So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed. Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared. And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her servitor. She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug of coffee out of a private bottle ofschnaps.
"Herr Je!" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?" For her young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching legs.... She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke up.... Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got clockwork inside them.... It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it will be so in France. And what the Danes got the French will get, and that will be a thumping!" She nodded directly afterward and dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.
Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step. They had hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly. They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came less frequently out of their dustier bags. They marched for the most part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid ground reverberate.
Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges would go down before it as by magic; and through the middle of a field of browning corn or whitening barley a broad white highway would be beaten hard as any threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched partridge chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a fragment of biscuit, a scattering of potato-peels, an empty match-box, the paper that had held an ounce of tobacco, and many empty bottles that had held beer. Rarely, a great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose injuries might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying blood and a broken stirrup-iron. Thus, under the rhythmical tread of the dusty boots, as under the iron-shod wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded and would follow them—green things were beaten from the face of earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before the Third Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they were flying before Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from the North.
Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched hedgerows, and the black circles of their great fires remained to tell of them, like the soil-pits that scarred the fields where they had bivouacked. Last night, by some delusion of the wearied senses of sight and hearing, they had seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of their camp to be marching even as they slept. The lusty snoring of the countless swathes of sleepers between the long, orderly rows of stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked helmets, suggested the rushing of a host in onward motion. When the boy who had lain through the night under the sutler-woman's cart to guard it from light-fingered marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his blistered feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still. Then in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead and shrill bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé—and when the tremendous war-machine rushed on again once more, the dusty boy had been caught up once more by the wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a chip is whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train, or a wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and borne upon its dreadful way.
He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as a blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed trotted past, sneezing, between the files at the rear of a half-company-column. "Whose is the beast?" he heard a soldier ask his neighbor on the right-hand, and: "Nobody's—joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the reply. Upon which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of biscuit, with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened, neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,—no more an ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.
Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out of a pair of eyes which were less bright than they had been before their owner became addicted to the use of beer withschnapsas a lacing. She had an incipient beard, and the voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there was a tinge of womanly coquetry in her way of straightening her big, battered bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl tied crosswise over her voluminous bust. She yawned, struggled to the perpendicular position, with some difficulty, owing to her corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout red finger at her henchman, yet squatting in the shade of a clump of dusty whins:
"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two fists! Such agimpelI never yet did see! But they say all theEnglischare mad, their climate makes them so. Otherwise would they not live in their country?—but no! they can't.Hier! Catch Rumschottel, and let's be moving!"
P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of idiot, or the contumely heaped on the United Kingdom. It was better to be on the black books of the sutler-woman than distinguished by her too-favorable regard.
For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had undoubtedly played the part of a Samaritaness toward the wandering Englander, she was, it had to be owned, more charitable than chaste; trading not only in beer, bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards, dominoes, pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following, between marches, the oldest profession in the world.
Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal billet of the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg Artillery, P. C. Breagh had flatly declined. Conceiving the refusal to be prompted by jealousy, Frau or Fraulein Krumpf had not taken it in ill part. Until, being undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of her anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated among her clients of the rank and file.
"You threadling, you whipper-snapper! You pickled herring in a jacket and breeches! There is a man buried in the Domkirche at Mainz, where I belong, that has been dead over a hundred years, and has more of good red life in him to-day than thou! 'Frauenlob,' they called him, because he couldn't live without women, and women! and when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his bier. And they poured wine over his grave so that you stepped up to your knees in it—all because he had liked the women as a tom-cat likes cream!"
The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted the situation. But the wound remained; and as the better-half of Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young Hebrew steward, the sutler-woman nagged at the young man who limped beside her jackass, through the deep welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long blistering stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless, dusty men marched by.
There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and others swarmed after them. Batteries succeeded battalions, ammunition and baggage, ambulance and commissariat-trains were followed by yet other battalions, while the sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and the skin wore off his heels.
At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of breathing and his straining muscles seemed about to crack, a man died.
He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened quite suddenly. P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned all unnecessary integuments, marching without coat, vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a moment previously swinging along with unbuttoned uniform—it was marvelous how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this method of relief.... His open shirt showed the lighter skin of his bare chest, hispickelhaubewas perched upon the cooking-pan crowning his knapsack-top, and he had draped a wetted red handkerchief over his steaming head.
Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale, staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown. But suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun. Men were thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and tin-ware. Yet they marched on without a pause.
Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the way. Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.
"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and was ravenously devouring weeds. She added, becoming aware of the prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white already. Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks' time and trouble. Better leave him for theFeld-lazarettto pick up."
But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel seized her beast's head and trudged on. If she had looked back, she would have seen good Irish whisky wasted. For despite the shade of the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was all up with the man, as she had prophesied.
He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried to lift a hand to his perspiring chest. By the tin crucifix dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that he tried to make the sacred Sign. Then his eyes rolled up, and an expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance. His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking, came from his open mouth.
"A-a-ach!"
He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man was dead. Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek, and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and stopped. He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the ground. The officer asked in staccato sentences:
"It is a case of heat-stroke? You are a doctor?"
P. C. Breagh answered shortly:
"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."
The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground impatiently. The captain said, patting the glossy, sweating neck:
"Very good. Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"
P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund Hessian's name, regimental, battalion and company-number, and turned it face-upward on the discolored breast. The captain, leaning from the saddle, read, and mentally registered. His keen eyes, hedged with dusty fair lashes, narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and, somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like a smile in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young man who squatted on the ground by the dying, the smile was an offense. He scowled, and the officer, noting this, asked curiously:
"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"
He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture. Resenting the gesture for the same inexplicable reason, P. C. Breagh responded with a head-shake. The captain pursued, pulling the damp and blackened reins between his gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the horse's within the palms....
"I asked, because you seemed—how shall one put it?—sorry for him, you know!"
The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor angrily. The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped into sudden flame:
"I am, damned sorry for him! To come by his end like this—without firing a single shot!"
There was something unusual about this little dialogue, carried on between the smart mounted officer and the footsore, untidy pedestrian, over the body stretched out by the roadside. As the broad stream of marching men flowed by, curious eyes rolled their way, the whites showing startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces. Men wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing there. And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry with wrathful bitterness:
"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!—as any fellow in his battalion. He set as much store as others by King and Fatherland! I daresay he dreamed of getting the Distinguished Service medal for some tremendous act of gallantry, and astonishing his wife—he wears a wedding ring, so I suppose he had one!—with it when he got home. And now it's all over. It makes me feel sick. All over, and nothing to show for it!"
