Volume 1 / Part 2 — CHAPTER II. PUCELLA RAPTA. (continued 2)

How deceptive are appearances! From the shattered hamlet of St. Hubert, on the grand chaussée, I had looked over to St. Quentin on the morning of the 19th August, and had thought I could have knocked at the gates of the fort after a short half-hour’s walk. Now, looking from St. Quentin to St. Hubert, I could barely see the ruined hamlet, and the poplar trees on the chaussée stood up against the horizon. Yet the distance could not have been so great after all, since a shot from Fort St. Quentin on the morning I refer to had killed two German soldiers mounted at the hamlet on the chaussée. Now on the horizon were visible the long low huts which the Germans had erected as their temporary barracks. Much closer on the left, and near the chaussée, where it passes through Roserieulles on its way into the Moselle valley, I noticed the trim square earthwork, so completely constructed as to have been sodded up with turf, of a German battery. In this battery had stood the 12-pounder guns which had burned the village of Moulin les Metz in the early days of October. What the gunners in St. Quentin were thinking of to allow the erection of this earthwork in such a position I could not comprehend. To pound it to pieces they need scarcely have taken the trouble to elevate the muzzles of the great guns on the top of the casemates. A steady cannonade must have made its construction too arduous for the Germans, not given, save in rare instances, to squander lives wantonly. Nay, more, at a quarter of a mile closer still, at La Maison Blanche, just behind Longeau, there stood an impudent little affair of an improvised battery, thrown up for a few field pieces. I wondered if the gunners there, whose lives were not worth five minutes’ purchase had St. Quentin been in earnest to dislodge the cocky little concern, ever sent a six-pound shell flying across the valley at the big guns of the fort, in mere bravado. Quitting the entrenchment, I plunged down the slope, about midway between the villages of Lessy and Scy. Now I was among what had been the French outposts, guarding the country roads and the hill paths. The inartistic character of the field defences, on the French side, surprised me not a little. There was a trench across the path with the earth thrown up on the farther side, and that was all. There was no cover for retreat, there were no means of pouring in a cross fire, there was no continuation of the cordon of entrenchment, so as to give cover for a thin line of riflemen connecting the posts. It was the same with the position for a field watch in front of Plappeville, between the entrenchments and the Bois de Châtel. The half-moon ditch and paltry earthen breastwork stood there utterly isolated and disconnected. Under a hot fire from the adjacent wood, no relief could have reached it, nor could its occupants have fallen back on their supports in the inner entrenchments, without ruinous loss. It was another story when, having crossed the bottom, I came upon the German foreposts on the opposite slope. On one side of the narrow path there looked down on me a venomous little work, behind which some half-a-dozen marksmen might have stood. Half-a-dozen paces forward, on the other side, there was a duplicate. It made one uncomfortable, even in the solitude, to move about in the continual consciousness that, look which way one might, there was one of these posts looking one all but full in the face, while at least a couple of others were squinting at one on the flanks. Then right in front came an obstruction of felled trees, then the chevaux de frise of vineyard stakes stuck in the ground, and last of all the deep trench across the road, with its substantial parapet running away on either side in an unbroken cordon. It was not one road that was so protected on the German side, but all. A comparison of the field works of the rival armies impressed me, in short, with the conviction that the French works were constructed by soldiers, the German by engineers; and this surprised me the more, because the engineering ability displayed on the part of the French in the choice of sites for the forts, and in their construction, was of a very high order, an opinion, I am sure, which will be confirmed by our highest military critics.

Hark! I hear the quiet tramp of the German infantrymen marching down the narrow street. It is the 2nd Division of the 1st Army Corps on its way through Metz. Ha! here comes the 45th, fresh, clean, and confident. Can you see any gaps in those dense files of fours, although it was the 45th that furnished the 285 tapfere Krieger that lie in one long grave in the quiet garden by Château Gras? No, the depôt of the 45th has given over 1400 recruits to the Regiment which it feeds, and if more are wanted (and more were wanted), I doubt not the depôt is equal to the demand. And here comes the sister regiment of the brigade, the gallant 5th, the blood of whose linesmen ran in the gutters of Servigny in that “Schlacht bei Noisseville” on the afternoon of the 31st August. Here is the dashing Hauptmann, who one night, having sitten a little in the sun before it went down, took it into his head to pay a visit to the fair maidens of Villiers l’Orme. The Hauptmann lost his way, and only found it when he was under the nose of a French field watch. He lost, too, his horse, and had a night’s rest in the open in the vine-berg; but he does not look much the worse for it, does he? Crash! bang! Surely I know that tune! It is the old “Hohenfriedburg.” Faugh-a-ballagh there for the fighting 4th. If the obstruction consisted of men with arms in their hands, instead of a posse of gamins, the 4th would do their own work in the way of Faugh-a-ballagh. At the head of the brigade rides General Zglinitski, full, let us hope, of “vermicelli and tail ox.” He looks quite fresh and rosy. I wish his “grandmamma” could see him as he jogs through the Port de France. Ha! here comes the good Oberst, with the cares of that horrible lager of French prisoners off his mind; and now he is on the road again with a reasonable prospect of a fight. Behind him comes the 1st Battalion, marching splendidly; the houses echo again to their firm tread; and the 2nd Battalion follows, with the portly Mecklenburgher Major at its head, and young von Verzen, his adjutant, by his side. Here comes Puttkamer, “the good old man,” as we used to call him, who speaks English with a Scotch accent, because he learnt it from a certain Jessie of northern extraction. What do I hear? Can it be? Yes; it is the familiar, although still far-off, salutation of “Miss Lucy, Lucy Long.” Verily there is von Hosius in the flesh, and a good deal of that same, too. At his heels his Scotch terrier “Phipps,” and by his side his trusty Fïscher, adept at pantomime and lover of salt herrings. “Kommen Sie mit?” is the hearty question that greets me on every side. Ach nein, worse luck, old friends. To the 2nd succeeds the Fusilier Battalion, with the stalwart senior Hauptmann at its head, its major is detached on another command. Company after company passes me, the honest Kerle in the ranks grinning a kindly greeting to one who had shared with them their roughs and smooths, chiefly the former, goodness knows, for not a few weeks. Near the tail of all comes the 11th Company, my own, with stately Ertmann marching in its front. There is a little darn on the right breast of his coat; you would scarcely guess, to see his sturdy step and upright carriage, that it marks the spot where entered the bullet that went through him on the 14th of August. Mein leiber Werth, best of chums! truest of comrades! Shall we ever meet again, I wonder? And as I live, here is Feldwebel Strauss mended again after that unlucky bullet at the Brewery, and with the company account-book sticking out of his breast as of old. They turn the corner over the bridge, and my Metz friends are out of sight. Good luck and plenty of fighting be their lot wheresoever the fortune of war may carry them, and a glad home-coming when the Friede comes at last!

END OF VOL. I.

BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.