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 itsdébrisof 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 themêléefor 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.
Bismarck said, lowering his binoculars:
"Lucky that war is so confoundedly expensive. Otherwise, one might get too fond of it!"
The King groaned:
"My Dragoons of the Guard!—my Uhlans, slaughtered in regiments! My infantry shattered—decimated—annihilated in Divisions. The bravest blood of France—poured out upon French soil like water.... Great God!—how shall I defend this carnage to the Queen?..."
The voice behind him said, ironically:
"My wife writes me ten pages every three days, urging upon me in Biblical language the necessity for complete extermination of everything French! Believe me, Sire, he who is guided by the advice of a woman follows, not a Jack, but a Jinny o' Lantern, that will inevitably lead him into a bog!"
The King winced under the gibe, yet he said, striking his clenched hand passionately upon his knee:
"And this shadow that we follow southward, this vision, of a Crown Imperial! What is it but anignis fatuusthat has plunged us to the neck in the morass of War? If the whole Army of United Germany sink down in the death-sleep, for what have we offered up the sacrifice?"
The answer came, prompt and authoritative:
"Your Majesty may leave that question to be answered by the sons of these men who lie dead about us, and the sons they shall in their time beget. If your Majesty's whole army must be sacrificed to insure German Unity, let it be so, in the name of Heaven!"
The King tugged again at his white side-whisker and muttered something about "sinful ambition." The hand that had wrenched the curb now offered sugar. The voice said, mellowed and softened to persuasive tenderness:
"I have served a great King. I aim to serve a great Emperor. If my ambition be sinful, it is at least not base!"
"Ah, Otto!" The King rose, and his hard, yellowish-hazel eyes were full of tears as they met the Minister's. "You have no argument so strong as your disinterestedness. For even your bitterest enemies have never questioned that!"
Something took place in the brain behind the great domed forehead hidden by the Cuirassier cap, the fierce, almost challenging stare sank beneath the old man's tearful look of love. The Man of Iron was asking himself: "Am I, then, so disinterested? ... If I am, why is it that these words have power to gall me so? Can it be that I have my price as well as others? I think myself repaid in Power for what other Ministers will only sell for gold."
The momentary embarrassment passed. He said, pointing to one of those long blue mounds of dead infantry:
"And who could see our soldiers advance under the fire of these French chassepots and the terrible mitrailleuses, and doubt that they have understood the greatness of the issue at stake. Excuse me a moment, Sire! ... What is it, Götzow?"
Theaide-de-camp, in the full uniform of the Chancellor's own regiment of Cuirassiers, was white as his own coat. He gulped out:
"Excellency, I am charged by His Highness, Prince Augustus of Württemberg, Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Guard Corps..."
The Chancellor's prominent blue eyes lightened so fiercely upon the speaker that he began to stammer and boggle in his speech:
"Terrible intelligence ... only just received by His Highness.... Yesterday Your Excellency's sons, Count Herbert and Count William, were in the general cavalry charge which took place at Mars la Tour..."
The great soldierly figure standing with the huge spurred boots apart, the hands leaning on the long steel-hilted sword, might have been cast in iron or carved in granite for all the emotion conveyed by look or gesture. The voice said stridently and harshly:
"The First Dragoons of the Guard were not involved in the struggle. Only the brigades of Von Barby, the 4th Westphalian Cuirassiers, the 10th Hussars, and the 16th Dragoons."
The ghastly aide faltered, perspiring freely:
"At the moment of General von Barby's charge, it has been unfortunately ascertained, a squadron of Prussian Guard Dragoons of the First Regiment—returning from a patrol, dashed into themêlée..."
The Chancellor drew a sharp breath, but stirred not a finger. His fierce eyes, staring from dark pits that had suddenly been dug round them, paralyzed the wretched bearer of the tragic intelligence. He asked in a tone that appalled by its tranquillity:
"Have both my sons been killed?"
Theaide-de-campgot out that it was feared so. He was thanked and charged with a polite message to the Prince. As he saluted and retired, lightened of his tidings of anguish, the Minister focused his binoculars with a steady hand upon that point toward the northward where the dark bulk of the fortress of St. Privat loomed on a hill-top covered with masses of troops and traversed by a straight white, poplar-bordered road, regularly trenched for musketry. He said in the same tone of composure, though his set face and the hand that held the glasses were wet as though with rain:
"St. Privat still resists. General Pape, with the Guard's cavalry and the Saxons, will find their work cut out for them in driving those French battalions out of the village below the hill."
He lowered and wiped the glasses with his handkerchief. The King said entreatingly, laying a hand upon his arm:
"Go, go! Find out the truth about your sons, Bismarck.... Leave not a stone unturned, in God's name!"
Even as the King spoke, German drums and trumpets sounded the charge; and there was a sudden shifting of masses of troops in the direction of St. Hubert. Then as a wave of dark blue men began to roll out from the deep woods that flanked the village of Gravelotte, so fierce a storm of cannon and mitrailleuse and chassepot began to beat about their heads that the unseasoned horses of the Princes of the suite kicked and plunged and the Minister said:
"It would be wise did your Majesty remove out of this neighborhood. These bon-bons thrown by Frossard's artillery are coming much too near."
"I will ride back—I will move out of the way," said the old man in great agitation. "But you, Bismarck!—you must go and see about your sons!"
