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 Blumenof 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 asaide-de-campupon 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 ishisWar—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 incafésand 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.
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 rosewoodbijou—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 impromptucafé-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 thedéjeuner.
"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 theklop-klopof 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 atLe 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 theCharivariin 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!
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 equinedébrisof 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 Chasseursà pied, with cocks' plumes shading the peaks of theirképisfollowed. 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 Chasseursà piedwho 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 thedébris. 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 Chasseursà 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 Chasseursà pieddead 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-likeguimpe:
"But all cannot be dead who lie bleeding in thatravin—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."