The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the face of the coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face, with the look of agonized surprise now fixed upon it, seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing but this!" The officer returned:
"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as he died upon Active Service, and that will not be so bad, after all. And presently theFeld-lazarettwill come up and put him in a wagon. He will be buried at sundown, when we halt.... They will give him a firing party and a bugler—everything will be done decently. After a battle there is not always—you understand?..."
He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals on his dark blue tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe knowledge and experience. Hating him still more vigorously, P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:
"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"
"'Pawns!' My worthy sir,ourpawns are battalions!" The captain laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained teeth under his thick brown mustache. "This was—a unit among myriads of myriads.... You will find plenty of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I guess, you are a graduate in surgery out for practice.... Let me advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance—the arm-badge is a protection—of a definite kind."
He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse snorted relief, and cantered on with him, sending another shower of dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct "unit among myriads of myriads" and the unkempt Samaritan hunkering by its side.
A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept over him a moment previously. Behind and through the officer's brown-eyed, good-looking face he had seen the fierce, challenging blue stare and great domed skull and bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars at will. And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty thousand men thus clad and armed had passed already, had awakened in him a rage of pity and a fury of disgust.
This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid world-event, shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and stirring nations to wildest enthusiasm, meant catastrophes innumerable as minute; infinitesimal tragedies never to be heard of, related or known,—involving the humbler and the weaker among the people of both sides.
Meanwhile—here was a letter, pinned inside the dead man's shirt, an ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted sprig of some kind of garden-herb, smelling evilly.
"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so thou bring thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will be enough." Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to remember that "old man" kept off the fleas, she enclosed "a bit picked from the clump in the garden border by the old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry after his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself his faithful wife Lottchen. One could only be sorry for poor Lottchen and note down her address, together with her deceased lambkin's name and regiment, and send her presently a line from a stranger who had been near him when he died.
For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing could be done beyond pulling his yet pliant limbs into decent straightness and folding the already stiffening hands upon the unheaving breast. Then P. C. Breagh covered his face with the red handkerchief, and—a tin crucifix being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace—touched the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a prayer for the departed soul, before, resuming possession of his discarded jacket and shouldering his knapsack, he trudged upon his way.
"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset, by heavy marching. Since breakfast-time there had been no halt; the columns of human flesh and horsemeat had pegged along, tirelessly as though the sinews that bore them had been forged of elastic steel.
The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies and gold beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north and east was green, with a vivid, springlike hue. The clear, thin dusk of August fell, yet the tireless columns marched on—and in company of other, even queerer wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly continued to trudge beside them. When at length the halt was sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field of flax, and threw himself heavily face downward amid the yellowing stems that had long ago flowered, and seeded, and ripened for pulling.
Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten minutes, when a bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy heads and forelegs of the leaders of a team of gun-horses crashed through the hedgerow, the scarlet face, open shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the forerider showing above. As luck would have it, orders had been given that a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this flax-field. And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the horses, and the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved very close to P. C. Breagh.
Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the hollow into which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had landed him. The heavy riding-whip of the forerider had cut him bitterly across the loins while yet in mid-air. Adding insult to injury, the artilleryman had cursed his victim for getting in the way of the battery, and the other riders and the gunners on the limber were grinning from ear to ear. Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the road....
Upon the farther side two half-battalions of infantry, divided by a little bushy knoll, were already encamped upon a strip of gorsey grass. The thing had been done as if by magic, the officers grouped in the foreground round their little camp tables were drinking Rhine wine and beer as peacefully as though they had not stirred for hours. Behind them the battalion-color and the halberd of the drum-major had been planted upright in the center of an orderly array of drums and band-instruments, the straight rows of knapsacks within rolled greatcoats, stretching away in the rear, were divided by the customary ten-pace interval, and the mathematically balanced stacks of needle-guns.
Fires of brush and dry cones from the pine-groves fringing the road crackled in the small oblong trenches dug by the fatigue-men. Squad-cooks were cutting up pea-sausages, raw potatoes, and onions into camp-kettles of water, destined to simmer, slung on sticks reaching from bank to bank. And the regimental butchers had already slaughtered a couple of young bullocks, whose skins lay smoking by the chopping-block. Presently, when the officers' mess-cooks had chosen such joints as seemed good to them, the rest of the meat would go to enrich the stew of the rank-and-file. Meanwhile the men, scattered to the utmost limits of the cordon of sentries, blunted the edge of hunger with black bread and the flinty brown biscuit, crowded thirstily round the beer and wine-carts, squatted in groups playing cards, chatting, or singing part-songs; wrestled and ran races, or dozed lying face downward on the sunburnt grass, their foreheads resting on their folded arms.
A charming scene, now that the all-pervading dust had begun to settle—the bivouac roofed in by the clear green twilight, through which diamond star-points began to thrust. If only one had been less sharp-set, and the proprietors of the wine and beer-carts had had bread and sausage to sell as well as warm, flat beer and musty-smelling vintage, the beauty would have appealed to one a good deal more.
Squatted by a lichened boulder in a clump of sun-scorched bracken, P. C. Breagh searched his pockets, and then the recesses of his knapsack, for something to eat. An ancient crust of black bread rewarded his investigations, just as the savory-smelling camp-kettles were taken off the fires.
He fell to work upon his crust as the stew was apportioned, and the big cans of beer distributed to each mess; and as he gnawed dog-like at the stone-hard lump of baked rye-dough, he caught the eye of one of the Barmecides, a merry-faced, red-haired young private, who was evidently the jester of his squad.
"Our soup smells good, what? Well, the smell may be had for nothing. He may fill his belly with as much of that as he can!"
A roar of laughter greeted the sally of the humorist. To whom P. C. Breagh nodded assent, and, gravely extending his diminished crust in the quarter from whence the whiff of oniony pea-soup came most powerfully, fell to with apparently renewed appetite, provoking the approving comment:
"He can take a joke! Well, then, let him take this! and this! Catch it,junge!"
A lump of very fresh beef, boiled in the oniony pea-soup, was dumped into a bit of newspaper, screwed up, and pitched across to the supperless. P. C. Breagh gratefully caught the oleaginous parcel and the two hard Army biscuits that came after, and, pulling out some small change, signified his desire to pitch back the coins in return. But a big hand waved them vigorously away, with the gruff exclamation: "Der Teufel!let him keep his pfennigs. One gives a share of one's supper—one doesn't sell!"
And so genuine was the one that, despite the smarting weal that had been the gift of another less kindly, P. C. Breagh's faith in humanity lifted up its head.
He disposed of the grub, and drank some hill-water tinctured with Kinahan, a permissible indulgence in view of his fatigue, and stuffed the well-used briar-root with bird's eye, and, propping his back comfortably against the boulder, kindled the pipe of peace. By nature clubbable, and athirst for news, he would have liked to mingle with the replete, unbuttoned soldiers, who, supper over, gathered round the fires to smoke and chat and sing. But the snub dealt by Valverden had not left off smarting; the fear of incurring another rebuff, even from a social inferior, kept him aloof and solitary. He realized with dismay that his stock of self-confidence was beginning to run low.