He answered, and his great bloodshot eyes and sagging jowl were more than ever those of a mastiff:
"When I have seen your Majesty in a place of safety I will ask your permission to do so."
An orderly from Steinmetz, who now had his field headquarters at St. Hubert, arrived with an urgent entreaty that the King would at once retire.
The horses were brought. King William and Von Roon mounted. The Chancellor's mare had been sent to water; his orderly appeared with her as the King's party rode on. With a hasty word of reproof the Minister swung his great figure into the saddle, but the brawn and bone of his beast had not carried him clear of the threatened spot before a retreating wave of German foot and horsemen swept over it, followed by the thundering gallop of a retreating battery.
It was asauve-qui peut, caused by the smashing fire from the French shrapnel and mitrailleuse batteries, and the practice of the French riflemen entrenched at the Moscow Farm. A general officer rode through the rout, laying about him with the flat of his drawn sword and swearing horribly, to judge by his bloodshot eyes, and purple countenance.
"Hares!Gottverdammt!hares!" he gasped breathlessly, finding himself face to face with a gigantic officer of Cuirassiers. "A thousand pardons, Excellency. I did not at once recognize you. Surely you will follow his Majesty to the rear?"
"Willingly," said the Chancellor, as a brace of French shells exploded, digging pits in the sandy ground over which the Headquarter Staff had passed. "Only, as shell does not fall twice in the same place, I am waiting to make sure." And, with a knee-touch, he put the brown mare into her stride.
There was a backward surge of disorganized infantry as the huge beast lifted herself over the yawning craters. But she passed through the press by the bore and thrust of her great shoulders, and the beast and the big man she carried were swallowed up in the roaring dusk.
Moltke, the bald-headed war-eagle, remained brooding his coign of observation upon the verge of the ridge south of Flavigny, his feathers drooping, his shoulders hunched, his sharp, hooked beak inclined toward his breast; his red eyes, burning with the battle-lust, staring fixedly from under the wide, hairless brows.
The sun sank in clouds of smoky gold and crimson over that country of copses, ravines, ruddy brown farmhouses, and white villages. Evening came down and dipped her wings in billows of salt-tasting gunpowder smoke, rose-tinged above and beneath by the reflection from the red sky and the red earth. The green Moselle was tinged with blood. Little rivers ran blood, streams and springs became blood. Wells were filled with blood, as in old time under the rod of the Lawgiver of Israel, and still the battle raged over hill and valley, common and highroad.
Flavigny village still smouldered, Malmaison was burning, houses and barns at Verneville were wrapped in roaring flames. Yet the gunners of the French batteries at Moscow, Point du Jour, La Folie, and the Quarries of Amanvilliers and Rezerieulles, continued to make practice of the deadliest; and still French cavalry charged the Teuton's dwindling infantry-squares.
Had not a comparatively fresh and vigorous Prussian Army Corps dropped in at the crucial moment success had hardly crowned the arms of United Germany. They had been marching every day since they quitted the Saar, those solid-thewed Pomeranians of the 2d Corps, but at Puxieux they had cooked and eaten, and now appeared like giants refreshed.
Not only Steinmetz rode at their head, with their commander Von Fransecky, but the Warlock in person directed their attack. Battalions that had retired in disorder reformed and rushed back to meet afresh the brunt of battle. Wherever the red eye glittered and the withered finger pointed, fresh swarms of fierce assailants were hurled against the dwindling hosts of France.
Down came the dark, and now St. Privat was burning; the village under the lee of the fort was burning—sending up great columns of livid smoke shot with licking tongues of flame. The day was over. But crackling lines of fire outlined the position of the rifle-trenches; the mitrailleuse batteries still spat death unwearyingly, as what remained of Bazaine's Army retired in comparative safety to the Fortress of St. Quentin under cover of that fiery screen.
There the shattered brigades and mutilated divisions clung like swarming wasps "with plenty of sting in them yet," said Moltke, "and the hive"—meaning the huge Fortress of Metz—"handy in their rear. But, on the whole," he added, "I am excellently well satisfied. My calculations have worked out correctly. Those Pomeranians of the Second Corps arrived just in time!"
And the veteran galloped joyously as a young trooper of twenty-five to cheer his King with the good news.
And can you see that other man, to whom Emperors and Kings and Ministers referred when they mentioned Prussia, who outwitted nations in policy and made wars at will, spurring the great brown mare wildly through the weltering darkness, with salt drops of mortal anguish coursing down his granite cheeks?
"Bazaine's right has been turned by the Saxons, the Guards have smashed his center, and the Pomeranians of the Second Corps have taken St. Privat and forced him to retreat, leaving Germany master of the field. Success has crowned beyond hope the arms of the Fatherland, but where are the sons who called me father? ... Is this Thy judgment upon one through whom so many fathers are sonless, O my offended God?"
Perhaps he groaned forth such words as these, as he bucketed the great brown mare through the perilous darkness, over roads bestrewn with helmets, swords, and cuirasses, knapsacks, talpacks, forage-caps, and schakos, needle-guns, and chassepots, and camp kettles, as well as the humandébrisof War. The flare of a lantern tied to and swinging from one of the great steel stirrups threw a treacherous and fitful light upon his road.
Follow him as he ranged from camp to camp, questioning, investigating.... It was black night and raining heavily when a gleam of hope dawned upon the man.
