"They'll have read them in Berlin and London long before they get to us," said the Doctor, shrugging. "Where are you off to, Brotherton?"

Brotherton returned--and the tone was offensive, if the words were not:

"To do what my senior Special does not appear to think necessary--wire the news to Printing House Square."

The elder answered with a good-humored twinkle:

"Why, that was done hours back, by grace of the authorities. They bridled my tongue, but left my pen unhampered. Knowing, of course, that the British Public must wait for its news until breakfast-time to-morrow. Were you speaking to me, Brotherton?"

The Major was saying in a voice as little like his own as the livid mask of rage he turned on the Doctor resembled his ordinarily calm and placid visage:

"I was addressing you, though it pleased you not to hear me. I was asking you what you meant, by G----! in stealing a march on the man you've called your friend?"

The Doctor's eyes blazed behind their gold-rimmed glasses. Anger darkened his handsome sunburnt face. He drew himself up and said, speaking simply and with dignity:

"How do you infer that I have 'stolen a march on you'? By taking the apology they give one here for a cold tub at cockcrow and going over to the Hauptmann's office with our papers while you and Tower were sleeping like----"

"Like dormice, by Gad!" put in Tower. "And so we were. And it's a case of the early bird--and not the first time, I'll swear--by thousands! And, Brotherton--you ought to apologize. You were simply infernally rude just now!"

Said the Major loftily:

"I gave it as my opinion that I had been dealt with unfairly. I do not withdraw the words I used. But I comprehend that my senior in the service of the paper is not anxious to share the credit of the earliest intelligence with regard to what is taking place on the frontier just now."

"For God's sake, Chris, don't say what you'll be sorry for!"

"I'll say what I think, to you, sir, or to the King of Prussia!"

The gray-bearded, strongly-featured face, with the look of generous sorrow on it, and the younger, fairer, handsomer face, with the stamp of arrogance and vanity and pride marring its manly beauty, confronted each other in silence, until, with an impatient snarl, Brotherton swung round upon his heel.

"Look here!--look here!--where the merry hell are you off to?" Tower spluttered, grabbing at the sleeve of the splendid scarlet tunic. "Not going to part company for a misunderstanding--hey?"

"I am going to part company," Brotherton returned bitterly, freeing himself from the detaining hand, "since the jealousy that hampered me in my military career threatens to mar my prospects now. Where I am going to I cannot tell you--probably you will hear from me, but I cannot promise it. Good-bye! Or--if you prefer it--Auf wiedersehen!"

He shook hands with Tower, nodded coldly to the astonished P. C. Breagh, formally saluted the Doctor, who returned with a slight bow, picked up his cap and cloak and strode away over the sun-dried grass and the hot yellow gravel, making for the gaudily painted iron gates that ended the drive.

"Oh, Chris, man-alive, and am I jealous of ye?" said the Doctor, his spectacles dewy with irrepressible laughter, as the gallant figure in its gorgeous scarlet and golden trappings was swallowed in a crowd of blue uniforms: "If you'd waited another minute, I'd have told you of something else your senior in the service of the paper by seventeen years, some odd days, and a minute or two isn't anxious to share with you, and that is a reputation for not being a hot-headed, unreasonable young ass!"

"He's making a bee-line for the Railway Station," said Tower, wiping his heated forehead with a gaudily-hued silk handkerchief, "and if he comes across any of those Transport swells there'll be the deuce to pay. He's got the bit in his teeth and his tail tight down over the ribbons, by George!--and he'll kick the trap to pieces and lame himself to a dead certainty. Shall I go after him and try to soother him down a bit?"

The Doctor shrugged assent.

"If you think 'twill be any good! ... Meanwhile I have to write a letter or two, and pack, or rout my man out of the servants' quarters to do it. As for you, my boyo!"--he turned on P. C. Breagh a keen, humorous glance that summoned up blushes to mantle under the railway grime--"a wash and brush-up will do you no harm, and besides--my absconding Berliner isn't described on his passport as a mulatto!"

Tower came back in half an hour, reporting failure in the attempt to pacify Brotherton, who nevertheless joined the Doctor's little party at the station, having apparently recovered his serenity of temper, and abandoned his determination to forswear his senior's company.

Beer, coffee, bread and meat were still being lavishly distributed among the troops continually parading for departure, and the train-loads of soldiers passing through. And the exodus of panic-stricken visitors, flying from the little up-Rhine watering places, in apprehension of the arrival of the Emperor with his mitrailleuses, continued; until, in another hour, the shrunken finger of the Warlock wagged, and thenceforth the Rhine Valley Railways were totally blocked for civilian passengers, and given over to the transport of men and munitions of war.

Presently, when a train of coal-trucks from Kreuznach came jolting into Bingen, bearing on their sable flanks the chalk hieroglyphics that signified their official emptiness, P. C. Breagh was destined to behold personages of the loftiest rank and the utmost exclusiveness, German Serene Highnesses, Austrian Duchesses, and English peeresses, with their children and lap-dogs, their maids, chefs, coachmen, lackeys, and grooms, packed into these grimy vehicles without precedence or selection, or any seating-accommodation other than that afforded by an empty sack or an armful of straw.

The troop-train conveying the mounted gendarmerie of the Third Army Corps--huge men equipped as dragoons--to Mayence, afforded accommodation to the men, horses and vans of the Doctor's party. Long before the fortifications came in sight the roads were blotted out by marching columns, and the fields were dotted with moving transport-trains.

At Mayence, whose stone-paved streets were roaring with the passage of iron-shod wheels, the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and the measured tramping of infantry battalions, the Doctor, stepping from the train, was seized upon by friends. Yet after the first eager interchange of interrogations and answers, he found time to bestow a parting hand-grip on Carolan and a final word of advice.

"And--put this in your pocket--it'll be a help to you if it doesn't hang you. They're lithographed by the Prussian War Department, and every German officer has one. And here's something else, a lot more use than the revolver those chaps stole from you. You'll know better than to use it unless in case of need!"

This was a folding pocket-map of the Eastern Departments of France, with certain military routes very nicely marked in red upon it. While the something else proved to be a wicker-covered metal pocket-flask, containing about half-a-pint of the whisky of Kinahan.

The donor added:

"Remember, train your memory to pigeon-hole things for later description, and never be caught taking notes, or fighting on a side! And--be on your guard with women, pretty ones especially. And--there's a scrap of paper in the pocket of the map-cover, may come in handy, at a pinch. No, no thanks! General von Reigen, that's the light blue Würtemburg Hussar officer talking to Tower--tells me Moltke and his staff are quartered at the Hotel de Holland. If so, the King won't be far off. He thinks Bismarck has gone to a house outside the town, but he can't swear to it. There goes a carriage with the Red Prince's big buck-nigger on the box. Shows his Highness must be somewhere hereabouts. As for the Crown Prince, nobody will say anything. He's marching--with an end in view. And they say the French are shooting uncommonly badly--and that half of the Reserve men don't know how to use their chassepots. Well, they'll have practice enough before long. Good luck, and good-bye!"

The "scrap of paper," upon later examination, proved to be a five-pound note, placed there by the hand that later penned those wonderful war-letters--under a wayside hedge, at a corner of a plank bivouac-table, on the zinc counter of a wine-shop filled with carousing soldiers--at the ebony and tortoiseshell éscritoire of Madame la Marquise, in the boudoir of the château that had been so sorely battered by those big potatoes of Moltke's.

Kind little, great man; a whole chestful of Orders had no power to chill the big warm heart that prompted your many deeds of generosity. It molders in a coffin now, and the decorations are dimming with dust in a glass-topped box. But beyond the Veil that parts the seen from the unseen world, I like to think that there were waiting for you rewards and honors, in comparison with which the most coveted earthly insignia were vilest dirt and dross.

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XXXVI

Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was powdered white as any lady's of the early eighteenth century, smearing the dust from the peonies of her cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any miller's:

"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good care of the jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in the end of the whip-butt if he tries to kick or bite--I'll creep in under the tilt and take a forty-winks. Lord be thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a bit!"

The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of "Rumschottel," laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's reference to the persuasive spike in the whip-butt, and the young man addressed by his temporary employer nodded in assent without opening his lips. For the dust in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of Germany, in line of march through the Haardt Wald by Kaiserslautern.

The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the Fifth Corps from Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and had picked up an American tourist who knew of a short cut to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army Corps in trying to find it. Staffs, squadrons, batteries, battalions, transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among these vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed gorges, these roads that ran between natural ramparts of granite, or passed through quaint villages tucked under hillsides crimson and gold with laden appletrees, and dominated by ancient castles perched on towering platforms of rock.

Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through their sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness, and there are bloody blisters inside the ragged socks. The American who had been so cocksure about the road to Kaiserslautern was lying up under a peasant's penthouse-thatch, at a twenty-mile distant village, drinking Kirsch, nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up "Murray." His late companion had refused to give in, and perseverance had won its reward. Sixty miles or so above Kreuznach, where the main road forks right and left, climbing the shoulders of the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth Corps of the Second Army marching up from Bingen, and hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty battalions until he could hobble no more.

The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside, had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters, supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as far as Kaiserslautern. True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you cannot have everything. And the weather was so beautifully dusty, thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of use. Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in liquid lubricants would be less roaring. And the tilt-cart contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel of rather luke-warm beer.

The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was issued from behind. There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed. A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite. Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward through a blazing August noon.

Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse and man. But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive whitey-brown.

Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead. For the First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach, south of Landau.... Five or six in the morning, supposing him to have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier. And scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz. For all they knew, "Unser Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.

So they marched--as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen, swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.

Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the most part falling to the lot of Reservists. And in the hottest part of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste. Then the sun came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.

So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed. Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared. And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her servitor. She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug of coffee out of a private bottle of schnaps.

"Herr Je!" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?" For her young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching legs.... She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke up.... Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got clockwork inside them.... It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it will be so in France. And what the Danes got the French will get, and that will be a thumping!" She nodded directly afterward and dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.

Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step. They had hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly. They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came less frequently out of their dustier bags. They marched for the most part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid ground reverberate.

Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges would go down before it as by magic; and through the middle of a field of browning corn or whitening barley a broad white highway would be beaten hard as any threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched partridge chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a fragment of biscuit, a scattering of potato-peels, an empty match-box, the paper that had held an ounce of tobacco, and many empty bottles that had held beer. Rarely, a great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose injuries might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying blood and a broken stirrup-iron. Thus, under the rhythmical tread of the dusty boots, as under the iron-shod wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded and would follow them--green things were beaten from the face of earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before the Third Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they were flying before Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from the North.

Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched hedgerows, and the black circles of their great fires remained to tell of them, like the soil-pits that scarred the fields where they had bivouacked. Last night, by some delusion of the wearied senses of sight and hearing, they had seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of their camp to be marching even as they slept. The lusty snoring of the countless swathes of sleepers between the long, orderly rows of stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked helmets, suggested the rushing of a host in onward motion. When the boy who had lain through the night under the sutler-woman's cart to guard it from light-fingered marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his blistered feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still. Then in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead and shrill bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé--and when the tremendous war-machine rushed on again once more, the dusty boy had been caught up once more by the wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a chip is whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train, or a wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and borne upon its dreadful way.

He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as a blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed trotted past, sneezing, between the files at the rear of a half-company-column. "Whose is the beast?" he heard a soldier ask his neighbor on the right-hand, and: "Nobody's--joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the reply. Upon which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of biscuit, with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened, neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,--no more an ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.

Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out of a pair of eyes which were less bright than they had been before their owner became addicted to the use of beer with schnaps as a lacing. She had an incipient beard, and the voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there was a tinge of womanly coquetry in her way of straightening her big, battered bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl tied crosswise over her voluminous bust. She yawned, struggled to the perpendicular position, with some difficulty, owing to her corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout red finger at her henchman, yet squatting in the shade of a clump of dusty whins:

"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two fists! Such a gimpel I never yet did see! But they say all the Englisch are mad, their climate makes them so. Otherwise would they not live in their country?--but no! they can't. Hier! Catch Rumschottel, and let's be moving!"

P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of idiot, or the contumely heaped on the United Kingdom. It was better to be on the black books of the sutler-woman than distinguished by her too-favorable regard.

For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had undoubtedly played the part of a Samaritaness toward the wandering Englander, she was, it had to be owned, more charitable than chaste; trading not only in beer, bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards, dominoes, pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following, between marches, the oldest profession in the world.

Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal billet of the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg Artillery, P. C. Breagh had flatly declined. Conceiving the refusal to be prompted by jealousy, Frau or Fraulein Krumpf had not taken it in ill part. Until, being undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of her anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated among her clients of the rank and file.

"You threadling, you whipper-snapper! You pickled herring in a jacket and breeches! There is a man buried in the Domkirche at Mainz, where I belong, that has been dead over a hundred years, and has more of good red life in him to-day than thou! 'Frauenlob,' they called him, because he couldn't live without women, and women! and when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his bier. And they poured wine over his grave so that you stepped up to your knees in it--all because he had liked the women as a tom-cat likes cream!"

The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted the situation. But the wound remained; and as the better-half of Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young Hebrew steward, the sutler-woman nagged at the young man who limped beside her jackass, through the deep welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long blistering stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless, dusty men marched by.

There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and others swarmed after them. Batteries succeeded battalions, ammunition and baggage, ambulance and commissariat-trains were followed by yet other battalions, while the sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and the skin wore off his heels.

At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of breathing and his straining muscles seemed about to crack, a man died.

He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened quite suddenly. P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned all unnecessary integuments, marching without coat, vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a moment previously swinging along with unbuttoned uniform--it was marvelous how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this method of relief.... His open shirt showed the lighter skin of his bare chest, his pickelhaube was perched upon the cooking-pan crowning his knapsack-top, and he had draped a wetted red handkerchief over his steaming head.

Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale, staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown. But suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun. Men were thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and tin-ware. Yet they marched on without a pause.

Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the way. Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.

"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and was ravenously devouring weeds. She added, becoming aware of the prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white already. Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks' time and trouble. Better leave him for the Feld-lazarett to pick up."

But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel seized her beast's head and trudged on. If she had looked back, she would have seen good Irish whisky wasted. For despite the shade of the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was all up with the man, as she had prophesied.

He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried to lift a hand to his perspiring chest. By the tin crucifix dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that he tried to make the sacred Sign. Then his eyes rolled up, and an expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance. His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking, came from his open mouth.

"A-a-ach!"

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XXXVII

He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man was dead. Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek, and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and stopped. He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the ground. The officer asked in staccato sentences:

"It is a case of heat-stroke? You are a doctor?"

P. C. Breagh answered shortly:

"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."

The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground impatiently. The captain said, patting the glossy, sweating neck:

"Very good. Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"

P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund Hessian's name, regimental, battalion and company-number, and turned it face-upward on the discolored breast. The captain, leaning from the saddle, read, and mentally registered. His keen eyes, hedged with dusty fair lashes, narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and, somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like a smile in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young man who squatted on the ground by the dying, the smile was an offense. He scowled, and the officer, noting this, asked curiously:

"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"

He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture. Resenting the gesture for the same inexplicable reason, P. C. Breagh responded with a head-shake. The captain pursued, pulling the damp and blackened reins between his gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the horse's within the palms....

"I asked, because you seemed--how shall one put it?--sorry for him, you know!"

The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor angrily. The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped into sudden flame:

"I am, damned sorry for him! To come by his end like this--without firing a single shot!"

There was something unusual about this little dialogue, carried on between the smart mounted officer and the footsore, untidy pedestrian, over the body stretched out by the roadside. As the broad stream of marching men flowed by, curious eyes rolled their way, the whites showing startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces. Men wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing there. And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry with wrathful bitterness:

"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!--as any fellow in his battalion. He set as much store as others by King and Fatherland! I daresay he dreamed of getting the Distinguished Service medal for some tremendous act of gallantry, and astonishing his wife--he wears a wedding ring, so I suppose he had one!--with it when he got home. And now it's all over. It makes me feel sick. All over, and nothing to show for it!"

The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the face of the coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face, with the look of agonized surprise now fixed upon it, seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing but this!" The officer returned:

"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as he died upon Active Service, and that will not be so bad, after all. And presently the Feld-lazarett will come up and put him in a wagon. He will be buried at sundown, when we halt.... They will give him a firing party and a bugler--everything will be done decently. After a battle there is not always--you understand?..."