"I'd a lot of faith in myself when I accepted that commission from Knewbit," he ruminated, chewing hard on the stem of the venerable briar-root. "More than half his money's spent—what did I want with that revolver?—and I haven't written him a line. Instead, I've swotted up a thundering long descriptive article, telling people all about what they know already—and sent it to that shaved sea-elephant in a Gladstone collar, who told me I might forward letters from the seat of hostilities if ever I got there!"
He frowned, mentally reviewing the points of the first-born launched upon the tide of speculation. However ancient its matter might be, the vigor and mastery of that descriptive article—completed in the train between Bingen and Mayence, and dropped with paternal solicitude into the sack of a corporal of the Field Post—would surely—could not fail to—insure its appearance in print.
Why did a horrible conviction of its utter stodginess come home to him at this eleventh hour? Its labored periods revolted, its stately mawkishness sickened his memory. He knocked out the pipe-bowl against the boulder and got out his note-book and began to jot down a letter to Mr. Knewbit by the light of the now risen moon, who, with Venus blazing emerald at her opulent side, hung high in the south-east, looking down upon forest and field, mountain, valley and river, and the armed men and beasts, guns and wagon-trains, strung out over leagues of distance, calmly as befitting an aged Queen familiar with the portents of War.
She stared down so haughtily at the travel-soiled and dusty scallawag lying upon the fringe of the bivouac among the remnants of a meal cadged from a soldier's camp-kettle, that he caught her eye and broke his pencil-lead. No! he couldn't write, even well enough to "please plain, homely people." ... Why, hang it all!—Old Knewbit must have known from the beginning, to do that was the highest and most difficult art of all. Men came into the world equipped, as had come Shakespeare, and Scott, and Dickens, each with a single feather, such as might belong to the wing of a Phcenix or an Archangel, sprouting from his own flesh. Urged by the inborn crave to set down Life, each had plucked forth his birth-gift with a pang of unutterable anguish, and there, at the quill-end, hung a single drop of red, red blood. And that drop tinctured every page they penned, and thus what they wrote lived. To be a distinguished War Correspondent one had to be born with the magic pen-feather. The Doctor had it. That was why his written sentences dug home to the quick. Without it, Success would never come to one, no matter how hard one tried for it. One would be nothing better all one's life than a plodding paragraphist.
Pity an unlucky youth, fagged, footsore, and smarting, not only from disillusion and chagrin, but from the very recent application of an Artillery horsewhip. In addition, the infantry band had now begun to play with soul-melting sweetness. First "The Lorelei," and then "Red Dawn That Lights Me to My Early Grave," and then the song of Siebel from "Faust"—with all its yearning passion and tender anguish. And possibly other eyes were wet besides P. C. Breagh's, who fairly put down his head and sobbed, under cover of the twilight and the protecting boulder, as he had not done since his knickerbocker days.... Not now from a vague, wistful aching for the voice and the touch of the young, unknown, long-dead mother. Pain and longing were there, but of how different a kind....
The reign of Brünhilde-Britomart-Isolde was over. That night saw the smallest and slenderest of heroines established on the vacant throne of the Ideal.
He who wept was not the type of a young girl's hero, choking and gulping, and burrowing his hot, wet face into the dry, rustling fern. But he suffered as only youth can suffer, the pangs were very real that wrung from him such stifled cries as these:
"Oh, God! I love her—Juliette de Bayard! ... I have loved her since the moment our eyes met. My infernal ingratitude that she forgave like an angel!—the brutal things I thought and said of her—were because I could not forgive myself for loving her so. My discontent, my restlessness, my ambition to do something and be somebody—weren't they prompted by the longing to cut a figure in her eyes! ... Lovely eyes;—and at this minute her husband may be kissing them!—'the noble gentleman, brave as a lion,' who fought like the deuce and all! Stop, though! If he's an Army man, he has had to leave her. Could I have borne to do that if I had had the luck to be in his shoes? Yet how she would despise a lover who hesitated between her and his duty! Even if 'her heart-strings about his heels were tied,' as the Suabian ballad says, 'she would bid him march to war!' For a girl like that could love, mind you! like Juliet and Desdemona and Viola rolled into one, and yet never be blinded by love into forgetfulness of God, or honor, or loyalty. It is written in her face. Are these things first with me? I'm afraid not!... I think not!... I know they're not!... And yet I dare to love her—to whom they mean everything!"
His conscience stung and smarted like the weal from the Artillery whip-lash. And the dread of Death and the Hereafter wakened in him, shuddering and quaking in the creeping dusk.
Now he comprehended his own insignificance and weakness and loneliness.... He had seen a man die that day, suddenly, without time for preparation, as thousands of others would die before the ending of this war. What if to-morrow at the hottest hour the trenchant blade of the sun should bite through P. C. Breagh's brain-pan? He heard the other self within him saying "Suppose...?" And he asked himself, with a cold sweat breaking out upon his flesh, and a curious stirring among the roots of his hair, what would have happened only an hour or two back, if the flying squirrel-leap that had made the white teeth flash against the brown faces of the gunners on the limber, had failed to land the dusty scallawag who had been sleeping in the flax-field beyond reach of the pounding of the hoofs of the battery-team! ...
"Father, I cry to Thee!"
The soldiers were singing the Battle Prayer of Körner, the lusty Teutonic basses and baritones and tenors mingling in melodious unison with the night-breeze that had risen with the moon.
Previously P. C. Breagh might have smiled at the simultaneous production of hymn-books, the rising at the word of command to sing—the short, business-like prayer recited by an officer, that was followed by a crashing Amen.
Now, it seemed to him, there was something wholesome and good in the military regulation that united men of every Christian creed and denomination, with those who habitually omitted religion from the daily routine, in the brief act of worship described.... Recalled by it to the teachings of the Mother Church, he made the sacred sign upon brow and breast, and whispered his nightly prayers. The name of Juliette mingled in the entreaty that Our Lord and His Mother would bless and guard those dear to the petitioner from danger and harm.
"And not let me come to grief forhersake—of course I mean Monica's! For she never would have loved me even if there hadn't been another man. But O! take care of her, and shield her from evil, sickness, grief, and danger. And let me see her again one day!"
He grew drowsy, lying against the yet sun-warm boulder, listening to the distant cry of the mousing owl, and the long rattlingchur'r'r!of the nightjar, mingled with the occasional snorting of the tethered horses, the measured tramp of the sentries,—the small explosions made by pine-cones thrown upon the blazing guard-fires, and the other sounds of the bivouac.