The cavalry piquet-officer who had given the clue beheld the great brute and her huge rider vanish in a cloud of their own steam. A furious clatter of hoofs came back out of the welter ing darkness, as the flaring lantern, gyrating like some captive fiend at the end of its tether, dwindled to a dancing will-o'-the-wisp and vanished, the officer exclaimed:
"Kreuzdonnerwetter!he must have a neck like other men. Yet he rides as though it were forged of tempered steel!"
"Who rides? ... What was that?" asked a brother officer, waking from a doze of exhaustion beside the hissing logs of the rain-beaten watch-fire. He got reply:
"Only the Pomeranian bear ranging in search of his lost cubs." He added: "I was able to tell him that he would find the eldest of them at the field-hospital of Mariaville, upon which he galloped away like mad."
"The field-hospital of Mariaville" proved to be a farmhouse on a hill-top near the battlefield of Mars la Tour. Candles stuck in the necks of empty wine-bottles revealed, through the open, unblinded windows, the figure of the surgeon in charge and those of his orderly-assistants passing to and fro.
"Have you a Bismarck here?"
The stentorian shout from the yard made wounded men turn upon their improvised pillows, and brought the head and shoulders of the bibbed and shirt-sleeved surgeon thrusting out of a window on the first floor. A colloquy ensued between the unseen and the medical officer. Presently the arbitrary voice interrupted:
"What do you call not seriously wounded, man? Describe the casualty clearly, without professional Latin, or too many crackjaw words."
The dressers winked to each other behind the back of the surgeon. He said, supporting himself with one hand against the crazy window-frame as he thrust his head and shoulders forth into the dripping darkness and gesticulated with a hand that held a probe:
"Excellency, your elder son has received three bullets. One lodged in the breast of his tunic, another hit his watch, and the third is at present in the upper part of his thigh. I was about to place the patient under chloroform when Your Excellency's call summoned me from his side."
The voice said, with a clang of anger in it:
"You should not have left him had it been the King who called. Go back to him instantly. I am coming up."
And he came striding in his great boots up the crazy one-flight stair. Ghastly faces of wounded soldiers turned upon their pillows of straw as that gigantic figure filled up the doorway. His shadow, thrown by the flaring tallow-candle flames, loomed portentously on the whitewashed walls. He wore no cloak or overcoat and dripped as though he had swum, not ridden, through water to his finding; the peak of his field-cap discharged quite a little deluge upon his son's white face as he stooped over the stretcher where the young man lay and touched his hand, and kissed him on the cheek.
"Never mind. Clean water does no hurt," he said, for he had drawn out his handkerchief to wipe the splash away, and finding it soiled with dust and powder-grime had returned it to his pocket.
The surgeon returned:
"I wish we had clean water—it would be above price. But all the springs are fouled with blood, and there are dead French in the courtyard-well."
"They must be got out and the well cleansed, if possible," said the Chancellor. "Meanwhile, a temporary supply must be found.... What nourishment have you, fit for wounded men?"
The surgeon responded, busy with a cotton-wool chloroform pad:
"Nothing, Excellency, except wine and a little Extract of Liebig."
The Chancellor said harshly:
"Yet this appears to be a farm-house, and I heard the clucking of fowls down below!"
The surgeon, who was a bullet-headed, obstinate East Prussian, and did not relish this sort of hectoring, returned, thrusting out a stubbly under-jaw:
"Excellency, there are certainly fowls in the farmyard. But they are not mine, nor have I money to buy. They belong to the unhappy wretch who owns this place, and has lost everything else."
And he gave back the stare of the fierce eyes that raked him. The Minister began to lisp, an ominous sign:
"Ah, indeed! ... May I—may I ask where you—where you gained your notions of the code of ethics that should prevail in warfare?"
Said the surgeon, fronting him fairly and squarely:
"Excellency, from my father, who was an honest man!"
Straw rustled under heads that slewed to look at the blunt speaker. There was a long instant's pause. Then the Chancellor thrust his hand into his breeches-pocket, pulled out a gold coin, and said, tendering it to the medical officer:
"Kindly pay this to the object of your pity for twenty fowls at a mark apiece. Now I will keep you no longer from your patient. Good night to everyone here."
"Good night, Excellency!" came in chorus.
He gave his brusque salute and had already reached the threshold, when his son, a colossal, black-haired, brown-skinned young trooper, who lay back upon his stretcher, staring sulkily at the smoke-blackened rafters, or contemplating the twitching bare toes of the leg that bore a tourniquet above the plugged and bandaged wound, started slightly, looked round, and called:
"Father!"
"What is it, my dear fellow?"
His great stride took him back to the prone young giant on the stretcher. Count Herbert said, barely removing his eyes from the ceiling, and speaking in a studiously indifferent tone:
"If you are upset about Bill, sir, there's no need to worry. His horse was shot under him, but he got hold of another. I saw him ride off all right with a wounded comrade behind him. That's all. Goodnight!"