He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals on his dark blue tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe knowledge and experience. Hating him still more vigorously, P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:

"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"

"'Pawns!' My worthy sir, our pawns are battalions!" The captain laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained teeth under his thick brown mustache. "This was--a unit among myriads of myriads.... You will find plenty of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I guess, you are a graduate in surgery out for practice.... Let me advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance--the arm-badge is a protection--of a definite kind."

He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse snorted relief, and cantered on with him, sending another shower of dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct "unit among myriads of myriads" and the unkempt Samaritan hunkering by its side.

A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept over him a moment previously. Behind and through the officer's brown-eyed, good-looking face he had seen the fierce, challenging blue stare and great domed skull and bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars at will. And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty thousand men thus clad and armed had passed already, had awakened in him a rage of pity and a fury of disgust.

This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid world-event, shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and stirring nations to wildest enthusiasm, meant catastrophes innumerable as minute; infinitesimal tragedies never to be heard of, related or known,--involving the humbler and the weaker among the people of both sides.

Meanwhile--here was a letter, pinned inside the dead man's shirt, an ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted sprig of some kind of garden-herb, smelling evilly.

"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so thou bring thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will be enough." Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to remember that "old man" kept off the fleas, she enclosed "a bit picked from the clump in the garden border by the old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry after his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself his faithful wife Lottchen. One could only be sorry for poor Lottchen and note down her address, together with her deceased lambkin's name and regiment, and send her presently a line from a stranger who had been near him when he died.

For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing could be done beyond pulling his yet pliant limbs into decent straightness and folding the already stiffening hands upon the unheaving breast. Then P. C. Breagh covered his face with the red handkerchief, and--a tin crucifix being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace--touched the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a prayer for the departed soul, before, resuming possession of his discarded jacket and shouldering his knapsack, he trudged upon his way.

"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset, by heavy marching. Since breakfast-time there had been no halt; the columns of human flesh and horsemeat had pegged along, tirelessly as though the sinews that bore them had been forged of elastic steel.

The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies and gold beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north and east was green, with a vivid, springlike hue. The clear, thin dusk of August fell, yet the tireless columns marched on--and in company of other, even queerer wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly continued to trudge beside them. When at length the halt was sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field of flax, and threw himself heavily face downward amid the yellowing stems that had long ago flowered, and seeded, and ripened for pulling.

Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten minutes, when a bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy heads and forelegs of the leaders of a team of gun-horses crashed through the hedgerow, the scarlet face, open shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the forerider showing above. As luck would have it, orders had been given that a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this flax-field. And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the horses, and the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved very close to P. C. Breagh.

Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the hollow into which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had landed him. The heavy riding-whip of the forerider had cut him bitterly across the loins while yet in mid-air. Adding insult to injury, the artilleryman had cursed his victim for getting in the way of the battery, and the other riders and the gunners on the limber were grinning from ear to ear. Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the road....

Upon the farther side two half-battalions of infantry, divided by a little bushy knoll, were already encamped upon a strip of gorsey grass. The thing had been done as if by magic, the officers grouped in the foreground round their little camp tables were drinking Rhine wine and beer as peacefully as though they had not stirred for hours. Behind them the battalion-color and the halberd of the drum-major had been planted upright in the center of an orderly array of drums and band-instruments, the straight rows of knapsacks within rolled greatcoats, stretching away in the rear, were divided by the customary ten-pace interval, and the mathematically balanced stacks of needle-guns.

Fires of brush and dry cones from the pine-groves fringing the road crackled in the small oblong trenches dug by the fatigue-men. Squad-cooks were cutting up pea-sausages, raw potatoes, and onions into camp-kettles of water, destined to simmer, slung on sticks reaching from bank to bank. And the regimental butchers had already slaughtered a couple of young bullocks, whose skins lay smoking by the chopping-block. Presently, when the officers' mess-cooks had chosen such joints as seemed good to them, the rest of the meat would go to enrich the stew of the rank-and-file. Meanwhile the men, scattered to the utmost limits of the cordon of sentries, blunted the edge of hunger with black bread and the flinty brown biscuit, crowded thirstily round the beer and wine-carts, squatted in groups playing cards, chatting, or singing part-songs; wrestled and ran races, or dozed lying face downward on the sunburnt grass, their foreheads resting on their folded arms.

A charming scene, now that the all-pervading dust had begun to settle--the bivouac roofed in by the clear green twilight, through which diamond star-points began to thrust. If only one had been less sharp-set, and the proprietors of the wine and beer-carts had had bread and sausage to sell as well as warm, flat beer and musty-smelling vintage, the beauty would have appealed to one a good deal more.

Squatted by a lichened boulder in a clump of sun-scorched bracken, P. C. Breagh searched his pockets, and then the recesses of his knapsack, for something to eat. An ancient crust of black bread rewarded his investigations, just as the savory-smelling camp-kettles were taken off the fires.

He fell to work upon his crust as the stew was apportioned, and the big cans of beer distributed to each mess; and as he gnawed dog-like at the stone-hard lump of baked rye-dough, he caught the eye of one of the Barmecides, a merry-faced, red-haired young private, who was evidently the jester of his squad.

"Our soup smells good, what? Well, the smell may be had for nothing. He may fill his belly with as much of that as he can!"

A roar of laughter greeted the sally of the humorist. To whom P. C. Breagh nodded assent, and, gravely extending his diminished crust in the quarter from whence the whiff of oniony pea-soup came most powerfully, fell to with apparently renewed appetite, provoking the approving comment:

"He can take a joke! Well, then, let him take this! and this! Catch it, junge!"

A lump of very fresh beef, boiled in the oniony pea-soup, was dumped into a bit of newspaper, screwed up, and pitched across to the supperless. P. C. Breagh gratefully caught the oleaginous parcel and the two hard Army biscuits that came after, and, pulling out some small change, signified his desire to pitch back the coins in return. But a big hand waved them vigorously away, with the gruff exclamation: "Der Teufel! let him keep his pfennigs. One gives a share of one's supper--one doesn't sell!"

And so genuine was the one that, despite the smarting weal that had been the gift of another less kindly, P. C. Breagh's faith in humanity lifted up its head.

He disposed of the grub, and drank some hill-water tinctured with Kinahan, a permissible indulgence in view of his fatigue, and stuffed the well-used briar-root with bird's eye, and, propping his back comfortably against the boulder, kindled the pipe of peace. By nature clubbable, and athirst for news, he would have liked to mingle with the replete, unbuttoned soldiers, who, supper over, gathered round the fires to smoke and chat and sing. But the snub dealt by Valverden had not left off smarting; the fear of incurring another rebuff, even from a social inferior, kept him aloof and solitary. He realized with dismay that his stock of self-confidence was beginning to run low.

"I'd a lot of faith in myself when I accepted that commission from Knewbit," he ruminated, chewing hard on the stem of the venerable briar-root. "More than half his money's spent--what did I want with that revolver?--and I haven't written him a line. Instead, I've swotted up a thundering long descriptive article, telling people all about what they know already--and sent it to that shaved sea-elephant in a Gladstone collar, who told me I might forward letters from the seat of hostilities if ever I got there!"

He frowned, mentally reviewing the points of the first-born launched upon the tide of speculation. However ancient its matter might be, the vigor and mastery of that descriptive article--completed in the train between Bingen and Mayence, and dropped with paternal solicitude into the sack of a corporal of the Field Post--would surely--could not fail to--insure its appearance in print.

Why did a horrible conviction of its utter stodginess come home to him at this eleventh hour? Its labored periods revolted, its stately mawkishness sickened his memory. He knocked out the pipe-bowl against the boulder and got out his note-book and began to jot down a letter to Mr. Knewbit by the light of the now risen moon, who, with Venus blazing emerald at her opulent side, hung high in the south-east, looking down upon forest and field, mountain, valley and river, and the armed men and beasts, guns and wagon-trains, strung out over leagues of distance, calmly as befitting an aged Queen familiar with the portents of War.

She stared down so haughtily at the travel-soiled and dusty scallawag lying upon the fringe of the bivouac among the remnants of a meal cadged from a soldier's camp-kettle, that he caught her eye and broke his pencil-lead. No! he couldn't write, even well enough to "please plain, homely people." ... Why, hang it all!--Old Knewbit must have known from the beginning, to do that was the highest and most difficult art of all. Men came into the world equipped, as had come Shakespeare, and Scott, and Dickens, each with a single feather, such as might belong to the wing of a Phcenix or an Archangel, sprouting from his own flesh. Urged by the inborn crave to set down Life, each had plucked forth his birth-gift with a pang of unutterable anguish, and there, at the quill-end, hung a single drop of red, red blood. And that drop tinctured every page they penned, and thus what they wrote lived. To be a distinguished War Correspondent one had to be born with the magic pen-feather. The Doctor had it. That was why his written sentences dug home to the quick. Without it, Success would never come to one, no matter how hard one tried for it. One would be nothing better all one's life than a plodding paragraphist.

Pity an unlucky youth, fagged, footsore, and smarting, not only from disillusion and chagrin, but from the very recent application of an Artillery horsewhip. In addition, the infantry band had now begun to play with soul-melting sweetness. First "The Lorelei," and then "Red Dawn That Lights Me to My Early Grave," and then the song of Siebel from "Faust"--with all its yearning passion and tender anguish. And possibly other eyes were wet besides P. C. Breagh's, who fairly put down his head and sobbed, under cover of the twilight and the protecting boulder, as he had not done since his knickerbocker days.... Not now from a vague, wistful aching for the voice and the touch of the young, unknown, long-dead mother. Pain and longing were there, but of how different a kind....

The reign of Brünhilde-Britomart-Isolde was over. That night saw the smallest and slenderest of heroines established on the vacant throne of the Ideal.

He who wept was not the type of a young girl's hero, choking and gulping, and burrowing his hot, wet face into the dry, rustling fern. But he suffered as only youth can suffer, the pangs were very real that wrung from him such stifled cries as these:

"Oh, God! I love her--Juliette de Bayard! ... I have loved her since the moment our eyes met. My infernal ingratitude that she forgave like an angel!--the brutal things I thought and said of her--were because I could not forgive myself for loving her so. My discontent, my restlessness, my ambition to do something and be somebody--weren't they prompted by the longing to cut a figure in her eyes! ... Lovely eyes;--and at this minute her husband may be kissing them!--'the noble gentleman, brave as a lion,' who fought like the deuce and all! Stop, though! If he's an Army man, he has had to leave her. Could I have borne to do that if I had had the luck to be in his shoes? Yet how she would despise a lover who hesitated between her and his duty! Even if 'her heart-strings about his heels were tied,' as the Suabian ballad says, 'she would bid him march to war!' For a girl like that could love, mind you! like Juliet and Desdemona and Viola rolled into one, and yet never be blinded by love into forgetfulness of God, or honor, or loyalty. It is written in her face. Are these things first with me? I'm afraid not!... I think not!... I know they're not!... And yet I dare to love her--to whom they mean everything!"

His conscience stung and smarted like the weal from the Artillery whip-lash. And the dread of Death and the Hereafter wakened in him, shuddering and quaking in the creeping dusk.

Now he comprehended his own insignificance and weakness and loneliness.... He had seen a man die that day, suddenly, without time for preparation, as thousands of others would die before the ending of this war. What if to-morrow at the hottest hour the trenchant blade of the sun should bite through P. C. Breagh's brain-pan? He heard the other self within him saying "Suppose...?" And he asked himself, with a cold sweat breaking out upon his flesh, and a curious stirring among the roots of his hair, what would have happened only an hour or two back, if the flying squirrel-leap that had made the white teeth flash against the brown faces of the gunners on the limber, had failed to land the dusty scallawag who had been sleeping in the flax-field beyond reach of the pounding of the hoofs of the battery-team! ...

"Father, I cry to Thee!"

The soldiers were singing the Battle Prayer of Körner, the lusty Teutonic basses and baritones and tenors mingling in melodious unison with the night-breeze that had risen with the moon.

Previously P. C. Breagh might have smiled at the simultaneous production of hymn-books, the rising at the word of command to sing--the short, business-like prayer recited by an officer, that was followed by a crashing Amen.

Now, it seemed to him, there was something wholesome and good in the military regulation that united men of every Christian creed and denomination, with those who habitually omitted religion from the daily routine, in the brief act of worship described.... Recalled by it to the teachings of the Mother Church, he made the sacred sign upon brow and breast, and whispered his nightly prayers. The name of Juliette mingled in the entreaty that Our Lord and His Mother would bless and guard those dear to the petitioner from danger and harm.

"And not let me come to grief for her sake--of course I mean Monica's! For she never would have loved me even if there hadn't been another man. But O! take care of her, and shield her from evil, sickness, grief, and danger. And let me see her again one day!"

He grew drowsy, lying against the yet sun-warm boulder, listening to the distant cry of the mousing owl, and the long rattling chur'r'r! of the nightjar, mingled with the occasional snorting of the tethered horses, the measured tramp of the sentries,--the small explosions made by pine-cones thrown upon the blazing guard-fires, and the other sounds of the bivouac.

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XXXVIII

The watch was set at nine o'clock. Then the "Lie Down" sounded far and near, and the moon stared down on rows of prone men wrapped in their greatcoats and pillowed on their knapsacks, stretching away under the pansy-dark canopy of heaven for miles.

The officers sat for some time longer, drinking their Rhine wine and playing cards by moonshine and lantern-light, or strolling, cigar in mouth, upon the outskirts of the bivouac. Several Artillery-officers, who had supped with them, went back to their own bivouac after voluble leave-takings. Infantry-officers, who had shared the hospitality of the gunners, returned, enlivening the night with, scraps of gossip, and more or less melodious song.

A couple of these late-comers halted on the outskirts of the cordon of sentries to finish a confidential conversation. The moon was obscured by clouds, the bivouac was swathed in shadow. Of the lumpy boulder by which the Adjutant stood, only its shape could be discerned against the dusty-pale grass by the dust-white road.

Said the Adjutant to the senior Captain, and the excellent cigar he was smoking smelt pleasantly in the dark:

"One can't call yesterday's a big battle, but at the same time it was a tolerably serious engagement."

The senior Captain snorted.

"Donnerwetter! one would think so. Nearly fifteen hundred prisoners, and Douay's Division obliged to abandon its camp and baggage. The Crown Prince has begun well--one expected no less!"

Said the Adjutant:

"I shall advise the Herr Colonel to announce the news to the regiment at roll-call to-morrow. It will make a good moral impression upon those who are new to Active Service, when they realize that the French have been trounced."

Then they were silent a moment, but one felt that both were crowing.

We know what had happened. Before midday the Crown Prince had pounded Douay's Division into brickbats, the brave General himself was dead, the town of Wissembourg had fallen; by two o'clock the mitrailleuse-batteries on the Geisburg had been silenced, and the Chateau stormed and won.

The men of the Imperial Army in Alsace had fought magnificently. Red-capped, swarthy Turcos in baggy white breeches, Zouaves and French infantrymen, light blue Bavarian and dark blue Prussian uniforms, with what had been brave men inside them, lay scattered among the hop-gardens and vineyards on the mountain-side.

Of these no doubt the Adjutant was thinking when he threw away his cigar-butt and said, with a sigh and an oath together:

"Kreuzdonnerwetter! one does not win victories for nothing. It must have been a bloody fight, and especially in the streets; you understand me? The French fired from the windows, and from the roofs of the houses.... There was a terrible struggle at the point of the bayonet, and both sides used the butt--liberally!"

"The butt may be brutal," commented the senior Captain, clearing his throat and expectorating copiously; "but all the same it is a hellishly useful thing!"

"Why leave your enemy brains when he may live to plan your defeat by the use of them?" agreed the Adjutant. The scabbard of his sword clinked, as he moved, against the boulder, and the sound made an eavesdropper go goose-fleshy all over, as he lay prone among dry bents and bracken in the blackness on the farther side. Then he heard the Captain ask:

"Did the Crown Prince continue the advance to-day?" and strained his ears for the Staff officer's reply.

"Undoubtedly! Moltke's telegram from the King's Headquarters at Mainz ran: 'Seek out and fight the enemy wherever you may find him,' and Marshal MacMahon is said to be concentrating all his force on a high plateau between Froeschwiller and Eberbach, west of the Sauer and the Sulz. The bridges have been broken--his position is an exceptionally strong one.... Of course you know the kind of ground!"

"Open ground," snorted the Captain, "over which an assailant must pass to get at him. Sapperlot! don't I wish I'd had the chance to-day!"