The watch was set at nine o'clock. Then the "Lie Down" sounded far and near, and the moon stared down on rows of prone men wrapped in their greatcoats and pillowed on their knapsacks, stretching away under the pansy-dark canopy of heaven for miles.
The officers sat for some time longer, drinking their Rhine wine and playing cards by moonshine and lantern-light, or strolling, cigar in mouth, upon the outskirts of the bivouac. Several Artillery-officers, who had supped with them, went back to their own bivouac after voluble leave-takings. Infantry-officers, who had shared the hospitality of the gunners, returned, enlivening the night with, scraps of gossip, and more or less melodious song.
A couple of these late-comers halted on the outskirts of the cordon of sentries to finish a confidential conversation. The moon was obscured by clouds, the bivouac was swathed in shadow. Of the lumpy boulder by which the Adjutant stood, only its shape could be discerned against the dusty-pale grass by the dust-white road.
Said the Adjutant to the senior Captain, and the excellent cigar he was smoking smelt pleasantly in the dark:
"One can't call yesterday's a big battle, but at the same time it was a tolerably serious engagement."
The senior Captain snorted.
"Donnerwetter!one would think so. Nearly fifteen hundred prisoners, and Douay's Division obliged to abandon its camp and baggage. The Crown Prince has begun well—one expected no less!"
Said the Adjutant:
"I shall advise the Herr Colonel to announce the news to the regiment at roll-call to-morrow. It will make a good moral impression upon those who are new to Active Service, when they realize that the French have been trounced."
Then they were silent a moment, but one felt that both were crowing.
We know what had happened. Before midday the Crown Prince had pounded Douay's Division into brickbats, the brave General himself was dead, the town of Wissembourg had fallen; by two o'clock the mitrailleuse-batteries on the Geisburg had been silenced, and the Chateau stormed and won.
The men of the Imperial Army in Alsace had fought magnificently. Red-capped, swarthy Turcos in baggy white breeches, Zouaves and French infantrymen, light blue Bavarian and dark blue Prussian uniforms, with what had been brave men inside them, lay scattered among the hop-gardens and vineyards on the mountain-side.
Of these no doubt the Adjutant was thinking when he threw away his cigar-butt and said, with a sigh and an oath together:
"Kreuzdonnerwetter!one does not win victories for nothing. It must have been a bloody fight, and especially in the streets; you understand me? The French fired from the windows, and from the roofs of the houses.... There was a terrible struggle at the point of the bayonet, and both sides used the butt—liberally!"
"The butt may be brutal," commented the senior Captain, clearing his throat and expectorating copiously; "but all the same it is a hellishly useful thing!"
"Why leave your enemy brains when he may live to plan your defeat by the use of them?" agreed the Adjutant. The scabbard of his sword clinked, as he moved, against the boulder, and the sound made an eavesdropper go goose-fleshy all over, as he lay prone among dry bents and bracken in the blackness on the farther side. Then he heard the Captain ask:
"Did the Crown Prince continue the advance to-day?" and strained his ears for the Staff officer's reply.
"Undoubtedly! Moltke's telegram from the King's Headquarters at Mainz ran: 'Seek out and fight the enemy wherever you may find him,' and Marshal MacMahon is said to be concentrating all his force on a high plateau between Froeschwiller and Eberbach, west of the Sauer and the Sulz. The bridges have been broken—his position is an exceptionally strong one.... Of course you know the kind of ground!"
"Open ground," snorted the Captain, "over which an assailant must pass to get at him.Sapperlot!don't I wish I'd had the chance to-day!"
"You are too greedy, Scheren," joked the Adjutant. "Ts't! What was that?"
Both men were silent, intently listening. For the eavesdropper, titillated to madness by a spear of seed-grass that had thrust up a nostril, had given a smothered sneeze. Now on the point of discovery, he found presence of mind sufficient to repeat the sneeze, panting doggishly, whining and scratching among the fern....
The ruse was successful. The Adjutant said, laughingly:
"It's a dog, nosing at a rat or rabbit-hole. Under-Lieutenant Brand's terrier 'Nagler,' perhaps."
"Hie, then, boy!"
"Here, Nagler!"
The Captain whistled, the other man advised indifferently:
"Let the brute alone—perhaps the rabbit's a French one!" He added, "It would be amusing to read a dog's Impressions of the campaign. What time is it? 'Ten!' Very well, I shall go and turn in. You'll do the same thing if you'll take my advice."
The Captain grunted assent, and the two officers clanked away together, while P. C. Breagh noiselessly collected his venerable waterproof, his water-bottle, and knapsack, and departed in search of a more distant sleeping-place.
But when he found it in a dry ditch a quarter-of-a-mile below the Mounted Artillery bivouac, and stretched himself out to sleep, he could not.... His head rang with the news that would presently thrill the civilized world.
First blood to Germany.... Did the Doctor know? ...
That genial little gentleman had prophesied accurately. The "meaty bone" of early and accurate information had fallen to the "tyke at the tail of the Army Corps." While the prophet, delayed by pumped-out horses and recalcitrant grooms, at the Lion Inn of Neustadt, knew no more than that the heir to the Prussian Crown was over the frontier, and was reported to have taken Wissembourg from the French.
That dry ditch accommodated a complacent lodger. His misgivings banished by one stroke of fortune, P. C. Breagh brooded sleeplessly over the Koh-i-noor that had fallen to him.... Though, to hold such a jewel and know oneself impotent to use it, that was the verjuice mingled in the cup of bliss.
Without funds for telegraphing—an Editor to print one's letters—and a public ready to read, what was the use of information? Stop! What was that the more authoritative of the two officers had said?—the one who had given the news to the other man? "It would be amusing to read a dog's impressions of the campaign! ..."
Would it? Such a dog, perhaps, as the mongrel that had joined the green-jacketed Saxon infantry regiment at Bingen. The cur the compassionate soldier had christened "Bang." Lying on his back, pillowed on his knapsack, staring at the waning moon, the boy pondered. Suppose one wrote one's letters to Knewbit in the assumed character of Bang?
The idea grew, and he sat up to review its possibilities. Something soft and feathery brushed past his ear as he stirred. An owlet, most likely, yet I prefer to believe that it may have been the wing of Inspiration, touching the head destined to be crowned by Fame.
"Pages from the Diary of 'Bang,' the Battalion Dog." That should be the title, or simply, "The Story of 'Bang.'" "Short and to the point," he heard Mr. Knewbit saying. And Knewbit ...
Here was day! ...
Reveille after reveille sounded, shattering his train of thought, waking the hilly echoes. Under how strange a sky the bugles clamored, the bivouac stopped snoring; men sat up on dew-wet cloaks and rubbed their eyes.