The son nodded surlily and resumed his inspection of the ceiling. The sire, who had received the news in silence, went out at the door, stooping under the lintel, his great shoulders rasping the posts on either side. They heard his heavy footsteps pass down the crazy staircase. A curt sentence or two reached them, spoken as he went through the kitchen on his way to the door. Then he was in the yard, loudly calling for an orderly to bring a lantern. An instant, and three revolver-shots cracked in rapid succession, each followed by a significant cackling and squawking. The surgeon, now fitting the cotton-wool pad upon the wire mouthpiece and signing to his assistant to hand him the chloroform, clapped the pad upon the mouth and nostrils of young Bismarck, and said, with a dry chuckle as he poured the pungent anaesthetic upon the wool:
"His Excellency is having a little sport. All the same, without water, one cannot cleanse wounds or boil hen-broth."
Water arrived an hour later, two barrelsful upon a hand-cart drawn by terrified peasants, behind whom rode a trooper of Uhlans, accelerating their movements with prods of the lance. A general officer had sent the barrels for the use of the wounded at Mariaville. This service rendered to his son, he rode in search of his King.
He found him, with his Staff, not far distant from Rezonville, having returned there when the French cavalry of the Left withdrew after their tremendous charge. The King was reading dispatches, seated on a saddle thrown across a wet faggot, beside a smoky watch-fire. The farmstead of Malmaison, now sending up showers of sparks like a set-piece at the end of a display of fireworks, gave light enough by which to read.
Persuaded to take shelter, the old man found it in a deserted hamlet, of which the very name was uncertain, so sorely had it been mauled about. A crust of stale bread and a mutton-chop grilled on some wood embers furnished his supper. Water fit for drinking being unattainable, he tossed off a nip of sutler's rum out of a broken tulip-glass, and lay down in his clothes to rest upon the royal ambulance, within four walls and under a roof holed and gapped by shot and shell.
The Princes of the Suite, much to their Highnesses' chagrin, were compelled to subsist on fragments of stale sandwiches from their holster-cases. The escort bivouacked about the Royal lodging. Troops, wearied to exhaustion by the two days' continuous fighting, lay down to sleep in the pouring rain.
The Warlock supped with his personal Staff on ration-biscuit and raw bacon, and spent the night by a bivouac-fire, among the living and the dead. Can you see him sitting on the empty ammunition-box, buttoned in his dripping waterproof, his scanty meal eaten and his cigar well alight? ... How contentedly he listens while the bulbul Henry sings, without notes of accompaniment, his moving ballads. How piously he rises, bares his old head, and joins in the robust hymn sung by his battered but victorious legions, "Now thank we all our God..."
Or, with the mind's eye, one can follow the Man of Iron as, having bidden his master good night and left the young Hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg to keep guard over the royal carriage, he set out, in company of his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen, a lieutenant of Dragoon Guards and one of the minor Councillors of the Embassy, in search of a lodging until break of day.
Sheridan, the famous American General, representing the United States with the Prussian Headquarters Staff, a short, alert gentleman of forty-five, with a dark mustache and chin-tuft, and a pronounced Yankee twang, followed, begging leave to accompany the expedition. The first cottage approached as likely to afford a night's shelter was found to be on fire.
"Too hot, though I like warm quarters!" the Chancellor commented. The next house was found crammed with wounded soldiers, all suffering from the excellent shell-practice made by the gunners of General Frossard. The next house and the next had also been converted into field-hospitals. The fourth yielded to the Minister's personal investigations a vacant attic, with three truckle-beds, provided with straw palliasses, tolerably clean.
Sheridan and Bismarck-Böhlen threw themselves upon their rude beds and very soon were soundly sleeping. For a little while the Man of Iron stood beside the narrow unglazed window in the attic gable, his great arms folded on his broad breast, his eyes, bloodshot and strained with gazing through the fire and smoke of bombardments, looking out into the wild black welter of the rainy night.
Those torn-up pastures and plow-acres, those devastated cornfields and woodlands, those burning farms and villages of Lorraine lay in comparative quiet now.... The hellish roar and crash and tumult of War had ceased for the time being. Its ghastly sights were veiled, for the most part, by merciful darkness, though the innumerable little sputtering fires kindled by the soldiers threw fitful illuminations upon grotesque, or strange, or terrible, or indescribably hideous things....
Hungry, thirsty, weary, and saddle-sore as any trooper of his own White Cuirassiers was the Man of Iron, having broken his fast at dawn upon a hunch of bread and bacon-fat, and supped upon a couple of raw hen's eggs, broken on the pommel of his big steel-hilted sword. But as his bloodshot eyes looked upon his handiwork, he was contented. This huge, vehement, and bloody conflict had established the mastery of Germany: France was outnumbered, out-generaled, and out-fought.
With frightful loss Moltke had attained his premier object. The Army of MacMahon had been driven in rout to Châlons, the retreat of Bazaine's Army westward had been effectually checked. The South road from Metz to Verdun, hitherto lightly held by the advance-patrols of the Prussian Crown Prince, was now blocked by the whole effective strength of two out of the three armies of Germany; weakened, wounded, and bleeding after the two days of desperate fighting, but still powerful, menacing, and grim.
One desperate effort made at this juncture might have broken through the barrier of living flesh and steel. Would it be made, or would the French Army of the Rhine fall into the snare so cunningly left open, and retire within the fortified area of Metz?
The gable-attic looked toward the great fortress. In vain his glasses swept the formless blackness. The sparkle of a moonbeam on a bayonet-point—the green or crimson ray cast by a Staff lantern moving over the ground, yet screened by the French batteries, might have cleared the point in doubt. Save for the sputter of German watch-fires over the recent field of battle, and the yellow candle-flare in the windows of half-ruined cottages and outbuildings, where wounded men lay on straw or the bare earth, no light showed, no life seemed to be.... He swung the shattered casement wide, and thrust his head out, gripping the window-sill, intently listening.... No distant roll of iron-shod wheels, no reverberating tread of countless footsteps; no other sounds, such as might betray the retreating movement of an armed host, broke the silence of that tragic night.