"You are too greedy, Scheren," joked the Adjutant. "Ts't! What was that?"

Both men were silent, intently listening. For the eavesdropper, titillated to madness by a spear of seed-grass that had thrust up a nostril, had given a smothered sneeze. Now on the point of discovery, he found presence of mind sufficient to repeat the sneeze, panting doggishly, whining and scratching among the fern....

The ruse was successful. The Adjutant said, laughingly:

"It's a dog, nosing at a rat or rabbit-hole. Under-Lieutenant Brand's terrier 'Nagler,' perhaps."

"Hie, then, boy!"

"Here, Nagler!"

The Captain whistled, the other man advised indifferently:

"Let the brute alone--perhaps the rabbit's a French one!" He added, "It would be amusing to read a dog's Impressions of the campaign. What time is it? 'Ten!' Very well, I shall go and turn in. You'll do the same thing if you'll take my advice."

The Captain grunted assent, and the two officers clanked away together, while P. C. Breagh noiselessly collected his venerable waterproof, his water-bottle, and knapsack, and departed in search of a more distant sleeping-place.

But when he found it in a dry ditch a quarter-of-a-mile below the Mounted Artillery bivouac, and stretched himself out to sleep, he could not.... His head rang with the news that would presently thrill the civilized world.

First blood to Germany.... Did the Doctor know? ...

That genial little gentleman had prophesied accurately. The "meaty bone" of early and accurate information had fallen to the "tyke at the tail of the Army Corps." While the prophet, delayed by pumped-out horses and recalcitrant grooms, at the Lion Inn of Neustadt, knew no more than that the heir to the Prussian Crown was over the frontier, and was reported to have taken Wissembourg from the French.

That dry ditch accommodated a complacent lodger. His misgivings banished by one stroke of fortune, P. C. Breagh brooded sleeplessly over the Koh-i-noor that had fallen to him.... Though, to hold such a jewel and know oneself impotent to use it, that was the verjuice mingled in the cup of bliss.

Without funds for telegraphing--an Editor to print one's letters--and a public ready to read, what was the use of information? Stop! What was that the more authoritative of the two officers had said?--the one who had given the news to the other man? "It would be amusing to read a dog's impressions of the campaign! ..."

Would it? Such a dog, perhaps, as the mongrel that had joined the green-jacketed Saxon infantry regiment at Bingen. The cur the compassionate soldier had christened "Bang." Lying on his back, pillowed on his knapsack, staring at the waning moon, the boy pondered. Suppose one wrote one's letters to Knewbit in the assumed character of Bang?

The idea grew, and he sat up to review its possibilities. Something soft and feathery brushed past his ear as he stirred. An owlet, most likely, yet I prefer to believe that it may have been the wing of Inspiration, touching the head destined to be crowned by Fame.

"Pages from the Diary of 'Bang,' the Battalion Dog." That should be the title, or simply, "The Story of 'Bang.'" "Short and to the point," he heard Mr. Knewbit saying. And Knewbit ...

Here was day! ...

Reveille after reveille sounded, shattering his train of thought, waking the hilly echoes. Under how strange a sky the bugles clamored, the bivouac stopped snoring; men sat up on dew-wet cloaks and rubbed their eyes.

The cup of heaven was red as though brimmed with blood new-drained from the veins of heroes. In the leftward hemisphere looking East, Ursa Major swam in blood, blazing with white-hot fierceness. On the ensanguined South the Dog cowered as though in terror. And like a skeleton arm, the Milky Way pointed over the blood-dabbled hill-crests and the blood-tipped pine-groves from the south-east, West....

Men's faces and hands were crimsoned by reflections cast from that portentous sunrise, the dew-wet grasses were dyed the same hue.

They broke their fast on their black bread washed down with bitter black coffee. In the pause that followed the roll-call, a voice spoke. And amid deafening cheers the news sprang from bearded lip to lip.

"Lucky is the standard that flies over the first-fought field!" says the proverb.

How those Teutons marched, that day of rain-pelts and thunderstorms, upheld by their first draft of the strong wine of Success!

At Mayence, Moltke had commented to his Sovereign, with his keen old eyes twinkling with joy:

"Douay's troops were preparing their evening coffee when the Prince with his four Divisions appeared on the heights above Schweigen. The Red Breeches thought it was a promenade militaire in the Second Empire style, until the shells began to plop into their cooking-pots!"

"Thanks be to Heaven!" returned King William piously, "our artillery-fire has improved since the Bohemian campaign."

"All the same," returned the Warlock, shaking the wise old head cased in the auburn scratch-wig, "their musketry should do much for the French. For the chassepot is quicker in loading than our needle-gun, and spits less, which is better for the aim.... Then our needle-gun has A poor trajectory at 500 yards, and wounds rather than kills outright. While the chassepot bullet,--driven by its huge charge of powder--has a splendidly flat trajectory, And flattening out,--makes a magnificent wound! In at the chest--out at the shoulder-blades! ... The man has a hole in him you can see the landscape through!"

And he nibbed his withered hands, the old specialist in slaughter. While Bismarck said, laughing, to his cousin and military attaché:

"The enthusiast forgets that the perforated examples will be German.... Look at him! Already he begins to resemble a bird of prey. Have you read these French newspapers? The King has laughed heartily over them, but they must horribly irritate the Emperor. Listen to this, from the Constitutionnel: 'Prussia continues to insult us with impunity, when the Armies of the Empire, at a word from their Chief, might descend like three crashing avalanches upon the hosts of Germany. Why is the word not uttered? Why is the massacre--with the rout that must inevitably follow, delayed for a single hour?'" ...

The Emperor had perused the leaders, in his headquarters at the Prefecture at Metz. His eyes seemed opaque as clouded glass, his face was a puffy mask, devoid of expression, as he replied to the hinted condolences of a sycophant upon his staff.

"The opinions of these gentlemen of the Press were not solicited. They are free to criticize me, let them do so. I am not bound to divulge to them my plans."

Alas! vacillation, hesitation, and delay on the part of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief fatally clogged the movements of his magnificent Army. He did not put in an appearance with his staff at headquarters until a fortnight subsequent to the Declaration of War. A week later--and no Plan of Campaign had been issued to his generals. True, he had demolished, with field-fire, a beer-shop at Saarbrück. He had paraded on the hills with Frossard's Army Corps. He had witnessed the evacuation of the town by its tiny garrison--had withdrawn his advanced posts and gone home to Metz to dine and telegraph to Paris of the "capture of the heights" and the "short resistance of the Prussians";--to tell of the cannon-balls and bullets which fell at his own feet, and those of the Prince Imperial, "who showed admirable coolness." "Some of the soldiers wept," he adds, "beholding him so calm...."

And indeed, though one takes the soldiers' tears with a grain of salt, the spirited bearing of the boy must have cheered the sick heart of his father, and yet thrust another dagger in it, too.

Had the Imperial Commander-in-Chief any plan, one wonders.... Long after he had ceased to be Emperor, a pamphlet was published at Brussels, which is generally accepted as the work of the pen that signed the Capitulation of Sedan.

"To Marshals MacMahon and Lebœuf alone, the Emperor had entrusted his scheme of warfare. His purpose was--to mass 150,000 troops at Metz, 100,000 at Strasbourg, and 50,000 at the Camp of Châlons. The concentration of the first two armies--one on the Sarre, and the other on the Rhine--did not reveal the purpose of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief, for the enemy would be left in uncertainty as to whether the attack would be made against the Rhenish Provinces or the Duchy of Baden."

Would the Warlock have long remained in uncertainty? But hear the pamphleteer:

"As soon as the troops should have been concentrated at the points indicated, it was the Emperor's purpose to instantly unite the armies of Metz and Strasbourg; and at the head of 250,000 men, to cross the Rhine at Maxau, compel the Southern States of Germany to observe neutrality, and hasten to encounter the Army of Prussia." Later on occurs the pathetic complaint: "If one could only know beforehand exactly where the enemy was, one's plans would be easy to carry out!"

Indeed, the dispositions of Moltke were made with baffling secrecy. Even as the Heathen Chinee accommodated card-packs innumerable in his ample sleeves, so the Warlock hid the twelve Army Corps of the North German Confederation, with the Prussian Guard Corps, the Bavarian Field Army and the Württemberg and Baden Divisions, in the skirts of his military cloak.... When the moment came, the aged conjuror twitched open the garment and showed them: Steinmetz with the First Army at Treves, Prince Frederick Charles with the Second at Mayence, the Crown Prince with the Third at Landau.

When the Three Armies rolled on, the art of the strategist covered their movements with a baffling veil of cavalry. That immense, well-organized and highly mobilized arm was thrown well forward before the Germans crossed the frontier: at their first entry into France they came in contact with French troops. A day's march ahead of the Army Corps' advanced-guards, Divisions of Uhlans, Dragoons and Hussars--(in a little all were "Uhlans" to the terrified French peasants)--provided for the security of the huge infantry bivouacs behind them; made requisitions for provisions, fuel, and forage; rendered railways and telegraphs useless--scouted for the enemy's positions--took prisoner or shot dispatch-bearers and patrol-riders--harassed marches, and boldly fired into camps. Many fell in forays, or skirmishes, many were those accounted for by the long-range hitting chassepot, which was heartily detested by Prussia's mounted men.

"If I had not been called to Metz to attend an Imperial War-Council," Marshal MacMahon is reported to have said bitterly, when the news of the defeat of Wissembourg reached him, "this blow upon the south would not have fallen. My Second Division would still be left to guard the opening between the Vosges and the Rhine."

The thunder of the guns of Worth add their comment upon that utterance.

Over the head of the town, lying at the bottom of a fertile valley patched with hop-gardens and vineyards, and threaded by a river, was waged between the Marshal with 50,000 troops, the pick and flower of the French Army, and "Unser Fritz" with twice the number of men, a desperate and bloody fight.

The French on the bluffy wooded cliffs that are the foothills of the Vosges, occupied, as strategists have declared, an almost unassailable position. But the fire of the mitrailleuses was hampered by the artillery of the 2d Bavarians under Hartmann, that seasoned veteran, who had fought at Waterloo in 1815 and now led an Army Corps against France in his seventy-sixth year. Thus the Prussian infantry crossed the Sauerbach on bridges improvised of planks and hop poles; and though the chassepot proved an infinitely deadlier weapon than the needle-gun, the generalship of Von Kirchbach and Von der Tann,--in command of the Prussian 4th Division and 5th Corps, backed by a division of the 11th Corps,--forced MacMahon's hand.

Outnumbered, outflanked and disorganized, with the loss of 9,000 men killed, 5,000 taken prisoners, twenty pieces of artillery, six mitrailleuses, and two eagles, the Marshal fled by the way of Zabern, under cover of night, trailing after him the beaten remnant of the Army of Strasbourg.

The Third Army of Germany had lost 489 officers and 10,153 rank and file. Before night of the 7th the dead were buried in great trenches, the columns of the Society of the Red Cross, the Sisters of Mercy and Lutheran Deaconesses, with surgeons, volunteers, and Army ambulance-bearers, had cleared the wounded from the field.

"Ah! if we had only had this sort of thing at the Alma and at Inkerman!" a grizzled Zouave sapper growled to one of the ladies of the Red Cross. "I was wounded there--sacred name of a pipe! My belt-buckle was carried by a shell-splinter through my ceinture into my stomach. This very buckle, look you, that I wear to-day!" He added, rubbing the locality of the previous casualty: "There is nothing inside there now, because of late they have not fed us, or our chassepots. How the devil can men kill Prussians without soup in their bellies or cartridges in their guns?"

The Zouave spoke truth. It was a half-equipped and under-rationed army that had made such a splendid show at Froeschwiller. It was a starving, demoralized remnant that surged and weltered through the passes of the Vosges at MacMahon's flying heels. Cavalry on foot, Zouaves riding Artillery-horses, mitrailleuse corps without mitrailleuses, baggage-wagons crowded with men of a dozen different regiments, went clanking and jolting over the roads that were littered with discarded chassepots, bearing witness to the pitiable, ghastly disorder of the retreat.

The hour of their defeat had seen Frossard's Army Corps holding with Forton's Cavalry Brigade the heights over Saarbrück, simultaneously attacked by the 7th and 8th Corps of Unser Fritz's terrible army, and driven back in confusion and with slaughter, toward Metz.

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XXXIX

The huge peacock-bubble of the Third Empire was pricked and leaking in good earnest. Thenceforward it was to shrink, and pale, and dwindle to its inglorious end.

The Emperor must have known its days were numbered, when those wires of the 6th reached him. On the 7th the news of Wörth electrified Paris. Can you hear Jules Ferry joyfully exclaiming to the father of Paul Déroulède, "The armies of the Third Napoleon are annihilated! At last there dawns a day of hope for France!" But fierce, triumphant voices like these were drowned in the muffled sobs of mothers, the moans of wives made widows, and the wailing of children now fatherless. Later, and as though to enhance the bitterness of defeat, lying telegrams were published in Paris, announcing that the Duke of Magenta had retaken Wissembourg, captured sixty guns, and made 25,000 prisoners. Chief among these unlucky ones figured the Prussian Crown Prince, who in an access of despair had shot himself....

For some hours the streets and boulevards were packed with rejoicing multitudes. Cries of "Vive l'Empereur," scarce at this era as snowflakes in summer, were suddenly heard again. Flags and Chinese lanterns were displayed from every window, the people stopped the hansom-cab in which the famous Opera tenor Capoul was being driven along the Place de la Bourse, and, hoisting their idol to the top of a stationary omnibus, compelled him to chant the "Marseillaise."

When the Emperor's sorrowful dispatches of the 7th revealed the cruel truth, and proclamations signed by the Empress and the Ministers made it public, rapture gave place to frenzy of the wildest. Troops of cuirassiers and mounted Gardes de Paris,--bands of National Guards,--companies of the Line, and Marines were employed to clear the Rue de la Paix, and the Places de l'Opéra and Vendôme, of rioters.

The Chambers assembled amid tumult indescribable. Ministers were insulted on their way to attend the deliberations. "À la Frontière!" cried the huge crowd, thronging the quay before the Palace of the Corps Législatif. "Vive Rochefort!" "À bas les Ministres!" "Chassepôts!"

Their reiterated demands for arms could be heard within the Chamber. Where, when M. Schneider mounted the tribune to read the Imperial Decree of Convocation, the opening formula: "Napoleon, by the Grace of God and the national will, Emperor of the French," was vigorously howled down. Ollivier, the unpopular Head of the Imperial Cabinet, who had egged on the war, fared no better. Later, the fall of his Ministry was greeted with salvo upon salvo of enthusiastic applause, and when the news was published all Paris went mad once more with joy.

While the moment of supreme collapse of the great peacock bubble was coming nearer, the Crown Prince of Prussia was hunting MacMahon through the defiles of the Vosges, his flying cavalry snapping up scores of wounded or footsore stragglers, his advance batteries of light artillery harassing the bleeding flanks of the fugitive. The Second and First Armies were moving Metzward, the Warlock having knowledge that the Emperor's main Army, the Imperial Guard, and Bazaine's, Ladmirault's and Frossard's Corps, with part of Canrobert's, were concentrating there.

The Great Bubble was sagging pitifully. The weather was wet and chilly, the Imperial troops not yet in action were disheartened by the news of battles lost. Their equipment was incomplete, their new boots had proved to be of no better material than brown paper and American cloth. Worst of all, the Commissariat, always inadequate, showed signs of caving in. And the blame for all was heaped upon the shoulders of the Emperor, whose faith in his fortunate star had quite deserted him; a man tormented by telegrams of wifely censure and wifely advice from Paris; disgruntled, if ever man was; haunted and oppressed by premonitions of impending disaster; sleepless, shaky, sick, and prematurely old.

The taking of the fortresses of Bitche and Phalsbourg--memorable by reason of its brave Governor's resolute defense--the seizure of the undefended City of Nancy, the Zorn Valley railway line, Forbach with its immense military stores, Sarreguemines, and other garrison towns were lesser shocks, falling on a mind already paralyzed. Hasty decisions, contradictory orders, had emanated, one after another, from the Headquarters. He was confused and flurried, finding his good brother of Prussia so near. For the Warlock, scenting a movement of French troops to the rear, had crowned the uplands eastward of Metz with the 1st and 7th Corps of the First Army of Germany under the veteran General Steinmetz, cavalry well to the fore and outposts skillfully posted, so as to look into the French position from all points of view, while the Red Prince felt for a solid footing for his Second Army on the left or French bank of the Moselle. Meanwhile, the Crown Prince, whose clutches Marshal MacMahon had evaded by taking a vast circuit to Châlons, had swept round and was marching northward from Vigneulles toward Metz.