The cup of heaven was red as though brimmed with blood new-drained from the veins of heroes. In the leftward hemisphere looking East, Ursa Major swam in blood, blazing with white-hot fierceness. On the ensanguined South the Dog cowered as though in terror. And like a skeleton arm, the Milky Way pointed over the blood-dabbled hill-crests and the blood-tipped pine-groves from the south-east, West....
Men's faces and hands were crimsoned by reflections cast from that portentous sunrise, the dew-wet grasses were dyed the same hue.
They broke their fast on their black bread washed down with bitter black coffee. In the pause that followed the roll-call, a voice spoke. And amid deafening cheers the news sprang from bearded lip to lip.
"Lucky is the standard that flies over the first-fought field!" says the proverb.
How those Teutons marched, that day of rain-pelts and thunderstorms, upheld by their first draft of the strong wine of Success!
At Mayence, Moltke had commented to his Sovereign, with his keen old eyes twinkling with joy:
"Douay's troops were preparing their evening coffee when the Prince with his four Divisions appeared on the heights above Schweigen. The Red Breeches thought it was apromenade militairein the Second Empire style, until the shells began to plop into their cooking-pots!"
"Thanks be to Heaven!" returned King William piously, "our artillery-fire has improved since the Bohemian campaign."
"All the same," returned the Warlock, shaking the wise old head cased in the auburn scratch-wig, "their musketry should do much for the French. For the chassepot is quicker in loading than our needle-gun, and spits less, which is better for the aim.... Then our needle-gun has A poor trajectory at 500 yards, and wounds rather than kills outright. While the chassepot bullet,—driven by its huge charge of powder—has a splendidly flat trajectory, And flattening out,—makes a magnificent wound! In at the chest—out at the shoulder-blades! ... The man has a hole in him you can see the landscape through!"
And he nibbed his withered hands, the old specialist in slaughter. While Bismarck said, laughing, to his cousin and militaryattaché:
"The enthusiast forgets that the perforated examples will be German.... Look at him! Already he begins to resemble a bird of prey. Have you read these French newspapers? The King has laughed heartily over them, but they must horribly irritate the Emperor. Listen to this, from theConstitutionnel: 'Prussia continues to insult us with impunity, when the Armies of the Empire, at a word from their Chief, might descend like three crashing avalanches upon the hosts of Germany. Why is the word not uttered? Why is the massacre—with the rout that must inevitably follow, delayed for a single hour?'" ...
The Emperor had perused the leaders, in his headquarters at the Prefecture at Metz. His eyes seemed opaque as clouded glass, his face was a puffy mask, devoid of expression, as he replied to the hinted condolences of a sycophant upon his staff.
"The opinions of these gentlemen of the Press were not solicited. They are free to criticize me, let them do so. I am not bound to divulge to them my plans."
Alas! vacillation, hesitation, and delay on the part of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief fatally clogged the movements of his magnificent Army. He did not put in an appearance with his staff at headquarters until a fortnight subsequent to the Declaration of War. A week later—and no Plan of Campaign had been issued to his generals. True, he had demolished, with field-fire, a beer-shop at Saarbrück. He had paraded on the hills with Frossard's Army Corps. He had witnessed the evacuation of the town by its tiny garrison—had withdrawn his advanced posts and gone home to Metz to dine and telegraph to Paris of the "capture of the heights" and the "short resistance of the Prussians";—to tell of the cannon-balls and bullets which fell at his own feet, and those of the Prince Imperial, "who showed admirable coolness." "Some of the soldiers wept," he adds, "beholding him so calm...."
And indeed, though one takes the soldiers' tears with a grain of salt, the spirited bearing of the boy must have cheered the sick heart of his father, and yet thrust another dagger in it, too.
Had the Imperial Commander-in-Chief any plan, one wonders.... Long after he had ceased to be Emperor, a pamphlet was published at Brussels, which is generally accepted as the work of the pen that signed the Capitulation of Sedan.
"To Marshals MacMahon and Lebœuf alone, the Emperor had entrusted his scheme of warfare. His purpose was—to mass 150,000 troops at Metz, 100,000 at Strasbourg, and 50,000 at the Camp of Châlons. The concentration of the first two armies—one on the Sarre, and the other on the Rhine—did not reveal the purpose of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief, for the enemy would be left in uncertainty as to whether the attack would be made against the Rhenish Provinces or the Duchy of Baden."
Would the Warlock have long remained in uncertainty? But hear the pamphleteer:
"As soon as the troops should have been concentrated at the points indicated, it was the Emperor's purpose to instantly unite the armies of Metz and Strasbourg; and at the head of 250,000 men, to cross the Rhine at Maxau, compel the Southern States of Germany to observe neutrality, and hasten to encounter the Army of Prussia." Later on occurs the pathetic complaint: "If one could only know beforehand exactly where the enemy was, one's plans would be easy to carry out!"
Indeed, the dispositions of Moltke were made with baffling secrecy. Even as the Heathen Chinee accommodated card-packs innumerable in his ample sleeves, so the Warlock hid the twelve Army Corps of the North German Confederation, with the Prussian Guard Corps, the Bavarian Field Army and the Württemberg and Baden Divisions, in the skirts of his military cloak.... When the moment came, the aged conjuror twitched open the garment and showed them: Steinmetz with the First Army at Treves, Prince Frederick Charles with the Second at Mayence, the Crown Prince with the Third at Landau.
When the Three Armies rolled on, the art of the strategist covered their movements with a baffling veil of cavalry. That immense, well-organized and highly mobilized arm was thrown well forward before the Germans crossed the frontier: at their first entry into France they came in contact with French troops. A day's march ahead of the Army Corps' advanced-guards, Divisions of Uhlans, Dragoons and Hussars—(in a little all were "Uhlans" to the terrified French peasants)—provided for the security of the huge infantry bivouacs behind them; made requisitions for provisions, fuel, and forage; rendered railways and telegraphs useless—scouted for the enemy's positions—took prisoner or shot dispatch-bearers and patrol-riders—harassed marches, and boldly fired into camps. Many fell in forays, or skirmishes, many were those accounted for by the long-range hitting chassepot, which was heartily detested by Prussia's mounted men.
"If I had not been called to Metz to attend an Imperial War-Council," Marshal MacMahon is reported to have said bitterly, when the news of the defeat of Wissembourg reached him, "this blow upon the south would not have fallen. My Second Division would still be left to guard the opening between the Vosges and the Rhine."
The thunder of the guns of Worth add their comment upon that utterance.
Over the head of the town, lying at the bottom of a fertile valley patched with hop-gardens and vineyards, and threaded by a river, was waged between the Marshal with 50,000 troops, the pick and flower of the French Army, and "Unser Fritz" with twice the number of men, a desperate and bloody fight.