Only the sob of the wind and the dripping of the chill rain from the overflowing roof-gutters, came to him, with the deep ruckling snores of exhausted Divisions, and the strangling coughs and hollow groans of mangled and dying men and beasts.
All would be well, he told himself, as he shut up the glasses, unbuckled his sword-belt, and unhooking his collar stretched himself in his great boots upon the groaning truckle-bed, his heavy revolver ready to his hand. Moltke's great plan would be successful.... The King would once more prove his Chancellor a true prophet.... The hand that could build up Prussia from a fourth-rate State into a world-power, would yet hold the German Empire in its grip of iron, and through that Empire rule the world!
If He Who created the World had been displeased by Bismarck's ambitions, things would have gone less smoothly from the outset.... If He Who wrought Man in His Image had been moved to wrath by all this bloodshed, He would have shown it by letting something happen to the boys....
But Bill was safe, while Herbert was only slightly wounded. To-morrow he should be brought back to the hospital at Pont à Mousson and thence invalided home.
Reverting to Bill, secretly the father's idol, in whose person he saw his own lost youth renewed, the Chancellor smiled now, painting in imagination on the darkness a picture of that charge of the French square at Mars la Tour. According to Herbert, who had put the thing badly, Bill had had his horse shot, and jumped on another, taking a comrade behind him as he rode off the field.
A fine story to write home to the boy's mother.... How her deep eyes would glow and kindle as she read.... An exploit with which to dazzle fat Borck, hated keeper of the King's Privy Purse.... Nor must one omit to embody the incident in the next official communication penned to Count Bernstorff, Prussian Ambassador in London, who would be sure to retail it to some Lady-in-Waiting possessing the ear of the Queen. Lastly, what a magnificent anecdote for the convivial stage of a Foreign Office Staff dinner, or an official banquet, related with spirit garnished with exaggerations of the pardonable harmless kind. Indeed, with such embellishments he subsequently related the slight episode, proving himself capable of the very folly of paternal tenderness. The picture cropped up constantly among his dreams on this wild night of Gravelotte. And when the wan-faced Dawn peeped shuddering between her blood-stained curtains, and the reveillé sounded, waking the living from their sleep among the dead, so that their haggard uprising seemed as though in answer to the trump of the Archangel of the Resurrection—he heaved his giant's frame from the squalid bed to learn, with a savage thrill of exultation, that Bazaine had fallen into the trap.
In the dead of night, behind the screen of the unsilenced French batteries yet emplaced behind the high-walled farms of Montigny la Grange, La Folie, and from thence to Point du Jour, the bleeding Army of the Rhine had retreated to the treacherous shelter offered beneath the guns of Metz.
Said the Warlock, smiling in his sunniest manner as he made his hasty morning toilet in the shelter of a baggage-wagon tilt:
"Three French Marshals are twittering in this birdcage on the Moselle—one Army has been shut up with them. Another yet remains at large, with Paris and the huge resources of France in rear of it." He paused to absorb a pinch of snuff and extract a clean white shirt from a small and shabby japanned tin field-case, then added: "A France on the point of Revolution—an Army commanded by MacMahon, who has been badly beaten, and has that Old Man of the Sea, the Third Napoleon, sitting on his back wherever he goes!" He put on the shirt and emerged from temporary obscurity to finish. "If the spirits of the just be permitted knowledge of earthly matters, my beloved wife Mary is pleased with her old man!"
And he equipped himself in his old war-harness, and crowned his old wig with his battered war-helm, and got on his fine charger and rode off to meet and confer with his King, the Chancellor, and the War Minister, and issue instructions to his Chiefs of the various Staffs, trolling even less tunefully than usual, another verse of his favorite song:
"And knew they, the shining stars above me,Of the bitterness of my woe,They would come down and bid her love me,Pleading: 'Ah! do not scorn him so!'"
Rumor had it that the King, the Chancellor, Roon, the Royal Staff, and the Tinsel Rabble, with the escort of red, blue, and green Hussars, Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans, had ridden toward Flavigny.
The Warlock placidly followed, traversing the battlefield near Rezonville. Here bearer-parties of the German Ambulance Service, with Red Cross helpers, Knights of St. John, volunteers and French and German surgeons wearing the Geneva badge, were now arriving; and some progress had already been made in the gigantic task of separating the wounded from the dead.
The Iron Chancellor was found here, attended by his shadow, Bismarck-Böhlen, sometimes dubbed "The Little Cousin," other whiles "The Twopenny Roué," according to the humor of his powerful relative. The Minister was glancing through the morning's letters, his cousin was reading him extracts from theDaily Telegraph, a parcel of English papers having arrived. Hard by, squads of fatigue-men, aided by bloused peasants, were working to finish the second of two parallel trenches, in length some three hundred feet, near which had been collected a huge mass of French and German corpses, many half-naked, the majority of them still in uniform. Carts lumbering up with fresh loads to discharge continually, augmented the terrible mound of bodies, a huge percentage hideously displaying the effects of shell-fire, many in the initial stages of decomposition, hastened by the sweltering and oppressive heat.