Ah! in what a hornet's nest the Imperial Commander-in-Chief found himself. Almost incapable of mental effort, he recognized, like Mr. Wilkins Micawber,--whose epistolary style is occasionally suggested by his Proclamations and harangues,--that something had to be done at once. To shake off the intolerable burden of authority was the most urgent necessity. He transferred it to the youngest of his Marshals, Bazaine.

"You will get us out of this, won't you, Marshal?" cried an officer of the Imperial Staff, as the new Commander-in-Chief came out of the Prefecture.

The Marshal had left his Imperial master in bed, expecting answers to letters he had penned to the Emperor of Austria and the King of Italy, soliciting aid and alliance, which these potentates did not bestow. True to himself, he could not quit Metz without a proclamation, penned in the old flourishing, ambiguous style:

"Inhabitants of Metz. In leaving you to oppose the invading enemy, I rely upon your patriotism to defend this great city. You will not allow the foreigner to seize this bulwark of France, and you will emulate the Army in courage and devotion.... I hope to return in happier times to thank you for your noble conduct."

Then he quitted the place with his son, his cousin and his personal following and escort. As his cortège clattered through the streets choked with soldiers, guns, provision-carts and baggage-wagons, and faces of contempt, or derision, or hatred turned to see, did he hide his sick, humiliated face behind the green silk screen of the carriage window? How did he answer the inevitable questions of his son?

A prey to hideous uncertainties, for the new Commander-in-Chief had suddenly applied to be superseded, the luckless Emperor spent the night at the camp at Longeville, waking upon a foggy morning--if he could be said to sleep, who never slept--to a brisk salute of Prussian guns. For a patrol of Uhlans with a half battery had made, during the night, a bold attempt to seize upon the Imperial person, and being foiled within an ace of success, had retreated, plumping a shell or so into the lines from the German side of the river. And while these hornets were being repulsed with heavy metal, the muddy, travel-stained Army of the Red Prince crossed the river lower down; the little episode described having diverted attention from their transit; effected, even as in a jam of batteries, battalions, squadrons, baggage and ammunition-trains, the French retreat was being made.

So choked were the roads that the Emperor and his suite with the Imperial Guard Escort only managed to struggle as far as Gravelotte, a village some eight miles from Metz, where Bazaine had his headquarters:

"Gentlemen, we will remain here, but keep the baggage packed!" had been the Emperor's instructions to his following upon alighting at the inn, where two miserable bedrooms were with difficulty obtained for himself and his son. Prince Napoleon and the other personages of the suite found harborage at various cottages; the lackeys slept in the baggage-fourgons, it may be hazarded. For in the morning these vehicles and their attendants were found to have disappeared. They had departed for Verdun, whither their master was now to follow them. Bazaine, who could not shuffle off his now detested responsibilities, was summoned, to find the Imperial carriage standing in readiness before the tavern door.

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XL

One can see the splendid bays, clamping their bits of solid silver, their sleek skins and their costly harness glittering in the sunshine that had driven the early morning fogs away, the postilions and outriders in their green and gold liveries sitting in the saddle, the landaus of the suite drawn up at the distance prescribed by etiquette.

Everybody was breakfastless, save the Emperor, his son, and cousin, and their immediate following. The regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique, the gorgeous Cent Gardes in gold-crested, crimson-tufted, silver helmets with flowing white horsetails and caped cloaks of azure, were empty of all but air, like their own famous kettledrums. Their horses had cropped a little grass in the fields during the night's bivouac, and were better off than their riders, by one meal.

The young Prince Imperial looked sulky and discontented, but neat and soldierlike in his new uniform of a subaltern of infantry. Prince Jerome Napoleon, the portly M. Plon-Plon of the Crimean War caricatures, wore a cocked hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and was buttoned up in a military cloak.

The Emperor had suffered in the night, for a traveler who had slept in an attic above his bedroom had heard him pacing to and fro and groaning. He wore a black-caped, red-lined waterproof cloak over the uniform of a General of Division; a glimpse of the Star of the Legion of Honor fastened on his breast showed as he raised his hand to throw away the butt of the inseparable cigarette, and set his neat little polished gold-spurred boot on the carriage-step, and beckoned with a small white-kid-gloved hand.

Obeying this signal, a green-and-gold equerry and a demure elderly valet hoisted him respectfully on one side, while a keen-eyed, lean-jawed young man, accurately attired in deep black, propped him scientifically upon the other. We know this deft and silent personage to have been a brilliant young Paris surgeon, retained about the person of the Emperor; a specialist whose ministrations, in dulling unbearable pain with subcutaneous injections of morphia, and combating the progress of disease by skilled surgical treatment, became more necessary every day.

They got him in. The sweat was starting through the rouge upon his livid face as he sank heavily upon the seat of the carriage. His son and cousin followed. Bazaine,--who was accompanied by Canrobert and Bourbaki, and did not dismount, rode up to receive his master's farewells.

He did not entreat again to be relieved of the supreme responsibility. Perhaps the Emperor imagined that he might. For he put out his hand in haste and shook the Marshal's, reiterating:

"All will go well! Excellently, I have no doubt of it! You understand, you have broken the spell."

Of ill-luck, did he mean, clinging to the fatalist whose Star was on the point of setting. He added:

"I go to Verdun and Châlons. Put yourself upon the road for Châlons as soon as possible.... May you be fortunate! Au revoir! En avant!"

The brigadier-general in charge of the escort gave the word. The Advance was sounded, the Chasseurs on their gray Arabs dashed onward, riding in fours, keeping a sharp lookout for Uhlans. A half-troop of Cent Gardes preceded the Emperor's carriage, his equerries and aides and those of the Prince's household followed on their empty, chafing beasts. Another peloton of Cent Gardes were succeeded by three Imperial carriages containing the surgeon, secretaries and valets; grooms followed with led horses; and the Empress's regiment of Dragoons, brass-helmeted, black-plumed warriors, in green with white plastrons, brought up the rear.

It was four o'clock in the morning when they started. Deep defiles rather than roads, with wooded, precipitous banks, stretch between Metz and Gravelotte. By the time the Imperial cortège had extricated itself from the stray columns and batteries choking these, and the cliffy banks had lowered to hedgerows, it was six o'clock and a gloriously sunny morning.

One may imagine, as the landscape broadened and smoothed like a human face relieved from carking anxiety, the young Prince Imperial turning in his seat, and looking back upon the scene he was unwillingly quitting, with a scowl of resentment and dissatisfaction that changed and aged his boyish face.

He saw the white tents of the huge camps of the Imperial Divisions snowing over a vast area of country on the French side of the river, and the clotting of cavalry and infantry in swarms upon the roads, where vast aggregations of baggage and provisions and ambulance wagons impeded their passage. He saw the Imperial Standard break out above the Tricolor on the flagstaff of the Fort of Plappeville, signifying that Bazaine had entered. He could see the artillery-batteries on the high ground at Rezerieulles, and he knew that others were posted behind the woods of Genivaux, and yet others near the quarries of Amanvilliers. The glitter of steel and the flutter of red and white lance-pennons told of the Light Cavalry outposts at St. Ruffine. And sinister moving specks upon the hill-crests beyond the river above St. Barbe--and others moving in the villages, with darker, bigger patches toward Sarrebourg, testified, like the gray-white drifts of powder-smoke that came down upon the northeast breeze, with the reduplicated rattle of musketry, the detonation of field-guns and the yapping of mitrailleuses--to the near, active presence of the ancient, racial foe.

He was drawing nearer, always nearer, to the coveted key-city of the Two Rivers, seated within her ancient fortifications, guarding the northeast frontiers of France. He wanted Metz, with her vast modern arsenal, her huge hospitals and military colleges, her fifteen bridges--(the railway-bridge had been blown up by Bazaine's engineers on the night before last, when the squadron of Uhlans, greatly daring, had made their way into the French lines, with the project of seizing upon the person of papa)--and her glorious Cathedral, whose vast gray bulk was now bathed in the misty golden sunshine of a perfect autumn day.

Soon, soon, those indomitable dark blue soldiers would be at grips with Frenchmen for the possession of Metz. Oh! not to be able to fire a shot, or strike a blow with her defenders, because of one's pitiable weakness and youth! Oh! to be perpetually guarded and protected and plucked from the very possibility of danger, because one happened to be Heir to the Imperial Throne.

Why had the Emperor resigned the supreme command of the Army? There had been reverses--does a Commander-in-Chief give up for that? True, he was not well, but the First Napoleon had fought battles and won them, in spite of cramps and colic. He would never have driven away under the noses of King Wilhelm and Count Bismarck and the Prince Commanders. He would have called the nephew who could commit such an impair as that a godichon. He would have said: "To the devil with you, who boast yourself of my blood! A Napoleon--and not a general! You might have proved yourself a fighter, at least!"

The soldiers regarded the Emperor's resignation as the Great Napoleon would have done. They had not cried "Vive l'Empereur!" when papa had driven out of Metz. Upon the contrary, they had maintained silence, scowling or sneering covertly. To-day, the meanest piou-piou had presumed to wink or grin. More, voices from the depths of company-columns had called out horrible insults; things that had made the son's teeth set and his fists clench with the passionate desire to thrash the offenders, yet had not twitched one muscle in the father's impassive face....

"Why do you look back so often, Louis? What are you thinking about?"

The Emperor's question brought the young head round. He muttered, twisting the gold knot of his little sword:

"I am looking at the Army, and at Metz--and at those Uhlan outposts. And I want to know why we are going away--just because the Prussians are coming? Why cannot we stay--and fight?"

The diplomatic, evasive answer came:

"Because for the present it is more prudent that we should withdraw ourselves."

The boy shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and his young face took on an expression of heavy obstinacy, bringing out, quite startlingly, a resemblance to the sire. He muttered:

"All very well.... But it isn't nice to--absquatulate!"

The slang term filer might be rendered as above. The Emperor's gray face with the patches of rouge on the flaccid cheeks moved not a muscle. Turning his hunched shoulders upon the scene of his horrible humiliations, he stared with fixed eyes along the road to Verdun, stretching away to the west between its bordering poplars, whose long blue shadows--the day being yet young--barred the white dust rather suggestively.

At Etain, where the cortège halted for breakfast, the Prince had a much nearer view of those ubiquitous horsemen in the dark blue uniforms. Indeed, the Emperor and his suite barely escaped a surprise, and the escort of Cent Gardes, who were here replaced by some of MacMahon's Chasseurs d'Afrique, were hotly chased and sniped at on the way back to camp.

Through the journey of that night, performed in the cushionless plank seats of a third-class carriage, his suite being accommodated in a string of cattle-trucks, of what did the sleepless Emperor think? What questions occupied that sick and sluggish brain?

The question of returning to Paris, the refuge he longed for and yet dreaded inexpressibly. The question as to whether the Empress Regent would welcome the Emperor who could no longer rule the State, and what kind of ovation the people would extend to the General who had deserted the Army of Metz before the advancing hordes of United Germany.

Would not Rebellion, Anarchy and Revolution rear up their hydra-heads to greet the Third Napoleon, reëntering his capital? Would his reign end in the explosion of a bomb, and a shower of torn flesh and scattered blood upon the paving-stones? Would his son ever wear the Imperial crown, won by bribery, bloodshed, fraud and trickery? Would the Church forgive the rape of temporal power? Would Heaven succor one who had defrauded Her? Was this the beginning of the end?

Lugubrious doubts like these and many others haunted his sleepless pillow in the Imperial pavilion of the camp on the dusty plains of Champagne. Dismantled at the close of the October maneuvers, and now hastily prepared for the Emperor's reception, the place was damp, dismal, and cheerless, as such places usually are.

The newly levied troops were showing signs of insubordination; the Gardes Mobiles from Paris were in open mutiny against their generals. The great camp was a wasp's nest, which the presence of the Emperor stirred to frenzy; the lewd songs in which he figured, the yells of savage laughter greeting obscene jests leveled at him and his, reached him, pacing the mildewed carpets underneath the damp-stained draperies festooned from the claws of Imperial eagles, whose gilding was tarnished and discolored, like the Imperial central crown.

All night he paced, on thorns. With the dawn of day he had the answer to his questions. From the Empress, who wished him to abdicate that she might reign for her son; from the new War Minister, a creature of his own aggrandizing, who by influencing the Empress, who detested him, dreamed of becoming another Richelieu; from the Prefect of Police--who indeed brought the warning in person--came a triple sentence of exile for the sick, dejected man.

Spewed forth again upon the road toward the northern frontier, he was a clog upon the feet of the army that might, by a movement in which boldness combined with rapidity, have relieved Bazaine at the critical moment and changed the fate of France. Thenceforth he was to be a passive witness, rather than a participator, in scene after scene of horrible disaster; disgraces, disillusions, defeats, crowding one upon the other, to be crowned by the unspeakable catastrophe of Sedan.

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XLI

Three hours after the Emperor had driven out of Gravelotte the Red Prince had blocked the direct road to Verdun. The First Army had crossed the Moselle. Moltke and the Royal Headquarter Staff were already at Pont à Mousson, the Crown Prince was marching toward Châlons.

At this stage of the game, the Warlock gave the signal. Von Redern's guns opened suddenly on the French cavalry camp near Vionville. You remember the squadrons were watering: Murat's Dragoons stampeded with their baggage-trains, De Gramont's troopers sent in a volley of carbine-fire, mounted and retired in less haste. This was the opening figure of the three days of bloody conflict waged in the rural tract between the northern edges of the Bois de Vaux and the Forest of Jaumont. The French call it the "Battle of St. Privat," the Germans the battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat.

The Great Headquarters of the Prussian Commander-in-Chief were at the riverside town of Pont à Mousson, some ten miles distant from the war-theater--whose stage occupied some six square miles of undulating, wooded, ravine-gashed country-side.

And here, his possessing genius, or demon, prompting him, the tactics of Moltke abruptly changed.

I have fancied the Warlock getting up at cockcrow on the day of Vionville,--he had a little folding camp-bed he always slept upon. Undressed to shirt and drawers, he would roll himself in a gray-striped blanket which did not reveal the fact when it needed washing, and cover himself on chilly nights with a big, shabby, military cloak.

Beside the bed, with the extinguished candle-lantern, standing on a corner of it, was the little portable campaign-table, covered with faded green baize. His maps were spread on this, and an Army revolver of large caliber lay atop of them, well within reach of its owner's practiced hand.

He sponged his old face and sinewy neck economically in a basin of cold water, carefully washed his hands, rinsed his mouth and put on a clean white shirt. A white drill waistcoat went on under the old red-faced uniform frock, with the distinctive shoulder-cords of Chieftaincy of the Great General Staff and the Order of Merit dangling from the silver-gilt swivel at the collar. Then he polished his bald head with his silk handkerchief, reached his wig from the chest of drawers and assumed it, read a text in his Lutheran Bible, prayed a twenty-second prayer standing: lighted a thin, dry, ginger-colored cigar, such as his soul loved, and sat down to work at his maps.

Bismarck might well have likened him to some bird of the predatory species. With the rising furrows of his bald brow hitching up his wig, and his clear eyes, lashless with old age, crimson-rimmed by dint of fatigue and overstrain, his fierce hooked beak following the journey of his withered claw over the tough cartridge-paper--one can imagine him, very like an eagle, or a member of the vulture-tribe.

It grew lighter as he worked with his old chronometer and well-used compasses and stumpy pencils; and the little thumbed table of distance-measures to which he sometimes referred. He finished and rang his handbell for his orderly-servant; chatted with his Adjutant and secretary as he broke his fast on bread and black coffee. Then at a great jingling of cavalry bridles and stamping of iron hoofs upon the cobblestones below, he went down, carrying his rolled map-case, mounted, and rode away with his following.

The sun rising had found him, lean, inscrutable and silent, on the ridge above Flavigny, where he had told Prince Charles and Steinmetz, Moltke would be found that day....

He had met and primed them with the result of his calculations, had seen a fierce engagement from his coign of observation. By three noon, he was back at Pont à Mousson, had interviewed the King, dined frugally, and now stood chatting with the Iron Chancellor upon the steps of the Mairie.

Guns were muttering in the distance as they had done all day at intervals. There had been fighting, he answered mildly when questioned. Quite a considerable battle one might call it. The villages of Flavigny and Vionville were burning as he spoke.