The French on the bluffy wooded cliffs that are the foothills of the Vosges, occupied, as strategists have declared, an almost unassailable position. But the fire of the mitrailleuses was hampered by the artillery of the 2d Bavarians under Hartmann, that seasoned veteran, who had fought at Waterloo in 1815 and now led an Army Corps against France in his seventy-sixth year. Thus the Prussian infantry crossed the Sauerbach on bridges improvised of planks and hop poles; and though the chassepot proved an infinitely deadlier weapon than the needle-gun, the generalship of Von Kirchbach and Von der Tann,—in command of the Prussian 4th Division and 5th Corps, backed by a division of the 11th Corps,—forced MacMahon's hand.
Outnumbered, outflanked and disorganized, with the loss of 9,000 men killed, 5,000 taken prisoners, twenty pieces of artillery, six mitrailleuses, and two eagles, the Marshal fled by the way of Zabern, under cover of night, trailing after him the beaten remnant of the Army of Strasbourg.
The Third Army of Germany had lost 489 officers and 10,153 rank and file. Before night of the 7th the dead were buried in great trenches, the columns of the Society of the Red Cross, the Sisters of Mercy and Lutheran Deaconesses, with surgeons, volunteers, and Army ambulance-bearers, had cleared the wounded from the field.
"Ah! if we had only had this sort of thing at the Alma and at Inkerman!" a grizzled Zouave sapper growled to one of the ladies of the Red Cross. "I was wounded there—sacred name of a pipe! My belt-buckle was carried by a shell-splinter through my ceinture into my stomach. This very buckle, look you, that I wear to-day!" He added, rubbing the locality of the previous casualty: "There is nothing inside there now, because of late they have not fed us, or our chassepots. How the devil can men kill Prussians without soup in their bellies or cartridges in their guns?"
The Zouave spoke truth. It was a half-equipped and under-rationed army that had made such a splendid show at Froeschwiller. It was a starving, demoralized remnant that surged and weltered through the passes of the Vosges at MacMahon's flying heels. Cavalry on foot, Zouaves riding Artillery-horses, mitrailleuse corps without mitrailleuses, baggage-wagons crowded with men of a dozen different regiments, went clanking and jolting over the roads that were littered with discarded chassepots, bearing witness to the pitiable, ghastly disorder of the retreat.
The hour of their defeat had seen Frossard's Army Corps holding with Forton's Cavalry Brigade the heights over Saarbrück, simultaneously attacked by the 7th and 8th Corps of Unser Fritz's terrible army, and driven back in confusion and with slaughter, toward Metz.
The huge peacock-bubble of the Third Empire was pricked and leaking in good earnest. Thenceforward it was to shrink, and pale, and dwindle to its inglorious end.
The Emperor must have known its days were numbered, when those wires of the 6th reached him. On the 7th the news of Wörth electrified Paris. Can you hear Jules Ferry joyfully exclaiming to the father of Paul Déroulède, "The armies of the Third Napoleon are annihilated! At last there dawns a day of hope for France!" But fierce, triumphant voices like these were drowned in the muffled sobs of mothers, the moans of wives made widows, and the wailing of children now fatherless. Later, and as though to enhance the bitterness of defeat, lying telegrams were published in Paris, announcing that the Duke of Magenta had retaken Wissembourg, captured sixty guns, and made 25,000 prisoners. Chief among these unlucky ones figured the Prussian Crown Prince, who in an access of despair had shot himself....
For some hours the streets and boulevards were packed with rejoicing multitudes. Cries of "Vive l'Empereur," scarce at this era as snowflakes in summer, were suddenly heard again. Flags and Chinese lanterns were displayed from every window, the people stopped the hansom-cab in which the famous Opera tenor Capoul was being driven along the Place de la Bourse, and, hoisting their idol to the top of a stationary omnibus, compelled him to chant the "Marseillaise."
When the Emperor's sorrowful dispatches of the 7th revealed the cruel truth, and proclamations signed by the Empress and the Ministers made it public, rapture gave place to frenzy of the wildest. Troops of cuirassiers and mounted Gardes de Paris,—bands of National Guards,—companies of the Line, and Marines were employed to clear the Rue de la Paix, and the Places de l'Opéra and Vendôme, of rioters.
The Chambers assembled amid tumult indescribable. Ministers were insulted on their way to attend the deliberations. "À la Frontière!" cried the huge crowd, thronging the quay before the Palace of the Corps Législatif. "Vive Rochefort!" "À bas les Ministres!" "Chassepôts!"
Their reiterated demands for arms could be heard within the Chamber. Where, when M. Schneider mounted the tribune to read the Imperial Decree of Convocation, the opening formula: "Napoleon, by the Grace of God and the national will, Emperor of the French," was vigorously howled down. Ollivier, the unpopular Head of the Imperial Cabinet, who had egged on the war, fared no better. Later, the fall of his Ministry was greeted with salvo upon salvo of enthusiastic applause, and when the news was published all Paris went mad once more with joy.
While the moment of supreme collapse of the great peacock bubble was coming nearer, the Crown Prince of Prussia was hunting MacMahon through the defiles of the Vosges, his flying cavalry snapping up scores of wounded or footsore stragglers, his advance batteries of light artillery harassing the bleeding flanks of the fugitive. The Second and First Armies were moving Metzward, the Warlock having knowledge that the Emperor's main Army, the Imperial Guard, and Bazaine's, Ladmirault's and Frossard's Corps, with part of Canrobert's, were concentrating there.
The Great Bubble was sagging pitifully. The weather was wet and chilly, the Imperial troops not yet in action were disheartened by the news of battles lost. Their equipment was incomplete, their new boots had proved to be of no better material than brown paper and American cloth. Worst of all, the Commissariat, always inadequate, showed signs of caving in. And the blame for all was heaped upon the shoulders of the Emperor, whose faith in his fortunate star had quite deserted him; a man tormented by telegrams of wifely censure and wifely advice from Paris; disgruntled, if ever man was; haunted and oppressed by premonitions of impending disaster; sleepless, shaky, sick, and prematurely old.
The taking of the fortresses of Bitche and Phalsbourg—memorable by reason of its brave Governor's resolute defense—the seizure of the undefended City of Nancy, the Zorn Valley railway line, Forbach with its immense military stores, Sarreguemines, and other garrison towns were lesser shocks, falling on a mind already paralyzed. Hasty decisions, contradictory orders, had emanated, one after another, from the Headquarters. He was confused and flurried, finding his good brother of Prussia so near. For the Warlock, scenting a movement of French troops to the rear, had crowned the uplands eastward of Metz with the 1st and 7th Corps of the First Army of Germany under the veteran General Steinmetz, cavalry well to the fore and outposts skillfully posted, so as to look into the French position from all points of view, while the Red Prince felt for a solid footing for his Second Army on the left or French bank of the Moselle. Meanwhile, the Crown Prince, whose clutches Marshal MacMahon had evaded by taking a vast circuit to Châlons, had swept round and was marching northward from Vigneulles toward Metz.