Soldiers went about with huge canvas sacks, filling these with zinc identification-tags taken from the necks of their dead comrades, gathering a harvest of watches and purses, the former sometimes of such value, and the latter occasionally so well-filled with French money as to suggest that they had previously been taken from the dead.
"Ach Gott!" the perplexed officer of Pioneers in superintendence of the trenching-party kept saying: "More, more, and still more.... What is one to do with so many dead men?"
Some utterance of this kind reaching the ears of the Chancellor, he turned in his saddle and called to the officer:
"Your trench is too deep, sir, and not half wide enough. Three feet is sufficient. Lay them in as cooks dispose herrings in oil-pickle, across in layers and not singly and lengthways—labor and space will be economized thus."
"Alas, Excellency!" protested the officer, "will not such a method be very unwholesome? The churchyard at Flauville is already raised four feet above the pavement of the church."
"Let them lay on fresh dead," said the Chancellor, smiling grimly, "and stop when they reach to the level of the window-sills. Thus our good fellows will be able to listen to the Curé's Sunday address. Meanwhile, bury thick." He added, as Moltke rode up, pointing to the ground now trodden into mud and littered with French schakos andképis, Prussian helmets and schapkas, knapsacks, arms, under-clothing, accouterments, brushes, razors, and shoes: "Would not one call this 'Death's Rag Fair'?" He added as the wind, blowing over a battery of dead horses, brought with it an odor that made the senses reel: "Or 'Death's Perfumery Shop' would be as appropriate a title.... I must advise the King not to breathe this atmosphere longer, fasting. It might result in dysentery."
Moltke agreed, expanding his thin nostrils: "Truly, the effluvium is exceedingly bad!"
"Hypocrite!" said the Chancellor, openly laughing. "Do we not all know that the bouquet of a battle-field covered with slain enemies is sweeter to you than November violet-blooms."
"Both may be agreeable," said the old war-eagle, "in different fashion; as the partition of a conquered province, and the dismemberment of a truffled capon might afford pleasure of two kinds to Your Excellency."
Said Bismarck, as his cousin reined back and joined the modest personal staff of Moltke, following at some distance in the rear of the Commander-in-Chief:
"I prefer the first, if the second appeals to my empty stomach. Though we must not sell the bear's skin before we have killed the bear!"
He went on, patting the sweating neck of the brown mare, who had winced and started as yet another dead-cart shot out its dreadful load to windward....
"The King has been in favor of keeping the country up to the Marne. I have yet another idea, which may be too Utopian to realize. A kind of German colony—a neutral State of eight or ten million inhabitants, free from the conscription, and whose taxes should flow to Berlin. France would thus lose a district from whence she draws her best soldiers—one would cut her claws thus!"
Said Moltke, his clear eyes narrowing in merry wrinkles:
"And draw her teeth as well!"
The Chancellor went on:
"That the annexation of the piece of territory will give jaundice to the French is a matter of no consequence. Revenge should be made impossible. Even without annexation we must render them permanently harmless before we risk their bite. The surrender of the eastern fortresses of France can alone serve our purpose. We have bought them with the best of our German blood!"
Agreed the Warlock: "Many noble Prussian families will be plunged in mourning. Wesdehlen and Reuss, Wedell and Finkenstein have been killed—Rahden is most grievously wounded, and a whole crowd of officers commanding regiments or battalions are either badly hurt or dead. I can but thank Divine Providence that I have suffered no personal bereavement."
"I echo your thanksgiving," responded the Minister, "though some pints of my own blood have vicariously been shed."
"I had heard—I had heard somewhat, but feared to touch upon the matter," said the Warlock. "With the younger olive-branch they tell me all is well!"
The Chancellor answered, stammering slightly and looking straight in the other's eyes:
"Bill rode off the field in safety, carrying two unhorsed comrades out of the leaden hailstorm, one in each stirrup, Cossack-fashion, and accommodating a th—a third on the crupper of his horse!"
"Ei—ei! I had not heard these interesting particulars," exclaimed Moltke, raising his hairless brows in apparent astonishment. "I did not know the brave young man had distinguished himself so much! The Countess will overflow with pride and gratitude.... She writes regularly, I think Your Excellency told me? Naturally she would be solicitous for your health."
"I had a letter from her yesterday," returned Bismarck, "in which she mingles, in equal doses, stern admonition and affectionate advice. Thus, I am to avoid the French wines, which are known to be gout-provoking, and be sure to return in time for the celebration of our wedding-day.... While, remembering, however strongly Paris may be fortified, that the walls of Jericho fell down when the trumpets of Joshua were sounded—I am to give Your Excellency no peace, 'until the modern Babylon is utterly destroyed.'"
"Ha, ha, ha!" The Warlock laughed with boyish merriment, until the water stood in his clear, keen eyes. "Her Excellency, as I have often told thee, Otto, possesses a personality of the antique order. She is of the breed of Judith and Zenobia.... I would also say Boadicea, but for the Countess's known antipathy to the British race. So we are to destroy Paris, and what of the Bonapartes and Bourbons and Orleans?... Have we, then, no cut-and-dried instructions as to what is to be done with these?"