The potato-gardens of Flauville were thick-strewn with corpses of French and German foot-soldiers. In a little, layer upon layer of dead and dying men and horses had been piled upon these. Necessity knows no law; and it had been found necessary to interpose Prussian cavalry between the French Artillery and exhausted masses of German infantry. Which accounted for a considerable thinning in the ranks of Rauch's Hussars.

The sacrifice had been necessary. He told himself so as he stood there smoking. His high forehead was quite unclouded as he returned in answer to some reference to MacMahon's losses at Wörth:

"It is one of the traditions handed down from the days of Murat and Kellerman and Lassalle--the French belief in the virtue of the massed cavalry charge...."

The Minister to whom he spoke replied:

"The English exploded the theory at Balaklava sixteen years ago, by their magnificent but useless sacrifice of Cardigan's Light Brigade. They learned then, and we have profited by the lesson that MacMahon has just been spanked for forgetting--and that Your Excellency will presently teach Bazaine...."

The great strategist cupped his long chin in his lean hand, and said in his dry, thoughtful way:

"Yes, yes. We will drub this precept into his brain at cost of his breeches. Regiments of mounted men serve admirably for the protection of marching Army Corps--are priceless for reconnaissance, outpost and patrol-work, but when they are thrown against vast bodies of troops armed with the modern breech-loader, their use is unjustifiable, being nil."

"And when in addition, the unlucky horsemen are charged as at Wörth, over hop-poles and tree-stumps, open field-drains and shattered garden walls," said the Minister, "then they are worse than useless, I should add."

The Warlock's thin-lipped mouth opened in a silent laugh that creased his lean cheeks and displayed the gums that were all but toothless. He rubbed his hairless chin and said:

"Ay, unless from the point of view of that farmer of Schleswig-Holstein who said as our troops marched by his barn-yard: 'Let us look on them as manure for next year's wheat!'"

The Iron Chancellor's blue eyes hardened with sudden anger. Imagine him in his great muddy jack-boots, with cord breeches not innocent of clay and soil, the black double-breasted frock with pewter buttons and yellow collar and cuff-facings, the white cap with the yellow band and the long, heavy, steel-hilted cavalry sword, puffing at a giant cigar as he stood on the doorsteps of the Mairie, over whose door drooped the Prussian flag, and the white Hohenzollern pennon with the Black Eagle and the gold blazoning, showing, like the bodyguard of Red Dragoons and White Cuirassiers, the numerous orderlies, and the double cordon of sentries placed about the building, that there lodged the King. While the Red Prince's headquarters were distinguished in similar fashion at the National Bank of France.

"I have not forgotten!" The response came in Bismarck's grimmest vein of humor. "Nor has the rascal either, if he happens to be alive still. Our infantry taught him very thoroughly that there are more uses than one for a bundle of straw."

"Some of our German Princes have mastered that lesson quite recently, Excellency," said Count Paul Hatzfeldt, First Secretary of the ambulatory Foreign Office, turning a handsome, humorous face upon his Chief. "The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg slept in a barn at the last halting-place, and Prince Leopold of Bavaria in a loft over a stable yard, where, as he explained afterward, there were not only mice, but rats!"

"I understand His Excellency to refer," said Moltke, taking a pinch of stuff, "to the Polish method of flogging, which is to tie a man face-downward on a truss and thrash him to a jelly with green birch-rods."

"Precisely. Only not having birch rods 'convenient' as Lever's Irishmen would say," returned the Chancellor, "our fellows used their belts--buckle-end preferably. Then they pitched the farmer on his own dunghill, and left him to rot there for the land in spring."

"Severe, but severe lessons are best remembered," said the Warlock, placidly. "Thus MacMahon will perhaps throw no more regiments of cavalry away! As for ourselves, we have hardly brought that arm of the Service to its present condition of usefulness to handle it wastefully. Military science--true military science--does not allow of undue extravagance in the sentient material of war. Nay,--it will never be said of me that I wasted blood prodigally!" He curved his long thin hand about his large and beautifully shaped ear, and added, as the distant detonations of heavy artillery made the windows rattle in their sashes and the pavement quake underfoot. "They are still fighting south and west of Metz. In half an hour, if the firing has not abated, I am going to ride in that direction with the King."

He glanced at his chronometer, then went down the side steps, and strolled, contentedly smoking, to where his own charger and his master's were waiting in charge of some orderlies near the Royal carriages and fourgons that occupied the center of the Market Place. While Count Hatzfeldt, glancing after the thin figure, shrugged and said to his Chief in an undertone:

"Heaven send that by this time to-morrow we may not be deploring some tremendous holocaust of Prussian cavalry! Do not ask me how the idea suggested itself...."

"Possibly,"--the Minister slightly moved his hand toward a string of country grain-wagons, crowded with wounded, and drawn by farmers' horses, converging from the westward boulevard toward the Market Place--"possibly because so many of those fellows have been brought in here since twelve noon. And in Moltke's very disclaimer of blood-waste, you find cause of suspicion. In that case, our greatest strategist would be like the spider, who agitates her web to conceal herself before she has even been seen. Moreover, they--I refer to our wounded--have been infantry of the Third Corps chiefly, nearly all Prussians from the Mark of Brandenburg. The French prisoners were mostly horsemen; Light Blue Lancers and Cuirassiers of the Guard Imperial. What fellows are these?" Under his heavy brows he scrutinized the approaching train of sufferers, adding: "H'm! Marshal Frossard's chassepotiers have taken toll of Rauch's Hussars with a vengeance! Where are you going, Count, in such haste?"

Halfway down the steps Hatzfeldt halted, dropping his eyeglass and turning round an astonished face.

"Going, Excellency? Why, naturally, to speak to these wounded cavalry men. My wife has a cousin, a captain in the Hussars of Rauch."

The Chancellor said, bending his powerful gaze on the handsome face of the diplomatic dandy:

"Let me counsel you to quench your desire for information. The King's windows are overhead. And the inquiries natural for you to make in your own character will be suspected, should His Majesty observe them--to have been prompted by me." He showed a corner of the sealed dispatch he had thrust into his pocket. "You recognize the Queen's handwriting upon this envelope? Augusta will have written another such Jeremiad to her spouse. Mercy and moderation, piety and philanthropy will be the headings of the sermon penned on my own sheets of letter-paper. The test of the King's will be, 'Bismarck is alone to blame!' Fortunately my back is broad, and I have his entire confidence.... But if he once suspected me of getting what the Yankees call 'cold feet!'..."

The hand that held the cigar indicated a stoppage of the foremost wagon. "See! Moltke is speaking to the officer in charge of the convoy. I will wager you a case of champagne that his mouth is being corked up. A wise proceeding too! For, remember, the story of a wounded man is painted from his own wounds--always a red tale of disaster. How can it be otherwise? In the heat of battle, or perhaps without having fired one shot, or ridden one charge--he has been struck down, poor wretch! and carried, bleeding, from the field.... Has it occurred to Your Excellency that those guns are drawing nearer?"

The query was addressed to Moltke, who had returned, leaving the wagon-train to jolt with its doleful load in the direction where the Flag of the Geneva Cross, hanging from doors and windows, announced the location of temporary hospitals.

The expert listened as distant crashes of volley-firing were answered by the hyena-yapping of mitrailleuses, and answered, pointing to the weather-vane on the tower of the Market Hall:

"Your Excellency is wrong. The breeze has altered its direction. It was northerly, and is now blowing directly from the west. Yet if the action should assume grave proportions, it may prove necessary to shift Headquarters to some village further afield."

"Heaven forbid!" murmured Count Hatzfeldt, expressively raising his fine eyebrows, "when one is able to get a decent dinner, and a daily bath at one's hotel!..."

"Heaven generally ordains, through the mouth of Your Excellency, an exodus," said the Chancellor, laughing, "when a comfortable bed falls to my lot. At Herny my couch had to be lengthened with chairs and carriage-cushions, and these kept parting company all the night long. My feet were on the floor when I awakened in the morning,--literally at cockcrow--for my window opened upon the dunghill where the lord of the poultry-yard sounded his reveillé. Now here I am accommodated in quite respectable fashion; in a little red creeper-covered house at the corner of the Rue Raugraf, and three of the Councillors are stowed under the same roof with me."

"While I," said the Warlock, "have my quarters at a cleanly bakery, where there is quite an excellent piano, by the way. So that, to-night, unless Fate order otherwise, I shall hear my nephew Henry von Burt sing some of my favorite songs. He is in voice for the first time since his attack of sore throat. The King has been much pleased with his rendering of Herder's 'Volkslieder' and 'Die Blumen of Heine, which doubtless Your Excellency knows."

"I am acquainted with the song you mention. Or I was," returned the Chancellor, "in my salad days. They are over for me, unluckily! ... Only Your Excellency possesses the secret of perpetual youth."

And he turned aside to receive a bulky sealed packet of dispatches from a green-jacketed Royal Courier, who had just driven into the Market Place in a farmer's gig, and now got down, tossing a fee to the scowling driver of the muddy, panting roadster. While Moltke stood smiling and humming with characteristic untunefulness a stave of the tender, sentimental ballad:

"_If they knew it, the little flowers, How she wounded this bleeding heart, They would weep with me in bright dew-showers, Healing, healing its anguished smart!_"

Said the Minister in an undertone to Hatzfeldt, as he transferred to his keeping the bulky sealed envelope received from the courier:

"Let his Excellency sing only loud enough, and neither Steinmetz nor the Red Prince will be able to prevent the music-loving Frenchmen from retiring upon Verdun."

He had not meant the pungent jest to reach the ear of the great strategist. But Moltke glanced round and answered mildly, if with a narrowing of his wrinkled eyelids, and a sardonic twist of his thin, dry lips:

"Then all the more surely should we surround and annihilate them. My second plan is usually stronger than my first. And I have already issued instructions to Prince Frederick Charles and General Steinmetz, indicating the course they are to follow should Bazaine pierce our left wing. Meanwhile let us listen to this fellow's singing. It may please Your Excellency better than mine!"

The arrival, a Captain of Dragoons of the Prussian Guard, acting as aide-de-camp upon the staff of Steinmetz, had just galloped into Pont à Mousson, accompanied by an escort of half a dozen troopers on blown horses, and had little breath left even for speech. But when he threw himself from his reeking beast, the dispatch he took from his belt-pouch and handed to the Chief of the Great Staff told of a huge expenditure of "the sentient material of war."

At noon of the day, looking from his point of observation on the high ground between the Bois des Ognons and Gravelotte, short-legged, fiery-tempered Steinmetz had seen what seemed a weak spot in the French position. Under cannon, mitrailleuse and chassepot-fire he had ordered several batteries of the 7th Corps and Von Hartmann's Division of Cavalry to cross the Gravelotte defile and plant themselves on the slopes south of the road. Death had harvested redly from the extravagant movement. The slaughter that ensued had shaken even the men who carried the needle-gun, their huge columns were giving ground. General Steinmetz and his staff were under heavy fire. Only the Prussian field-batteries, served and trained by gunner-sharpshooters, kept the German right wing from caving in.

Heavy news, one would suppose, yet the Warlock read the dispatch to his master with as placid an expression as though he were at that moment seated beside the baker's excellent piano, listening to the tender warblings of the melodious Henry von Burt.

"Steinmetz is over ardent, it may be, yet it is what I should have done, had I been in his place," he said in answer to some perturbed exclamation of King Wilhelm. "Only, perhaps," he fingered his long chin thoughtfully, "I should have done it in a different way. He is supported by now. Stülpnagel will have thrown his Division forward and gripped the woods and heights upon the French left. Your Majesty will see a change in our favor by the time we have reached the ground!"

"Your Excellency should be there now and I with you. Pray order the horses!" urged the agitated King.

"They are waiting, sire!" said the Warlock, cool, calm, and inscrutable as ever. In fact, he hummed another bar or two of the plaintive ballad about the weeping flowers as he followed his Royal master downstairs to the door, and the War Minister, Von Roon, who had been hastily sent for, rode up with his staff as the King mounted his steadiest charger, a powerful black horse.

"The Federal Chancellor, Count von Bismarck Schönhausen, begs permission to accompany your Majesty!" said Hatzfeldt, gracefully approaching as the orderly of the Body-guard resigned the bridle-rein.

He said to himself as he returned with the graciously accorded permission to where the Minister waited by the big brown mare that was held by an orderly of Cuirassiers:

"How perfect is his discretion! How completely he hides the iron grip of power under the velvet glove of diplomacy! Roon is the King's quartermaster-sergeant, Moltke is his calculating machine, Bismarck is his ruler--but he will always seem his slave! Wherever the King goes--on journeys, shooting excursions, visits to watering-places--he is always at his elbow; he rides with him to maneuvers, and reviews and parades. Since the War began--and at cost of what exertion, mental and bodily, no one understands better than I do!--he has never left his master alone for long enough to further the intrigues and influence of other men.... Every battle-field the King looks on will be seen through the Chancellor's eyes. For this War is his War--and he knows it! ... Here come galloping the Royalties and Serene Highnesses, rabid to see some real fighting.... Bismarck calls them the Tinsel Rabble,--if only they knew!"

And Count Paul, smiling in his gently satirical fashion, strode back to his quarters to pen to his young, pretty, and exceedingly coquettish Countess, a marital letter full of tender expressions and requests for lots more cigarettes. While their Highnesses and Mightinesses of the Royal Suite pranced away in the wake of the King and his three great servants, without the slightest idea that the Chancellor who rode on William's left hand held them in such contempt.

The wounded men sitting or lying on hay in the grain-carts at the hospital door looked up as the Great Headquarter Staff rode by and gave a shaky Hoch! of greeting. Heads of dressers, nurses, Knights of St. John, and surgeons appeared at windows from which projected the Flag with the Red Cross. While a long train of haggard French prisoners, halted before the porch of the church that had been converted into a temporary prison, stared with lackluster eyes over the bowls of cabbage-soup and the huge hunches of bread that had been distributed among them by pitying ladies; and a battalion of little black-a-vised, green-coated Saxon soldiers who had marched in dead-beat and were dozing on straw under the Market Hall, lifted their heads from their knapsacks, saying: "There goes Moltke with his King, and the Big Pomeranian. Something is up out yonder!" and rolled over to sleep again....

The inhabitants and tradespeople of Pont à Mousson were too crushed to make any audible comments. Within a fortnight they had had twice to feed and quarter a French Division. Now here, as it seemed, was the whole Prussian Army poured out upon them.

They were dumb and stupefied in the Babel of foreign dialects. They could make no headway against the flood. Everywhere were loud-voiced Intendants making requisitions and giving orders; officers and quartermaster-sergeants shouting for rooms, provender and stabling; the men, like the officers, insatiable in demands for meat, bread, forage, tobacco, flour and wine, liberal in oaths and blows to those who could not satisfy their needs.

Tradesmen in gutted shops swore in whispers over basketsful of dirty little nickel coins with (to them) indecipherable inscriptions--all they had to show in return for one or two thousand francs' worth of stock. To grumble brought retribution, swift, sharp and merciless, on the head of the grumbler. To resist meant death. Therefore they would be silent until the invader should have passed on.

But when the wearers of the muddy blue uniforms and the riders of the muddy, well-fed horses did pass, fresh hosts came swarming after them. There seemed no end to the brown-faced men in the loathed blue uniform....

"Are there more to come?" those of them who understood French--and many did--were asked timidly, and they answered: "Naturally. We are only the Advance. To keep the roads by which we have passed open, and to guard the telegraph-wires we have left behind us there will be very many more required!"

Germany was being emptied into France's lap, it seemed to the bewildered peasants leaning against the walls of their cottages or peering from the doorways, as had done the peasants of Alsace-Lorraine. They, like them, were ruined, their crops devastated by cataclysms of armed humanity, their cellars emptied, their frugal stores devoured.

"But where are we to find food for all these, we who had fared badly enough before they came? And who will pay us for what they have not paid for, or give cash for this stuff called money that they have left behind? Will it be the King or the Emperor?" some haggard man or woman, reckless with despair and misery, would demand with frantic gestures. "And how shall we feed our children when they leave us nothing? How live at all when they live upon us?"

They asked this less often when the Flag with the Geneva Cross appeared above roofs and thrust out of windows of buildings appropriated as hospitals, and when long trains of German ambulance-wagons and hay-carts full of wounded men in blue uniforms began to pass by, as well as piteous processions of French wounded and French prisoners....