Ah! in what a hornet's nest the Imperial Commander-in-Chief found himself. Almost incapable of mental effort, he recognized, like Mr. Wilkins Micawber,—whose epistolary style is occasionally suggested by his Proclamations and harangues,—that something had to be done at once. To shake off the intolerable burden of authority was the most urgent necessity. He transferred it to the youngest of his Marshals, Bazaine.
"You will get us out of this, won't you, Marshal?" cried an officer of the Imperial Staff, as the new Commander-in-Chief came out of the Prefecture.
The Marshal had left his Imperial master in bed, expecting answers to letters he had penned to the Emperor of Austria and the King of Italy, soliciting aid and alliance, which these potentates did not bestow. True to himself, he could not quit Metz without a proclamation, penned in the old flourishing, ambiguous style:
"Inhabitants of Metz. In leaving you to oppose the invading enemy, I rely upon your patriotism to defend this great city. You will not allow the foreigner to seize this bulwark of France, and you will emulate the Army in courage and devotion.... I hope to return in happier times to thank you for your noble conduct."
Then he quitted the place with his son, his cousin and his personal following and escort. As hiscortègeclattered through the streets choked with soldiers, guns, provision-carts and baggage-wagons, and faces of contempt, or derision, or hatred turned to see, did he hide his sick, humiliated face behind the green silk screen of the carriage window? How did he answer the inevitable questions of his son?
A prey to hideous uncertainties, for the new Commander-in-Chief had suddenly applied to be superseded, the luckless Emperor spent the night at the camp at Longeville, waking upon a foggy morning—if he could be said to sleep, who never slept—to a brisk salute of Prussian guns. For a patrol of Uhlans with a half battery had made, during the night, a bold attempt to seize upon the Imperial person, and being foiled within an ace of success, had retreated, plumping a shell or so into the lines from the German side of the river. And while these hornets were being repulsed with heavy metal, the muddy, travel-stained Army of the Red Prince crossed the river lower down; the little episode described having diverted attention from their transit; effected, even as in a jam of batteries, battalions, squadrons, baggage and ammunition-trains, the French retreat was being made.
So choked were the roads that the Emperor and his suite with the Imperial Guard Escort only managed to struggle as far as Gravelotte, a village some eight miles from Metz, where Bazaine had his headquarters:
"Gentlemen, we will remain here, but keep the baggage packed!" had been the Emperor's instructions to his following upon alighting at the inn, where two miserable bedrooms were with difficulty obtained for himself and his son. Prince Napoleon and the other personages of the suite found harborage at various cottages; the lackeys slept in the baggage-fourgons, it may be hazarded. For in the morning these vehicles and their attendants were found to have disappeared. They had departed for Verdun, whither their master was now to follow them. Bazaine, who could not shuffle off his now detested responsibilities, was summoned, to find the Imperial carriage standing in readiness before the tavern door.
One can see the splendid bays, clamping their bits of solid silver, their sleek skins and their costly harness glittering in the sunshine that had driven the early morning fogs away, the postilions and outriders in their green and gold liveries sitting in the saddle, the landaus of the suite drawn up at the distance prescribed by etiquette.
Everybody was breakfastless, save the Emperor, his son, and cousin, and their immediate following. The regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique, the gorgeous Cent Gardes in gold-crested, crimson-tufted, silver helmets with flowing white horsetails and caped cloaks of azure, were empty of all but air, like their own famous kettledrums. Their horses had cropped a little grass in the fields during the night's bivouac, and were better off than their riders, by one meal.
The young Prince Imperial looked sulky and discontented, but neat and soldierlike in his new uniform of a subaltern of infantry. Prince Jerome Napoleon, the portly M. Plon-Plon of the Crimean War caricatures, wore a cocked hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and was buttoned up in a military cloak.
The Emperor had suffered in the night, for a traveler who had slept in an attic above his bedroom had heard him pacing to and fro and groaning. He wore a black-caped, red-lined waterproof cloak over the uniform of a General of Division; a glimpse of the Star of the Legion of Honor fastened on his breast showed as he raised his hand to throw away the butt of the inseparable cigarette, and set his neat little polished gold-spurred boot on the carriage-step, and beckoned with a small white-kid-gloved hand.
Obeying this signal, a green-and-gold equerry and a demure elderly valet hoisted him respectfully on one side, while a keen-eyed, lean-jawed young man, accurately attired in deep black, propped him scientifically upon the other. We know this deft and silent personage to have been a brilliant young Paris surgeon, retained about the person of the Emperor; a specialist whose ministrations, in dulling unbearable pain with subcutaneous injections of morphia, and combating the progress of disease by skilled surgical treatment, became more necessary every day.
They got him in. The sweat was starting through the rouge upon his livid face as he sank heavily upon the seat of the carriage. His son and cousin followed. Bazaine,—who was accompanied by Canrobert and Bourbaki, and did not dismount, rode up to receive his master's farewells.
He did not entreat again to be relieved of the supreme responsibility. Perhaps the Emperor imagined that he might. For he put out his hand in haste and shook the Marshal's, reiterating:
"All will go well! Excellently, I have no doubt of it! You understand, you have broken the spell."
Of ill-luck, did he mean, clinging to the fatalist whose Star was on the point of setting. He added:
"I go to Verdun and Châlons. Put yourself upon the road for Châlons as soon as possible.... May you be fortunate!Au revoir! En avant!"
The brigadier-general in charge of the escort gave the word. The Advance was sounded, the Chasseurs on their gray Arabs dashed onward, riding in fours, keeping a sharp lookout for Uhlans. A half-troop of Cent Gardes preceded the Emperor's carriage, his equerries and aides and those of the Prince's household followed on their empty, chafing beasts. Anotherpelotonof Cent Gardes were succeeded by three Imperial carriages containing the surgeon, secretaries and valets; grooms followed with led horses; and the Empress's regiment of Dragoons, brass-helmeted, black-plumed warriors, in green with white plastrons, brought up the rear.
It was four o'clock in the morning when they started. Deep defiles rather than roads, with wooded, precipitous banks, stretch between Metz and Gravelotte. By the time the Imperialcortègehad extricated itself from the stray columns and batteries choking these, and the cliffy banks had lowered to hedgerows, it was six o'clock and a gloriously sunny morning.