The Chancellor returned, with immovable gravity of tone and feature, belied by the amusement dancing in his eyes:
"We are to purge France of the whole lot of them. Though—supposing the Prince Imperial were to complete his education at a German University, and thus attain to manhood surrounded by German influences—Monseigneur Lulu might one day become a subaltern in our Prussian Army—subsequently to completion of the customary period of service in the ranks!"
"Capital. Her Excellency is indeed a woman in a thousand." And Moltke fairly rocked in his saddle with laughter, finally having recourse to the frayed cuff of his old uniform field-frock for the mopping of his overflowing eyes. "Thou must paint for the King," he gasped, "that picture of Lulu as a Prussian private soldier. Do not fail to tell him—it will be sure to make him laugh."
Said the Chancellor, shrugging his great shoulders:
"He has ridden with Von Roon and the Tinsel Rabble in the direction of Flavigny, where the French bombardment so greatly endangered him yesterday. Von Roon will be pouring into the royal ear dismal details of our losses, which are to be estimated for the Berlin newspapers at something under twenty thousand, including officers."
"Seventy thousand would be nearer the mark," said the Warlock placidly. "Nor do I regard it as a heavy price for such a victory as we have won. Roon, however, is not to be envied an unpleasant duty, which, for my own part, I prefer, when possible, to leave to other mouths than mine."
And leaving the battle-field they struck into a road in a cutting leading east toward Flavigny, and bordered with cottages shattered and scorched by shell-fire, most of them standing in gardens gay with dahlias, sunflowers, snapdragons, marigolds, lavender, and phlox. Every house that boasted a roof was full of wounded French and German soldiers, most of them lying on bare boards or earthen floors. Oaths and cries of anguish came from kitchens that in virtue of their solid tables had been converted into operating theaters; ambulance-assistants emptied buckets of ensanguined water over the gaily-colored flower-beds, while bare-armed surgeons, in blood-stained aprons, came to the doors every other moment to cool themselves, or fill their lungs with draughts of cleaner air.
"It is sad to see all this suffering," remarked the Chancellor, "or would be, did one not know it unavoidable!"
Said the Warlock, smiling cheerfully:
"Blood and wounds, dying men and dead men, are the inseparable concomitants of War. One takes them then as natural, and pays no heed to them. Did armies fight with truncheons of sausages, and dumplings stuffed with plums instead of iron shells full of shrapnel, there would still be deaths in plenty."
The Chancellor said, laughing heartily:
"And the Field equipment of our Army surgeons would consist of calomel and rhubarb-pills. Here now are a collection of soaked macaws and paroquets. The fine feathers of the Napoleon's Guard Imperial have suffered badly from last night's rain."
In two fields right and left of the road they followed were crowded nearly four thousand French prisoners, under a heavy guard of Mecklenburg infantry. The Mecklenburgers were drinking their morning coffee and munching Army bread and raw ham rations. The emerald, pale blue, and scarlet Imperial Dragoons and Cuirassiers, the white-mantled, red-fezzed Chasseurs d'Afrique, the green-coated Chasseurs à cheval, the gorgeous Guides and Lancers, the Voltigeurs, and the red-breeched, blue-coated grenadiers belonging to individual regiments, standing as if in the ranks, or lying down in groups upon the muddy ground where they had spent the last night, looked with hollow eyes of famine, upon their munching jailers, but disdained to ask for food.
"They are wet," said Moltke, "for few of them have got their greatcoats. It is the love of display that leads the French soldier to throw away what extra weight of covering he carries when he is in the thick of amêlée, or suddenly called upon to charge. While our stout fellows will come out of an assault with what they carried into it."
"Or perhaps a little more!" hinted the Chancellor.
"It may be—it may be!" admitted the Field Marshal. "The French love for gold-carrying is the cause of that enrichment. Hence most of their Guard Cavalry officers carry beneath their tunics or in the pockets of their tight pantaloons netted purses given them by their women, that stick out in a tempting style. A prod of our German lance, or a rip from the bayonet, and out pops the purse into the soldier's fist. You would not call him a thief for taking what he finds in this manner?"
"I cannot answer for myself," said the Chancellor, turning a laughing look upon the speaker, "but I can safely predict that my wife would exonerate him upon Scriptural authority. By the way, I see that your brigadiers have not thought it worth while to place the French wounded under surveillance." He pointed to a halting procession of roughly bandaged casualties in torn and muddy uniforms. "I have already passed at least a thousand of these limping fellows in red breeches, and of course there must be thousands more."
"How could they escape?" asked the Warlock, turning his ascetic, hairless face upon the speaker. "And did they succeed in doing so, of what use would they be as combatants? All these you see, have they not been wounded by shell-splinters in the head or arms, or hit in the legs and feet by our rifle bullets? Why should we burden ourselves with the maintenance of men who cannot fight against us? and must be helpless burdens upon their country even were they within the French lines?"
"I admit the clearness of your Excellency's judgment," said the Minister, "even while I doubt whether, if some of these red-breeched rascals happen to be in possession of concealed weapons—there would not be an excellent opportunity, at this moment, for ridding France of Bismarck or Moltke."
"Or both," the Warlock amended, "with the aid of a double-barreled pistol. Look here! Was ever a more startling likeness between a dead man and a living, than is presented at this moment before Your Excellency and myself?"
And returning the salute of a young soldier in the white-faced blue uniform of the Guards Infantry, who in the act of galloping past upon a powerful if wearied beast, had checked his stride so as not to splash mud upon the Chancellor and the great Field-Marshal, Moltke signed to him to halt.