"You see, they die!" they presently began to tell each other. "Frenchmen are being killed like flies out yonder where you hear the cannon, but not Frenchmen only. These too, die.... MacMahon has failed us and the cursed Emperor has run away for fear of Bismarck, and Bazaine may prove a rotten staff for France to lean on. But if our generals have forgotten how to lead, the Army of France has not forgotten how to fight, and thousands upon thousands of Prussians have been killed since the beginning of the War. They dig their great trenches so quickly and bury the slain in such haste that the greatness of their losses will never be really known. When they would hide them more completely, they heap up corpses in farmers' barns, and pile the farmers' straw and hay and faggots about them, and pour on petroleum and tar and set fire to it--and thus their dead are consumed to ashes--and sometimes the yet living with the dead!"

As at Paris, spy-fever raged in cities, towns and villages, while the armies of the invader plowed bleeding furrows in the flank of prostrate France. For the Prussian Secret Intelligence Department had its emissaries everywhere. Hotels, public bureaus, railway stations, shops, offices, even clubs, had harbored them unknowingly. Now they cropped up on all sides, speaking French with the Gallic accent, their German brains full of neatly pigeon-holed and docketed information, ready to place themselves at the disposal of their friends. Hence, patriotic Frenchmen, favored by chance or heredity with blue eyes, fair hair, ruddy complexions and the advantage as to inches over their neighbors, found themselves cold-shouldered by their intimates and subjected to unpleasantly suspicious scrutiny when consuming refreshment in cafés and restaurants, or strolling with their acquaintances on public boulevards.

English artists attached to illustrated newspapers, special correspondents, handicapped by blonde whiskers and an imperfect acquaintance with the French language, found themselves in many a tight place. "Mort aux espions!" is not a cheering cry when some thousands of red-hot throats are uttering it, and half a dozen soldiers or gendarmes form the only barrier between the unlucky suspects and the furious mob.

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XLII

A mud-bedaubed nondescript who toiled at the heels of the Great Headquarter Staff upon a huge velocipede of the big-wheeled, bone-shaker type prevalent at that remote period, met plenty of scowling glances from groups of peasants gathered at the corners of villages and listening by the wayside. Even on territory occupied by German troops, it was not safe for lagging soldiers to drop behind upon the march. To enter roadside taverns or farmhouses with a comrade was imprudent, to venture in alone was perilous, the sight of the German uniform, the sound of the Teutonic gutturals, were so fiercely abhorred. Of the reason for this loathing the Englishman was not ignorant. Marching with the infantry of the German army, he had followed where the Uhlans had passed.

He had slept, the night before the Army of the Red Prince had crossed the river, in a little deserted country château,--an ideal honeymoon nest for lovers, standing in a high-walled garden full of fruit-trees and tangled roses in the middle of a sloping meadow on the banks of the Moselle.

The butt of some Prussian soldier's rifle had served for key to the locked door in the high garden-wall. Those who had gone before had stripped the bushes and espaliers. The house had been entered, and the dainty silk-upholstered drawing-room chairs and sofas had been dragged out into the garden. The piano--a tiny rosewood bijou--probably a wedding present--and the absurd little billiard-table with which Monsieur had disported himself, stood crookedly upon the gravel; a long tear in the green cloth of the one; prints of tumblers, marks of greasy fingers marring the shiny veneer of the other. Bottles that had contained Champagne and Moselle--butts of cigars, empty tobacco-papers and match-boxes were scattered everywhere--over gravel, and grass-plot and the once trim garden-beds. An impromptu café-concert had evidently formed a feature of the bivouac.

P. C. Breagh had slept in a charming bedroom, under rosebud-chintz curtains looped with silken ropes, having carved wooden Cupids, painted pink, instead of tassels. The bed was not as luxurious as it might have been, because the blankets and sheets had been carried off. Opening his eyes in the gray of morning he had seen himself as he lay reflected in a long cheval-glass, and failed, for the moment, to recognize in the bronzed, shaggy, unclean tatterdemalion therein reflected the young Englishman of respectable appearance who had interviewed the German States' Chancellor in the Wilhelm-strasse.

He was not alone in the room, that was the next discovery. A woman, young and swarthy, dressed in the quaint costume of the country, stood upon the other side of the bed, with a kitchen chopper in her lifted right hand. He took in the chopper at a glance, and promptly rolled off the bed upon the side facing the friendly cheval-glass, and stood glowering at the black-eyed girl.

"I have startled Monsieur? A thousand apologies!"

She forced a smile with her curtsey and backed toward the door. P. C. Breagh explained in his French that he was no robber but a harmless traveler, and that she need not be alarmed.

"Monsieur is very kind!" Her chopper-hand hidden under her apron, she explained that she had served as cook in the establishment. Upon the news that M. de Bismarck was coming, tout à coup, Monsieur and Madame had gone away together to Paris. They were noble and very amiable, but old, old, and feeble.... They had left the little château in her care....

"Mademoiselle is not easily frightened?" P. C. Breagh hinted.

Said the black-eyed, modestly:

"I am Angéle--nothing of Mademoiselle. A peasant--like my father, who was gardener for Monsieur and Madame.... I was alone here when the Prussian horsemen came, breaking the doors and shutters.... Everything was spoiled, or taken, wine, linen, the fowls in the poultry-run. Destitution, ruin everywhere!..."

She accentuated her tale of loss by heavings of the bosom, shrugs of the fine shoulders, dramatic gestures.

"Then my father returned and found ... No matter! Both he and I should have been silent and endured everything.... It was not wise, Monsieur, that the old man should have struck a Prussian, even for my sake. For then he was beaten. Whenever I shut my eyes, I see it.... Therefore I have vowed not to sleep again until...." She opened her eyes wide, and smiled, rather grimly, then changed the subject with a wave of the unchoppered and visible hand. Was Monsieur hungry? By searching, a crust of bread might be found in some cupboard, an egg or two--laid by one of the abducted hens in some private corner--a pinch of coffee and sugar sufficient for Monsieur!

"I should be glad of it. But--when you are in such trouble it seems unfair," protested Monsieur. He added, reverting to the language of the country, that he would be happy to pay for the déjeuner.

"But no! A meal for a bird!--Monsieur and Madame will never miss it!" and Angéle curtseyed herself away, with forced smiles.

Left alone, P. C. Breagh bolted the door and finding water in the bedroom jugs, and scented soap upon the washstand, enjoyed the luxury of a comprehensive wash, drying himself, in the absence of towels, upon a pillow-case. A pot of cold-cream, tinted a delicate pink and bearing the label of Piesse and Lubin, he found, and anointed his blistered feet therewith, and not without pangs of conscience--tore up the pillow-case and bandaged them. He would pay the girl for the damage done to her master's property, he told himself.

He combed his shock of dusty hair with a tortoise-shell comb he picked up from the carpet, and went downstairs, knapsack in hand. It was four o'clock. The dusty, foot-print and wheel-marked highway beyond the broken door in the garden-wall was strangely bare and lonely. The battalion he had marched with had bivouacked on the other side of the village. The troops that would presently follow were not yet upon the road.

The girl cried out that Monsieur's breakfast was ready. It had been laid, looking quite tempting, on one of the little inlaid tables that stood upon the tiny lawn. A truncheon of bread, fairly new, a pat of butter, two eggs, and a bowl of fragrant, steaming milk and coffee--such a meal as P. C. Breagh had not enjoyed for many a day.

He begged Angéle to share. She replied with a graceful wave of abnegation that she had already eaten. P. C. Breagh expressed regret, muttered his old Rockhampton grace and savagely fell to.

"Monsieur is Catholic?..."

The movement of his hand, making the sacred Sign, had not escaped her. He nodded, with his mouth full, and Angéle turned pale under her swarthy skin. Her guest vigorously beheaded an egg and reached for the coffee-bowl. The expression of the girl's eyes, as he lifted it to his mouth, brought something back to him. He sipped cautiously--recognized the French equivalent for English rat-poison--spat forth what he had taken, with a hideous grimace, and poured the deadly stuff out upon the ground.

Then he got up and looked for Angéle, whose white-frilled cap, crimson bodice, and striped stuff petticoat had vanished round the corner of the little hen-house. He could hear the klop-klop of her varnished cow-leather clogs receding along paths unknown.

Said P. C. Breagh, speaking with mouth awry, for the intense bitterness of the alkaloid had dried up tongue and palate:

"I'd like to follow that girl and shake her. But more than likely her sweetheart and male relatives are lurking in the neighborhood with pitchforks, to speed the unwelcome guest."

He went back to the breakfast-table, but the glamour had faded from the banquet, and the leathery dryness of mouth and throat foiled him in the effort to finish the egg he had begun. He pocketed the other, abandoned the bread and butter as unreliable, strapped on his dusty knapsack, and was hobbling away upon the sticks that had lately served him as crutches, when he caught sight of an obviously new coffin of thin tarred planking, on the gravel near the conservatory door. It bore a cross and an inscription roughly scrawled in letters of white paint:

| --+-- | |

JOSEPH MARIE MEUNIER,

AGED 80.

KILLED BY THE PRUSSIANS,

AUGUST, 1870.

------

R.I.P.

And then, with a stiffening of every muscle and a cold and deadly sinking at the heart, the English boy realized that Angéle's father had been murdered, and knew what had been the unendurable injury that had provoked the man of eighty to strike in his daughter's defense. Next instant a gun banged, but the charge of slugs that had been meant to lodge in P. C. Breagh's cerebellum merely smashed the conservatory glass and peppered the walls and trees. The intended recipient of these favors had previously been lame. Now, regardless of blisters and skin cracks, he cast away his improvised crutches, darted down the garden-path, nipped through the shattered door that hung upon one twisted hinge, and ran for dear life.

Thenceafter our young friend did not stray too far from the column he temporarily marched with. The secret of those haggard eyes and scowling looks was clear to him now. And the discovery of a giant velocipede with the solid rubber tires of the period and a front wheel of four feet in diameter abandoned in a ditch, presently enabled him--previously schooled by Mr. Tickling in the management of a machine of similar construction to outpace the Red Prince's marching battalions; and--upon highways, keep abreast of his flying cavalry.

Now, hugely daring, he pounded along in the wake of the Great Headquarter Staff, guided by the whipping flicker of the black and white lance-pennons of the Red Uhlans bringing up the rear.

There were troops upon the road.... One or two stray batteries of artillery, and part of an Engineer Corps going the same way, halted to give a cheer for the King. But the galloping dispatch-bearers with their guards of troopers, bound for Pont à Mousson, meeting the Great Staff on the way, turned back with it, adding to the clouds of dust in its wake.

The Doctor had promised P. C. Breagh plenty of raw-head and bloody-bones whether he marched with the Advance or remained at the rear. The prophecy had been verified. He had not yet seen a battle or even a battlefield. But thousands of wounded men, displaying every sickening mutilation that shot and shell and steel can inflict upon the human body; thousands upon thousands of prisoners, gaunt with fatigue, hunger and misery, had passed in an almost unending panorama before his sickened, pitying eyes. Ruined châteaux, farms and churches, crops destroyed or rotting in the ground ungarnered, villages razed or burned, towns battered out of shape, and fortifications breached by heavy gunnery, were to become sights of common occurrence as he traveled the long red road that was to lead him home at last.

Now he rode and odd lines of songs, comic or tender, fragments of Fleet Street talk, brain-pictures of things seen or persons remembered passed through his mind as he pedaled between long lines of roadside poplars, whitening in the hot breeze that carried the scorching dust along in clouds.

The face of the peasant girl who had tried to poison him. By George! if Mrs. Rousby or Miss Marriott or Mrs. Vezin could have seen her fierce, gleaming eyes, and her heavy black eyebrows lifted at the outer corners, and the way a white canine tooth had nipped her red underlip.... The voice of Mr. Knewbit barking, "Avoid Sham Technicality and Sentimental Slumgullion," the well-bred voice of Valverden dealing the unforgotten snub. The fortune told him by the gipsy woman on Waterloo Bridge after that unforgettable January night's vigil: "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road; and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it, until the end, when tute is jasing...."

"When tute is jasing" meant "When thou art going" he had been told so by a man who knew a bit of Romany. His imagination made a grasshopper-leap of years to the death-bed of a celebrated War Correspondent.--a grim, bronzed man who had followed his arduous calling in many quarters of the world, and had earned much kudos and a whole chestful of decorations, but had never married, and was understood to look with coldness upon the loveliest women, his heart having been irrevocably given in earlier days. Juliette--still young, and ah! how exquisite in maturity--Juliette in widow's weeds, would hasten to the moribund's side and place her little hand in his, gaunt and damp with approaching death. She would hear his story of faithful, hopeless passion, and close his eyelids for the last long sleep. And standing by his pillow, looking pityingly at the dead face, she would realize that she loved--too late....

He sniffed and gulped as the tears stung his smarting eyelids, so moving was the picture of that death-bed scene.

A picture of the King of Prussia as he had seen him sitting at the open window of his lodgings at the Mairie of Pont à Mousson next came up, with faces of market-people and street-boys gaping round-eyed at Le Roi de la Prusse, who nursed his clean-shaven chin and stared unwinkingly before him. Again, the old man, pale, square-shouldered, capped and tightly-buttoned, riding through the market-place with his Iron Chancellor by his side.

Wiry, hawk-eyed Moltke and saturnine, shaggy-browed Roon clattered upon the heels of them, but P. C. Breagh had had eyes only for the great soldierly figure that bestrode the big brown mare.

Did he not owe his life to the well-shaped hand that had rested on the thigh of the brown mare's rider, as the Minister bent to speak to the King?

No common bond of confidence and friendship seemed to unite the master of seventy-three and the man of fifty-five. The hard, somewhat vulpine face of the Hohenzollern, with its drooping, aquiline nose, narrow light hazel eyes, curled white mustache, precise, tight-lipped mouth and rounded chin projecting between the brushed back white whiskers, had been all alight with interest, and warm with kindliness.

This is what the Man of Iron had said with his small square teeth showing laughingly under the heavy hair-brake, and his fierce, prominent blue eyes sparkling with humor and fun:

"The final scenes of melodrama are always the most strenuous. Your Majesty must regard the ridge over Flavigny as your Royal box on the Grand Tier, the occasion as a farewell performance of the French Empire--played for the benefit of United Germany, before the whole world!"

Flavigny was a village.... But the flickering black-and-white pennons that tipped the dust-cloud ahead were slowing.... Three battalions of infantry, each with its band playing gaily at its head, the bronzed, healthy-looking, white-powdered men marching eight abreast, had halted and front-faced as the word of command followed the sound of the Great Staff trumpeter:

"Clear the way! Clear the way! Here comes the King!"

And now the scorching air vibrated with their vigorous cheering as the King cantered by and was gone with a shout and a wave of the hand.

"Our old one takes dust and sun, saddle-blisters and short commons like any old trooper!" P. C. Breagh heard a Lieutenant say to a subaltern as the dusty ranks half-wheeled and fell into step once more. "He's a precisian too.... Zum Beispiel, he called to a man in Vidler's company that he had got his 'needler' on the wrong shoulder. Now that's another thing I like in the old man!..."

"The Field Marshal is taking the Great Headquarters to where it will be hellishly risky," a Captain with Staff shoulder-cords was saying to another, as a new outbreak of cannon and mitrailleuse-fire caused his horse to start and rear. He added: "They were hard at it at Mars la Tour, Vionville and Rezonville all day yesterday: the 5th Division were in action all round Moltke as he stood on the high ridge above Flavigny.... To-day our 7th and 10th are fighting between Gravelotte and St. Hubert, where the French have the devil's own array of battery-emplacements and rifle-pits--our guards are at Doncourt, our 9th and 8th corps are at Verneville and Amanvilliers. Now the fighting seems to have rolled down nearer the river. I have certainly heard cavalry trumpets sounding the charge, and volleys of musketry--French, I judge!--coming from that direction. I should judge that...."

"Bazaine must have turned the handle in too much of a hurry!" retorted the junior, who enjoyed a regimental reputation for humor, and a volley of laughter rattled along the marching files, now breasting a steep and gravelly hill, half-way up which the rider of the giant-wheeled velocipede had been compelled to dismount.

P. C. Breagh had seen, reproduced from the Charivari in all the German illustrated papers, the famous caricature of Cham, over which King Wilhelm's brown-faced infantrymen were grinning as they climbed the hill. Who does not remember the Count de Noë's memorable presentment of the field of war dotted with defunct Prussians, and the French mitrailleuse-gunner in the foreground who exclaims in astonishment: "Sapristi! the battle is over. I must have turned the handle too fast!"