One may imagine, as the landscape broadened and smoothed like a human face relieved from carking anxiety, the young Prince Imperial turning in his seat, and looking back upon the scene he was unwillingly quitting, with a scowl of resentment and dissatisfaction that changed and aged his boyish face.
He saw the white tents of the huge camps of the Imperial Divisions snowing over a vast area of country on the French side of the river, and the clotting of cavalry and infantry in swarms upon the roads, where vast aggregations of baggage and provisions and ambulance wagons impeded their passage. He saw the Imperial Standard break out above the Tricolor on the flagstaff of the Fort of Plappeville, signifying that Bazaine had entered. He could see the artillery-batteries on the high ground at Rezerieulles, and he knew that others were posted behind the woods of Genivaux, and yet others near the quarries of Amanvilliers. The glitter of steel and the flutter of red and white lance-pennons told of the Light Cavalry outposts at St. Ruffine. And sinister moving specks upon the hill-crests beyond the river above St. Barbe—and others moving in the villages, with darker, bigger patches toward Sarrebourg, testified, like the gray-white drifts of powder-smoke that came down upon the northeast breeze, with the reduplicated rattle of musketry, the detonation of field-guns and the yapping of mitrailleuses—to the near, active presence of the ancient, racial foe.
Hewas drawing nearer, always nearer, to the coveted key-city of the Two Rivers, seated within her ancient fortifications, guarding the northeast frontiers of France.Hewanted Metz, with her vast modern arsenal, her huge hospitals and military colleges, her fifteen bridges—(the railway-bridge had been blown up by Bazaine's engineers on the night before last, when the squadron of Uhlans, greatly daring, had made their way into the French lines, with the project of seizing upon the person of papa)—and her glorious Cathedral, whose vast gray bulk was now bathed in the misty golden sunshine of a perfect autumn day.
Soon, soon, those indomitable dark blue soldiers would be at grips with Frenchmen for the possession of Metz. Oh! not to be able to fire a shot, or strike a blow with her defenders, because of one's pitiable weakness and youth! Oh! to be perpetually guarded and protected and plucked from the very possibility of danger, because one happened to be Heir to the Imperial Throne.
Why had the Emperor resigned the supreme command of the Army? There had been reverses—does a Commander-in-Chief give up for that? True, he was not well, but the First Napoleon had fought battles and won them, in spite of cramps and colic.Hewould never have driven away under the noses of King Wilhelm and Count Bismarck and the Prince Commanders. He would have called the nephew who could commit such animpairas that agodichon. He would have said: "To the devil with you, who boast yourself of my blood! A Napoleon—and not a general! You might have proved yourself a fighter, at least!"
The soldiers regarded the Emperor's resignation as the Great Napoleon would have done. They had not cried "Vive l'Empereur!" when papa had driven out of Metz. Upon the contrary, they had maintained silence, scowling or sneering covertly. To-day, the meanest piou-piou had presumed to wink or grin. More, voices from the depths of company-columns had called out horrible insults; things that had made the son's teeth set and his fists clench with the passionate desire to thrash the offenders, yet had not twitched one muscle in the father's impassive face....
"Why do you look back so often, Louis? What are you thinking about?"
The Emperor's question brought the young head round. He muttered, twisting the gold knot of his little sword:
"I am looking at the Army, and at Metz—and at those Uhlan outposts. And I want to know why we are going away—just because the Prussians are coming? Why cannot we stay—and fight?"
The diplomatic, evasive answer came:
"Because for the present it is more prudent that we should withdraw ourselves."
The boy shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and his young face took on an expression of heavy obstinacy, bringing out, quite startlingly, a resemblance to the sire. He muttered:
"All very well.... But it isn't nice to—absquatulate!"
The slang termfilermight be rendered as above. The Emperor's gray face with the patches of rouge on the flaccid cheeks moved not a muscle. Turning his hunched shoulders upon the scene of his horrible humiliations, he stared with fixed eyes along the road to Verdun, stretching away to the west between its bordering poplars, whose long blue shadows—the day being yet young—barred the white dust rather suggestively.
At Etain, where thecortègehalted for breakfast, the Prince had a much nearer view of those ubiquitous horsemen in the dark blue uniforms. Indeed, the Emperor and his suite barely escaped a surprise, and the escort of Cent Gardes, who were here replaced by some of MacMahon's Chasseurs d'Afrique, were hotly chased and sniped at on the way back to camp.
Through the journey of that night, performed in the cushionless plank seats of a third-class carriage, his suite being accommodated in a string of cattle-trucks, of what did the sleepless Emperor think? What questions occupied that sick and sluggish brain?
The question of returning to Paris, the refuge he longed for and yet dreaded inexpressibly. The question as to whether the Empress Regent would welcome the Emperor who could no longer rule the State, and what kind of ovation the people would extend to the General who had deserted the Army of Metz before the advancing hordes of United Germany.
Would not Rebellion, Anarchy and Revolution rear up their hydra-heads to greet the Third Napoleon, reëntering his capital? Would his reign end in the explosion of a bomb, and a shower of torn flesh and scattered blood upon the paving-stones? Would his son ever wear the Imperial crown, won by bribery, bloodshed, fraud and trickery? Would the Church forgive the rape of temporal power? Would Heaven succor one who had defrauded Her? Was this the beginning of the end?
Lugubrious doubts like these and many others haunted his sleepless pillow in the Imperial pavilion of the camp on the dusty plains of Champagne. Dismantled at the close of the October maneuvers, and now hastily prepared for the Emperor's reception, the place was damp, dismal, and cheerless, as such places usually are.
The newly levied troops were showing signs of insubordination; the Gardes Mobiles from Paris were in open mutiny against their generals. The great camp was a wasp's nest, which the presence of the Emperor stirred to frenzy; the lewd songs in which he figured, the yells of savage laughter greeting obscene jests leveled at him and his, reached him, pacing the mildewed carpets underneath the damp-stained draperies festooned from the claws of Imperial eagles, whose gilding was tarnished and discolored, like the Imperial central crown.
All night he paced, on thorns. With the dawn of day he had the answer to his questions. From the Empress, who wished him to abdicate that she might reign for her son; from the new War Minister, a creature of his own aggrandizing, who by influencing the Empress, who detested him, dreamed of becoming another Richelieu; from the Prefect of Police—who indeed brought the warning in person—came a triple sentence of exile for the sick, dejected man.
Spewed forth again upon the road toward the northern frontier, he was a clog upon the feet of the army that might, by a movement in which boldness combined with rapidity, have relieved Bazaine at the critical moment and changed the fate of France. Thenceforth he was to be a passive witness, rather than a participator, in scene after scene of horrible disaster; disgraces, disillusions, defeats, crowding one upon the other, to be crowned by the unspeakable catastrophe of Sedan.