"That he is a relative of Max Valverden's," said Bismarck, "I would have wagered you a dozen of Moselle, of Comet vintage, if Your Excellency were not already inclined to bet on the relationship."
"I never bet," chirped Moltke, "except in boxes of chocolate and gloves with my nieces, and then it is a matter of certainty beforehand that the little girls are going to win!" And he turned his narrow, glittering gaze upon the object of his curiosity, who was now fixed in the front attitude of attention, immovable as an equestrian statue of painted stone.
"I will not detain you upon what is no doubt a pressing errand," said the Chief of the Great Staff, smiling amiably in the Guardsman's rigid countenance. "I merely wished to ask your name, and why it is that a private soldier of Guard Infantry happens to be riding an officer's horse?"
"Pardon, General Field-Marshal!" The statue blushed becomingly. "My name is Carl Bernhard von Schön Valverden, at the service of Your Excellency. Of my rank in the Army I am hardly at this moment certain, as I was promoted Corporal and Sergeant yesterday, during the action of the Guard at St. Privat and Amanvilliers, and am now acting temporarily as junior Captain of my company, nearly all our officers having been killed."
"I congratulate you, Sergeant!" rejoined the Field-Marshal cordially, "and am glad that you, as successor to the family honors of an officer who served the Prussian Army with distinction, seem likely to follow in the steps of your relative. Prut!—that was a close thing!"
"Hellishly so!" agreed Bismarck.
For the flushed and laughing face of Valverden had suddenly hardened and sharpened. With lightning quickness he had drawn a revolver from a pouch strapped to his belt and fired across the withers of the big brown mare bestridden by the Iron Chancellor. As the single shot rang out, another followed almost instantly, and the midmost of a knot of three dismounted Lancers, their heads, legs, and arms swathed in clumsy, blood-stained bandages, who had halted to rest by the side of the muddy road, yelled shrilly and pitched heavily backward, dropping, with the broken pair of clothes-props that had served him as crutches, a cavalry holster-pistol that had exploded as it fell.
Said Valverden, stiffening his features in the endeavor to disguise his almost passionate elation: "Your Excellencies will pardon me, but I saw the fellow was dangerous...."
"He might with reason," the Chancellor answered, "have entertained a similar idea of you!" He turned to Moltke, saying:
"Will not Your Excellency give orders that the companions of these would-be assassins—all upon the road who have witnessed the attempted outrage—shall be shot without delay? It strikes me also that more stringent precautions must be taken with regard to disarming wounded prisoners. The man had a pistol—that goes for much!"
"Certainly—certainly!" agreed Moltke, beckoning to an aide of his small Staff, who followed at some distance. He issued some brief directions, speaking in an undertone, then said, smiling and turning to Valverden:
"The late Count Max was an excellent marksman with the pistol. You seem to have inherited this talent of his!"
The Chancellor added, looking at the still smoking revolver: "You have there a pretty little weapon, apparently of American make!"
"It is one of Colt's six-shooters," said Valverden, smiling. "I bought it from a non-commissioned officer quite recently, and have practised with it in the trenches at the animate mark. But of the ammunition I got with it all has been expended save six cartridges, one of which I have had the honor to dedicate to the service of Your Excellencies."
Both the Excellencies laughed, Moltke saying:
"It would be a pity to spoil your shooting, Sergeant Count von Schön Valverden, for want of a few cartridges. Give me the caliber of your weapon and I will engage to supply you with a few hundred. And, as to your promptitude may be owed the priceless life of Count Bismarck, the silver-sword-knot must be the reward."
"Thanks, thanks! Your Excellency!" stammered Valverden, grasping the offered hand of the old warrior.
"And the King shall hear how important a service his newly promoted officer has rendered him," appended the Chancellor, "in preserving to the Throne and nation of Prussia the greatest of living strategists!"
"Under Divine Providence," said Moltke, devoutly raising his forage-cap.
"Under Divine Providence," repeated the Chancellor, touching the peak of his own.
He added, as Valverden, dismissed by a wave of the Chief's finger, his blue eyes blazing, his blond face aglow with triumph, set his borrowed spurs to the flanks of his late Captain's charger, and with a showy bound and demi-volte, galloped furiously away:
"He is as vain as Count Max, but seems to possess more character. I prophesy he will go far!"
Moltke agreed, slightly glancing after the flying horseman:
"Far—if Heaven preserve him from the clutches of such women as Adelaide de Bayard. Wouldst thou believe, Otto, the she-fiend spread her nets to catch that youngster, who out of dare-devilry prevailed on an officer of her acquaintance to take him to her house?"
"So!" Bismarck turned his large eyes on the withered eagle-face. "Did the meeting ripen into intimacy?"
Moltke replied:
"Sufficiently so to cause Valverden's family acute apprehension. One would suppose that she first revolted, then attracted, then charmed.... The Countess in the anguish of maternal solicitude wrote a letter to the Colonel of Valverden's regiment.... Fortunately the call to Active Service diverted the young man's thoughts elsewhere."
Bismarck said, smiling and smoothing his heavy gray mustache with his ungloved right hand:
"And, happily for her intended victim, an accident befell the sorceress, which blunted some of the arrows in her quiver of irresistible charms!"