But more than the sardonic jest of Cham, the Captain's reference to the nearness of a possible action interested the would-be spectator of a battlefield. The wiry, sun-bronzed young man in the broken boots and the dusty brown Norfolk jacket, now pushing the solid-tired giant-wheel up a steep and lung-testing hill which the bearers of the needle-gun took in a canter, had seen war-casualties in appalling numbers, but he had not yet beheld War.

And now sharp bugles and piercing trumpets were clamoring of War all round one. The musketry that one could hear at Pont à Mousson clattered in volleys among the neighboring hills. The deep booming of heavy field-batteries persistently answered. Every now and then the ear was violently assaulted by the hideous hyena-yapping of the mitrailleuse.

These breasting hills, these deep-cupped valleys walled and ramparted with wood-crested hill-ranges, cut up the honest battle into a dozen skirmishes. Oh! for an open, campaign and a vantage on some breezy hill-top whence one might see, as the King was seeing with Moltke and his Chancellor from the ridge above Flavigny!

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XLIII

The ridge above Flavigny seemed farther off and more inaccessible than the Great Atlas. One must get off the highroad to some elevated bit of ground, consult the Doctor's map, and use the Chancellor's binoculars. Here was a broad track, green with grass grown over ancient wheel-ruts, leading off upon the left near the crest of the hill.

The grass-road led to a stone quarry evidently long abandoned. Skirting the quarry, P. C. Breagh began to climb the grassy scarp of the hill. It grew steeper, and presently he awakened to the difficulties of mountaineering with a velocipede, and hid away, with the intention of retrieving it later, his stolen giant-wheel in a clump of whins. Alas! its bones, like those of many a sentient charger, were to rust in rains and blister in suns upon that hillside of the Meurthe Department for many and many a year.

But not knowing this, P. C. Breagh continued climbing. The ridgy backbone of turf-jacketed rock proved a natural buttress rising to a towering platform sparsely grassed, tufted with thorn and furze-bushes, stunted pines and dwarfy oak-trees, all mossy of stem and bending to the southwest.

The afternoon sunshine was mellow rather than hot. The pure dustless air was fragrant with hill-thyme and the meadow-sweet. The autumn-tinted woods were golden, the hills hathed in clear blue air. The short herbage clothing the steep was warm, smelling like the clean hide of some great grass-feeding animal. But for the restless bickering of trumpets and bugles, and the hellish noise that men with guns were making, it would have been sweet to be upon the hillside alone with God.

There was a great view from the summit of the colossal limestone.... You could see that bone of contention, the road leading to Verdun, stretching away southwestward, a dusty-white ribbon between its lines of whitening poplars, over the tops of three thick patches of rusty-golden woodland, and the bushy uplands above Gravelotte and the church spire of Vernéville.

Dark blue Prussian columns showed on the grassy slopes traversed by the road that ran from Ars to Bagneux. Near the Quarries of Rezerieulles was a huge French battery served by red-legged artillerymen, who ran about like ants. But one could only guess at the fact that Germany and the Bad Neighbor were locked in the death-grips over six miles square of battle-ground, the breasting plumps of trees and towering bush-clad ridges hid so much away.

Ah! but the din was hellish! The woods vomited fire. White balloons that meant shrapnel-shells described arcs against the hot blue sky, crossing and recrossing between Rezonville and Gravelotte. When they fell upon the slippery grass slopes they exploded with fearful crashes, or became black balls that rolled merrily a while and then lay quiet. In the grass near them were shapeless lumps and masses, red and blue, and dark blue; and things with stiff legs sticking up grotesquely,--the human and equine débris of the morning's fighting and the battle of the previous day. The soft westerly breeze brought an ugly taint upon it--less loathsome, but more horrible than the stench coming from the huge crowded camps of French about St. Quentin and Plappeville and Les Carrières and St. Eloy.

Two great nations at each other's throats and God's image being shattered everywhere.... Blizzards of Lead and Iron, Steel and Fire raging over six miles square of ground. Rivers of blood being poured out, and yet, in spite of the terrific din of War, the insects and birds and beasts went about their usual business. The shrill laugh of the green woodpecker sounded in the copses, the jackdaws were gossiping as they darted in and out of the clefts of the gray rock. Two magpies were feeding a late-hatched fledgling among the dwarfy oak-scrub. Rabbits were showing their white scuts on the edges of the oak-plantations; and the black and gray humble-bees were buzzing as they rifled the lavender scabious and the blue corn-bottles and the late white clover-blooms.

Looking northeast toward the richly wooded hill where perches Fort Queleu, you could see the French flag flying from there, and from St. Privat, and the great cathedral of Metz sitting in the lap of the Moselle. The railway bridge crossing the green, slowly rolling river above Ars was guarded by Uhlans and Engineers. A stray outpost with half a field-battery held the island below the bridge, and the rear squadrons of a brigade of cavalry,--Blue Dragoons, White Cuirassiers, Uhlans, and Red Hussars, with two batteries of Horse Artillery, were traversing the iron roadway, the troopers walking beside the horses as they delicately picked their way along. The Advance was almost out of sight, the midpost squadrons, remounted, were under the bluff that runs beside the river road from Ars to below Aney, and with the Staff of the Cuirassier brigade-commander--the dazzling scarlet-and-gold of his British Dragoon's uniform contrasting forcibly with the steel cuirasses and white coats, his red-plumed silver helmet shining like a miniature sun--rode Brotherton, on a powerful dappled-gray horse, his handsome face animated and eager as he replied to some remark addressed to him by the Brigadier.

"Certainly, General, but I should think the sword could never be superseded. It is, with the bow and spear, the traditional weapon of war."

"You omit the sling, Colonel!" called out an officer who rode behind him. And then the scrap of English talk was swamped in the clink of steel on steel, and the rhythmical trampling of the squadrons that followed.

P. C. Breagh sat astride of a hot boulder, got out the Doctor's map and adjusted his cherished binoculars. They showed him the battalion he had marched with halted by the side of the river road. The bridge at Pagny showed black with solid columns of infantry, marching eight abreast; their sun-touched bayonets rippling lines of molten silver, each helmet-spike a flame of ruddy gold.

The First and Second Armies of United Germany, hitherto compelled to a strenuous inactivity, were having their innings with a vengeance now.... Looking Metzwards, one could see that three new lines of pontoons were thrown across the river below Yaux. A division of the dark-blue soldiers, with eight squadrons of cavalry and half a dozen batteries of mounted artillery, were crossing almost within range of the guns of Mount St. Quentin and Plappeville.

How thickly the white tents were clustered on the green slopes about both fortresses, Red Breeches swarming in thousands without and within the walls. Were the gunners of the huge bronze Creusots one had read of asleep, or lazy or indifferent? The answer came in a spirt of white vapor from an embrasure of the middle salient of St. Quentin's long, eight-pointed star. A white-hot flame leaped, a towering cloud of smoke soared, the roar of a heavy piece of artillery followed; and a shell of big caliber soared above Moulins and burst with a shattering explosion and an uprush of flame. Some Artillery-horses on the nearest pontoon reared, causing a momentary confusion. Their dismounted drivers quieted them, and the orderly crossing went on.

Boom-Boom! Crack! A clatter like old iron and a heavy splashing and pounding of hoofs. St. Quentin had got the range.--No! the shrapnel shell had been fired from a French field-battery placed behind earthworks above St. Ruffine. Another shell hit the upper pontoon and must have smashed it adrift on the landing side. For dark-blue men and struggling horses were drifting away in the direction of Metz, and the green river was tinged with red. The wheelers of a gun-team, dragged downward by the weight attached to them, had gone to the bottom almost without a struggle. The leaders, submerged all but their wild heads and splashing fore-hoofs, battled a while with the current before one of them vanished. The other, whose rope-and-chain traces had somehow broken, swam gallantly down-stream, and finally landed on the farther bank.

Further successful practice on the part of France's artillerists may have followed. At this juncture the attention of P. C. Breagh became diverted by a curious fact. One of the stone-pines seemed to be lobbing cones at him. Whiff-phutt! they were dropping on all sides. Or could it? ... A shrill whistling sound close by his ear, and a simultaneous bristling of the hairs upon his scalp and body, told him that it could. The missiles were bullets.

They came, sometimes with a sharp whistle that told of unexpended energy, at others with the pleasant humming that had at first attracted him, from the woods that clothed the rising ground northwest and west of the platform he occupied.

Were they Prussian bullets or French? At the moment, the question did not interest him. He had pocketed his map and crawling on his belly towards the southern edge of his platform, looked cautiously over, meditating descent. Beyond was a sandwich-shaped stretch of woodland climbing to a ridge; and beyond the ridge a considerable expanse of bush-dotted common bordered by a stream and speckled with a few farm-buildings. Quite a decent-sized town lifted its Norman church-tower nearly a mile away.

The town must be Gorze. Withdrawing his eyes from it, they dropped into a deep ravine or combe running parallel with the western and southern sides of the giant limestone rock he sprawled on. Ferns clothed the deep, hollow sides, and oaks and birches, springing from the bottom, lifted their bushy heads to the level of his face. Spying between the branches, he saw that the ravine was full of garishly colored lights and shadows, and that a steady current of glittering white metal snaked in and out between the tree-trunks, setting from west to east.

Bayonets, carried on the shoulders of red-breeched French soldiers, moving with startling rapidity over the dry leaves at the bottom of the ravine. A battalion, at least, of wiry, active-looking Voltigeurs, a mitrailleuse-battery, each weapon hauled by a team of three gunners.... Green-coated Chasseurs à pied, with cocks' plumes shading the peaks of their képis followed. Would a surprise be intended for the cavalry-brigades that had crossed the railway-bridge and ridden eastward down the river-road a few minutes previously? In that case, what ought one to do?

Even as he asked, the advanced company of Voltigeurs discovered the Prussian squadrons. He saw a ripple of excitement pass down the ranks, and the Voltigeurs hurry forward at the double. He saw the mitrailleuse-batteries string out in line, push up the sloping sides of the ravine, and scatter among the trees of the plantation that climbed the ridge. The Chasseurs followed. Their intention was obvious. They were going to enfilade the passing brigades from the cover of the wood.

Even as the hounds of hell seemed to break loose, and a sheet of pure yellow-white flame ran from end to end of the ridge where the trees ended, the foremost brigade of three Hussar regiments came in view, trotting over a track that traversed the common, became a road, and plunged between deep woodlands trending west. His map had told him that the road led to Rezonville and Gravelotte.

He heard the Prussian trumpets sound through the ear-splitting racket of the French rifle-fire. He saw through the thin haze of powder-smoke that hung above the wood, the massed columns split into squadrons, the squadrons divide into troops, the troops become units--scattered over the common, galloping to re-form again upon the road that led through the woods to Rezonville.

They were two of the brigades forming Rheinbaben's Fifth Division, under Von Barby and Von Bredow, pushing forward to join General von Redern in the neighborhood of Mac La Tour. Their mobility saved them from decimation on a grand scale, but they left dead horses and men and officers dead and wounded. Their retreat was covered by one of their batteries of Horse Artillery, and two squadrons of a Uhlan regiment.

In the distance a riderless gray charger galloped wildly over the common, and a prone figure in a brilliant scarlet coat lay motionless beside the track. More could not be observed just then, for the battery of Horse Artillery got into position, while the Uhlans dismounted and coolly returned with carbine-fire the enfilade from the chassepots in the wood.

They knelt, and aimed and shot without hurry, and that their shooting was effective was demonstrated to the noncombatant onlooker, by half a dozen French Artillerymen and Chasseurs à pied who came staggering or limping back through the trees, and got down into the ravine. One toppled over in the act of negotiating the descent, and lay sprawling and head downward. Another, who kept putting a hand to his streaming cheek, and taking it away to stare at the blood upon it, was shot again in a vital part, spun around, and collapsed in a heap.

"Lee-ee eer!"

The wailing, stinging screech of a bullet that had shaved unpleasantly near was accompanied by the whisking of the sun-scorched straw hat from the head of P. C. Breagh, and an acute pang of deadly fear. In the same instant the Prussian field-battery opened fire. Beyond the trees four puffs of white smoke went up, and four tongues of bright yellow flame preceded the quadruple crash of the driving-charges. Lanes opened through the smoke-filled wood, as trees split into kindling and match-sticks. And heaps of green and scarlet rags mixed with bloody flesh and shattered bones mingled with the débris. And something that screamed like a devil unchained hurtled through intervening space, and plumped upon the limestone platform within a dozen feet of P. C. Breagh. And he shrieked like a shot rabbit as it exploded with a splitting crash, and a spurt of evil yellow fire licked the skin off his ear and cheek.

Dazed and stupefied, he removed himself to the farther and more sheltered side of the platform. But the skirmish was over, the Voltigeurs and the Chasseurs à pied, with what remained of the mitrailleuse-battery, had not waited for the Uhlans to charge, but were in pell-mell retreat along the ravine. He heard a French voice cry savagely:

"We are cut off! These woods are full of Prussians!"

And in the same instant, through the lanes that had been hacked through the trees, P. C. Breagh saw the Prussian artillery limber up and ride off with what remained of the Uhlan squadrons. They were wanted badly at the front, and the infantry-battalions with which P. C. Breagh had marched from Pont à Mousson, and the Division coming up from Pagny, striking into the Ars road, had crossed the upper end of the ravine. The woods were indeed full of them. And they also were wanted at the front and had no time to spare.

As blue uniforms and crimson faces topped by gilt-spiked helmets came crowding through the trees, the human river, flowing along the bottom of the defile, rose in a wave and splashed back upon itself. A red-haired young officer of Voltigeurs, drawing his sword, used his voice and the flat of the weapon to restore order; and succeeded so far that his company formed in straggling lines and began to send in volleys with the courage of despair. The gunners of the mitrailleuse that was not smashed by the German shell-fire could not use the piece effectively at the bottom of the death-trap. They were shot down in the attempt.

It was cool, scientific slaughter--merciless carnage. Before it began, a bugle cautioned attention. A flat-capped field-officer pushed his horse to the front and cried in stentorian tones:

"Aimed fire!"

The men of the chassepot made a gallant stand, but the odds were heavy, and the men of the needle-gun did not waste a cartridge. They loaded and aimed, fired and reloaded with machine-like precision. When the ravine was piled with bloody corpses the bugles sounded "Cease fire!" Then the Prussian field-officer spurred to the edge of the red ditch and shouted, looking down:

"Does anyone here ask quarter?"

There was a laugh. But something raised itself from a heap of bullet-pierced bodies. A rattling voice cried:

"No, dog of a Prussian!"

A revolver cracked, and the speaker, a Voltigeur, was silent. His voice had sounded like that of an old man, but he wore the epaulettes of a lieutenant and had carroty-red hair. At this juncture, being overtaken by grievous retching and vomiting, P. C. Breagh's observations ceased.

He sat up presently and wiped his dripping neck and mopped his forehead. It seemed to him that he had seen the whole French Army exterminated, and yet he had witnessed but a skirmish ending in a battue. He shook his wits into some order, and controlled the shuddering that took him in the pit of the stomach, when he remembered that in common decency he must go to Brotherton.

The descent from the rock-platform was nothing more than a risky scramble. There were plenty of pine and furze roots and jutting stones for holding to and clefts into which to thrust one's toes. But the crossing of that ravine cumbered with bloody corpses was not effected without revolt of body and soul. He slipped once and fell, and struggled up all horribly besmeared and sick and shaking. For the teeth of a head from which the face had been shot away had snapped close by his ear. Then came the negotiation of the bit of woodland. Here were more Voltigeurs and Chasseurs à pied dead and horribly mutilated, and the wreck of a mitrailleuse, with two of its gunners. Some of these poor wounded creatures were living, and moaned for water.

"My God!--my God! how I suffer!" one feeble voice kept crying.

Help was coming, for from the direction of the town some carts were being driven, one by a stout priest in cassock and broad-brimmed hat, others by men with Red Cross armlets. Black-habited, white-capped Sisters of Mercy were in these vehicles, with baskets, and pitchers, and pails.

Seven dead Hussars showing hideously the effect of mitrailleuse-fire,--a troop-horse or two, and a White Cuirassier shot through the body and swearing horribly in Low German, were the fruits of the French enfilade. The fine gray charger had ceased careering; it grazed peaceably on the short herbage by the track that led over the common. But Chris Brotherton would never sit in saddle again.

P. C. Breagh turned him gently over and opened the gold-laced scarlet tunic. There was no blood upon it, only clean dust, nor was the dead man bruised or cut, having fallen where it was grassy. Upon the broad breast, under the white cambric shirt, was an oval miniature, pearl-set, of a pretty woman. The handsome mouth of the wearer smiled under the drooping fair mustache, and his blue eyes stared glassily. A bluish hole in the right temple and a bloody clot amid the hair upon the left side showed where the chassepot bullet had traversed the brain.

He had been high-handed, arrogant, and domineering, yet the Doctor and the horsey Towers had seemed to love him. No doubt that woman in the miniature had held Chris Brotherton dear.... P. C. Breagh would have left her fair face lying on the yet warm breast of her lover, but something he saw going on among the casualties upon the edge of the wood caused him to change his mind.

That gaunt-eyed, greedy-fingered creature in the peasant's blouse and Red Cross brassard, who glided from body to body, rifling pockets, should not plunder the Doctor's friend. With this determination, Carolan took away the portrait, a packet of letters, and Brotherton's watch and purse and pocketbook, then went forward to meet the Sisters, just descending from the foremost of the string of peasants' carts; and began:

"My Sister..."

The nun addressed turned a pleasant face upon him, and cried, with a sympathetic clasping of her small, work-roughened hands:

"There is blood on Monsieur! ... He has been wounded."

P. C. Breagh explained with economy of words how and where he had been watching the fighting, and whence came the ugly stains upon his clothes. The nun glanced toward the wood, paled and shuddered, and said, making the sign of the Cross upon her starched, cape-like guimpe:

"But all cannot be dead who lie bleeding in that ravin--the hollow where our poor school-children gather primroses in Spring?"

"I think they must be. The massacre was carried out deliberately. Aimed fire--and there is not a movement, not a groan...."

P. C. Breagh shuddered, remembering the crossing of the red ditch. The nun said with energy, as other black habits and white guimpes came crowding round her:

"We must make sure.... Each of those bodies must be lifted and examined. Life often lingers, sir, when it seems to have fled. We learned that in the Crimea, when we worked in the base-hospitals of Kamiesch. What of these things?" P. C. Breagh was holding out the portrait, purse, pocketbook, and letters. "You wish our Reverend Mother to take charge of them? They belonged to that dead officer yonder, in the scarlet uniform? He was English, you tell me--and you, too, are of England? Very well! It shall be as you wish, Monsieur--I am free to decide, as I am the Superior of our community. But I will not receive the valuables at your hands until you have helped us to clear that terrible ravine. We have only our good priest with a few peasants and one surgeon, and some charitable ladies and gentlemen of the Association of the Red Cross. Everyone else is panic-stricken--they have barricaded themselves within their shops and houses, and taken refuge in the cellars.... The explosions of cannon have been so terrible--they are becoming yet more alarming, and when the fighting came quite close.... Our people are not brave, you think!--Still, everyone cannot be courageous.... But, Monsieur, who watches men being killed by guns to gain experience--we may look to Monsieur for help?"

The clear woman-eyes went to the sun-browned, freckled face of the young man in the travel-worn, dusty, blood-stained clothing, and realized that a struggle was going on within him. She said:

"If Monsieur is of necessity compelled to go and leave us, I will take charge of the dead English officer's property for Monsieur. But a great blessing is for those who succor the wounded. Our Lord has always promised this!"

No one listened to the little colloquy; some of the Sisters were already stooping beside the prone bodies, two of them were helping the vocal Cuirassier into a cart....

With a great longing P. C. Breagh had longed to make the ridge south of Flavigny, and see with his own eyes how the Man of Iron comported himself in the clash of war. And to stay behind and forego the possibility cost him poignant anguish, but one could not leave the Superior and the Sisters to dabble unaided in that ghastly ravine.

"I will stay, Reverend Mother," he said, with a bow that might have been more clumsy. Next moment Brotherton's property had vanished into a huge pocket hidden somewhere in the black habit. The nun clapped her hands, crying to the peasants:

"Thanks! thanks! Come, Antoine, Pichegru, Eloi, Bénoit! Dubois! To the wood, my friends! and the hollow, where are many sufferers! I place you under the orders of this English Monsieur."

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XLIV

Upon that battlefield of Gravelotte, France, driven to bay, fought like a royal tigress. How many times the dark blue Divisions were thrown back in their assault upon positions zoned with death-bellowing cannon and death-barking mitrailleuses, History relates. So murderous was the fire of her chassepotiers from their densely manned rifle-pits that you could trace Moltke's plans of assault in mounds of dead Uhlan cavalry and long regular swathes of motionless blue objects that had been Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz....

Yet if the Warlock had said within himself, "This shall be above all a battle of cavalry," it would seem as though the determination had been formed upon the other side.

For this day that saw the death-charge of Von Bredow's brigade upon the Gorze Road--Uhlans, White Cuirassiers, and Dragoons of the Guard hurled in a solid column of shining steel against French field-batteries and battalions of riflemen--also saw the cavalry of Frossard, of Ladmirault, and Canrobert ride down whole squares of German infantry, who rose again and poured in volleys from their needle-guns, to be beaten down by the storms of leaden hail ground out by the mitrailleuse.

A glowing, coppery sun looked down on those six square miles of fiercely contested ground. Over its whole expanse there was not one patch as big as a National School playground without its débris of arms and accouterments, its ghastly or ludicrous tokens of war.

In an intermittent lull of the racket you could hear the dry earth, that had been pounded bare of verdure, sucking moisture as though after heavy rain. Only the rain was red. The faint, sour smell of it came to the nostrils mingled with the smell of burnt gunpowder, human and equine exhalations, and the acrid stifle of burning wood.

For Flavigny was yet smouldering, the farm-buildings at Gorze were burning, Malmaison was a furnace; houses and barns at Verneville were wrapped in clouds of black smoke shot with lurid flame.

Exhausted battalions, sick and stupefied with slaughter, were lying down among the dead and the wounded to snatch a wink of sleep. Others opened their haversacks to snatch a hasty mouthful, or drained their canteens of the last drop. Surgeons were going up and down among them, patching up flesh-cuts with lint and diachylon, temporarily plugging bullet-wounds of the minor order. "There!" they would say to the Schmidt, Kunz, or Schultz so treated; "now you are fit for fighting again!"

Perhaps you can see the Man of Iron in his white Cuirassier cap, black undress frock with the pewter buttons, and great steel-spurred jack-boots, standing, grim-jawed and inscrutable, behind his King's camp-chair. Through the stress and storm of two long days of hot fighting, that patch of high ground south of Flavigny had been the point to which orderlies and aides-de-camp furiously galloped from every point of the compass, and from which they galloped back in even more desperate haste.

In the rear of the camp-chair, not so close to it as to draw fire, were the King's personal military staff, a bevy of Princes, and the representative of the British War Office, Colonel ----. Several Councillors and Secretaries of the Chancellor's traveling Foreign Office stood about, stout, gray-haired, important-looking persons in semi-military uniform. The carriages that had conveyed them waited at Tronville. The King's charger and those of the other great personages were in the care of orderlies. The Escort waited by their horses in the background.

Moltke stood apart, taciturn and inscrutable, nursing his thin elbow and cupping his long chin. Roon, who contrary to his custom was not wearing his helmet, gloomily champed his cap-strap, unable to disguise his anguish of anxiety. He would have given a year of life to say:

"Old man, so cool in the midst of this hellish slaughter, can it be that you do not know how things really are going? Since two of the clock the French have had the best of it! The chassepot you termed a 'magnificent weapon' has justified your eulogism. The mitrailleuse we despised, not comprehending its terrible capabilities, has revealed them to our undoing. The Army of United Germany bleeds at every pore!"

He tore his mustache, the dye upon which had not been renewed recently. His heart swelled with the flood of pent-up speech.

"The Commander-in-Chief's dispatches to the Queen have been cheered in Berlin. Throughout Germany they are hailed with joy.... 'France now fights with her back to the Rhine,' the people say. 'Our Army stands arrayed between Bazaine and Paris!' Is it possible they do not realize that the situation is critical? Have they no suspicion that the tables might be turned?"

He wrung his knotted hands together in torment, and the sweat started in gouts upon his livid skin.

"Before us the Army of Bazaine--behind us at Châlons the Army of MacMahon. Were the Duke of Magenta with his recuperated Divisions to advance energetically and swiftly to the relief of his brother Marshal--could the Crown Prince hold him back? And if he could not, what were our chance worth?..."

The sentence had escaped Roon without his knowledge. Moltke's wrinkled visage turned his way. The scarlet-rimmed eyes glittered on him a moment. Roon leaped as the dry voice said:

"Not so much as a pinch of snuff!"

The War Minister stammered:

"Pardon, Your Excellency! You spoke to me?..."

Moltke answered quietly:

"I asked if you could spare me a pinch of snuff. My box is empty." He opened the little silver receptacle and turned it upside down, tapping it on his finger nail: "Neither have I a single cigar!"

Roon had forgotten his cigar-case in quarters. He fumbled for his snuff-box, thought it must be in his cloak. A resonant voice said from behind the King's camp-chair: "Will Your Excellency take one of these?"

"Why not? why not? If they are not too strong for me...." The Warlock smiled, showing his toothless gums. The Chancellor said, opening and offering the plain green leather case with the coroneted B stamped in gilding on it:

"It may be they are stronger than you are accustomed to smoke?"

Moltke's keen, swift glance met the heavy blue stare of the Chancellor. He returned:

"I will answer Your Excellency when I have tested them."

The case held three Havanas of varying merit. Two were good, one super-excellent. The withered hand hovered, paused above them, made selection, while the sharp, glittering glance seemed to say: "So! ... You are trying again the test you put me to at Königgratz! See! I am cool enough to choose the better creed!" While Bismarck returned the case to his breeches-pocket, mentally commenting:

"Excellent. He has chosen the best one. He is not flustered--he has yet a trump to play!"

Believed, he returned to his post behind the King's camp-chair, a rugged, powerful figure, with the face of a thoroughbred mastiff, unwearyingly keeping guard lest meaner influences should undermine his power and topple his unfinished life-work down.

Watching the battle through these noonday hours, he had, being a practical soldier as well as a consummate statesman, known some moments of horrible foreboding. Now his courage revived. The work would be completed. The well-shaped, sun-browned hand lightly resting on the chair-back would hold all Germany within its iron grip.

The thrill of conscious power transmitted itself to the King, it may be, for he moved impatiently in his seat. Sometimes he must have chafed, the white-haired Hohenzollern chieftain, knowing himself a puppet in the hands of his powerful Minister.

"How they fight! How they fight! Ach Gott!" he muttered. "Wouldst thou have credited, Otto, that such fire was left in France?"

And the helmeted head of the old chieftain shook with an uncontrollable nervous spasm. Over it came the scoffing retort:

"It is the fire of fever, the fire of phosphorescence. It will leave them weak and debilitated--it will glimmer out and go black. And yet Bazaine, contemptible as a strategist, has his moments of inspiration. The thrust of the skilled fencer will sometimes puzzle the master of swordsmanship.... Frossard and Canrobert are devout Catholics, and no doubt believe in guardian-spirits. They have had a hint, it may be, from some celestial Field Marshal; St. Louis, possibly, or the Chevalier de Bayard."

The King murmured, unheeding the jest, his eyes glued to the field-glasses that jerked in his shaking hands:

"Even a victory could not bring my soldiers of the Guard to life again. And there! Dost thou see?..."

The Minister turned his own binoculars in the indicated quarter. What remained of a Division of the Prussian 10th Corps, with a brigade of cavalry, Uhlans and Dragoons, was locked in the death-grip with a Cavalry Division of Bazaine's own corps, the Third, on the plain between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont. And even the Chancellor's iron hand trembled as with ague, and his breathing harshened perceptibly as he carefully focused the glasses on the fight. He said after a moment:

"Those three regiments of cavalry on brown horses with green, silver-laced dolmans and red-bagged talpacks are Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard. Fine fellows! They have a man to lead them, it would seem, in that little Colonel with the big paunch."

The Brigadier of the Chasseurs had been killed by a shell, and upon Paunchy had devolved the leadership. Twice he had led the green dolmans in shattering charges, under the stress of which the dark blue islands of infantry had hollowed and caved in. Twice he had fought his way out at the head of his shrunken and mutilated squadrons. Now, sweeping round, the Dragoons and Uhlans had attacked the Chasseurs furiously in the rear.

All that could be seen, even through the binoculars, was a shifting kaleidoscopic jumble of gay uniforms. Men's heads and arms rising and falling, flashing swords, flickering lance-pennons, and the crests and hindquarters of plunging beasts.... Hence Kraus, Klaus, and Klein of the blue infantry could not fire into the mêlée for fear of shooting their countrymen. Red Breeches hesitated to use his chassepot on the same count.

About a bushy knoll to the left of the struggle, the German cavalry circled like swallows, greedily assailing a swarm of green and red dragon-flies. The chasseurs' cartridge-boxes being empty, they used their long sabers as they had used their carbines, coolly and effectively; and Paunchy, lifted above the press by the little knoll referred to, encouraged them with looks and gestures and words.

"Courage, my children! ... Follow me! ... Bravo! ... One moment's breathing-space, and at them again!"

He was only a green and scarlet speck in the midst of an aggregation of other specks on the vast battlefield, yet the King and the Minister watched him with fixed regard.

"Grosser Gott! How that man fights!" the King muttered at one point in the conflict, and the rejoinder came from overhead:

"He is gallant, certainly, but a bit of an actor. Would not one say that flourish was meant for the ladies in the orchestra-stalls?"

"Because he has kissed a medal or a relic?" the King muttered, tugging at his white whisker. "Doubtless he is Catholic.... We ourselves have many brave soldiers of the Roman faith!"

For as his squadrons ever thinned and dwindled, every instant paying toll to the great swords of the Prussian Dragoons and the blood-thirsty Uhlan lances, they had seen the little Brigadier take from the breast of his green dolman something white and press his bearded lips to it, and thrust it back again, and sign himself with the Cross.

"Hurrah Preussen! Immer vorwärts!" yelled the Uhlans, as their dripping lance-points flickered in and out between the red-stained sword-blades, and the bodies of dead Chasseurs and dead horses rose in a mound about the knoll where stood the little Brigadier.

Paunchy possessed a great voice. His "Chargez!" had reached the ears of the King and his Chancellor through all the pandemonium of battle. When his Staff trumpeter's instrument, bullet-pierced, gave forth no sound but a strangled screeching, the little Colonel's thundering "Feu!" needed no trumpet to make the order plain. Now, his "Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur!" boomed out like the roar of a dying lion. His melting squadrons gave back the rallying-cry.

But they were lost. Prisoned within the ring of piercing steel that tirelessly revolved about them, they could kill, but they could not break through the barrier. Fresh squadrons rushed with hoarse shouts to the aid of the German cavalry. The Chasseurs were hopelessly outnumbered, and must inevitably be crushed.

The subaltern who bore the Imperial standard got a lance-thrust in the shoulder. At the same moment, his horse was shot dead. As the beast reared in the death-throe and went down under the plunging hoofs of the maddened horses round him, the Colonel leaned from his saddle, seized the hand that gripped the staff of the standard, drew the fainting officer upward, and laid him across his own saddle-bow. Then, as his gallant horse braced itself to bear the double burden, the rider lifted high the glistening folds of the tricolor topped by the golden Imperial eagle, and as the Uhlans charged the knoll he shouted again in terrible tones the slogan of the dying Empire:

"Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur!"

War has many of these sublime moments mingled with her squalid hideousness. Upon this day many a soldier, French and German, died as finely as the father of Juliette. You are to see him--bareheaded, for the fur talpack with the plume of green and scarlet had been sheared from his head by a glancing sword-cut--lifting a war-flushed forehead to the sky all sunset-red. Then a mortal lance-thrust reached him over the body that lay across his horse's withers, and he reeled upon his saddle, and fell backward, partly swathed in the Flag for which so many heroes have died.

Through the tricolored folds yet other Uhlan lance-points reached him. Did any thought of his daughter pass through the brain of the dying soldier between the sharp pangs of the probing steel?

"_My child ... safe ... neutral territory.... Charles ... honest man ... protect my girl from Adelaide! Now ... death! Ah!--agony! Save, Jesu! ... Mary, help!_"

A few of his gallant Chasseurs surrendered. But these were only a handful. Nearly the whole strength of his brigade of three regiments lay dead upon that patch of common that was cumbered with their corpses and those of their enemies.

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