Front matter (continued 10)

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?"

The aide-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 the mêlée..."

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?"

The aide-de-camp got 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 a sauve-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 human débris of 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.

XLVI

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:

XLVII

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 the Daily 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 and képis, 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 a mêlée, 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!"

XLVIII

"Sad, sad! I had not heard. How did it happen?" asked Moltke, elevating his hairless brows inquiringly.

"Briefly, the affair, as its details have reached me, sums up in this way: Straz, the Roumanian agent of the Emperor Napoleon, having performed his mission to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, met Madame de Bayard at a Sigmaringen hotel.... She is as clever and light-fingered as she is, or was, beautiful——'

"I know, I know!" said Moltke. "She sucked Straz dry of his store of Imperial secrets, but how, I did not hear from Your Excellency."

Returned the Chancellor:

"By drugging him—or so he vows!—she obtained those copies of his instructions from the Emperor (with copies of his copies of the telegrams sent by Prince Antony)—which I was privileged to show you later on. Subsequently, and in floods of artificial tears, she awakened her victim, declaring she must return that instant to Berlin. Which she did—a special engine having been kept under steam at the Sigmaringen railway station—in time to place the papers in the hands for which they were destined. The exquisite point of the jest is that Straz accompanied her—subsequently discovering how roundly he had been befooled! But upon this point I am not certain.... I only argue from the premises that when Delilah was subsequently found gagged, half-strangled, and robbed in her bedroom at the hotel where she and her Roumanian had put up—Straz—who had vanished—was the perpetrator of what Madame has since termed 'a mysterious outrage.'"

"He took the money?" Moltke queried.

"Undoubtedly he took the money, which Bucher had paid her a few hours previously. Twenty thousand marks in honest Prussian bank-notes. Some of them Straz changed before he left Berlin. He is now here in France, and that is all I care to know of him at present. But in the eyes of every man she now encounters, Madame will read something that will keep her animosity alive."

"So changed, is she?" asked Moltke, with interest.

"So changed is she, in spite of the aid of cosmetics, that as I looked at her I was minded to exclaim with the Prophet Ezekiel: Devourer of men ... thou shalt devour men no more!"

The speaker added:

"Unless vicariously, for the De Bayard has a daughter—not destitute of charms, if there be truth in the description given me by her mother, when the woman offered, for a consideration, to sell the girl to me!"

"Prut!" said Moltke, reddening angrily and frowning. "Decency demands that such vileness be kept hid!"

Said the Chancellor, shrugging indifferently:

"Decency and such women as Max Valverden's ex-mistress have long ceased to be on nodding terms. To do Madame justice, she flew at higher game than a mere Prussian Minister. Her idea was to influence a future Emperor, in the person of Badinguet's heir."

Moltke wrinkled up his transparent, arched nostrils, as though an unpleasant odor had afflicted them:

"Pfui!—what beastliness! what abomination! And the boy but fifteen, and childish for his age!"

"And cleanly of habit and thought," added Bismarck, "considering his paternity, and the sort of people who habitually surround him." He turned slightly in his saddle as carbine-shots rang out, followed by oaths, shouts, and in the distance behind them muscular blows: "The gendarmery of the Württembergers are carrying out your orders in a general battue. It should be enforced as an iron rule never to be infringed or departed from, that not only those soldiers, reduced to the level of non-combatants—who attempt to revenge the misfortunes of their Army by acts of violence—but those who witness such acts are to be instantly shot. More, the rule should extend to private persons: I would without mercy shoot or hang all those who do not treat as sacredly inviolate the persons of their conquerors!"

His deep-cut nostrils expanded, his blood-tinged blue eyes blazed under the heavy eyebrows, the corners of his mouth clamped downward, giving to the thick mustache a certain appearance of solidity, typical of the man, and suggesting a human mask carved in granite, or cast in bronze and colored with the hues of life. His resonant voice had the clang and timbre of a war-gong, forged of metal tempered by Pagan priests in blood of human victims. And he went on, his clenched right hand beating the measure of his words upon his solid thigh:

"I speak from the inner depths, at the promptings of a profound conviction. Strictness—unmerciful strictness—should be wielded, to bring home to the innocent and the guilty, the feeble as well as the powerful, the horror and hideousness of War. And yet"—his voice assumed a milder tone, the somber frown relaxed, and the tense corners of the deep-cut mouth twitched a little: "And yet wilt thou credit that during the frightful carnage of the last two days—there have been moments when my bowels melted to water—when Pity and Compunction have gripped me by the throat?"

"Ach-ach!" ejaculated Moltke, turning his clear red-rimmed eyes wonderingly upon the heavy features whose ruddy color had faded to grayish: "Thou wast unfed, or hadst made some rough soldier's meal that disagreed with thee. Man's stomach will upon such occasions chide with the very voice of conscience. Unavoidable horrors need not cause twinges. Besides, pity and compunction are felt by my niece Gusta when she has trodden upon her lapdog's tail.... I am myself agitated by these sentiments when Gusta exhibits to me her chilblains.... In War—especially a recklessly provoked war of attack, such as this—neither pity nor compunction can be tolerated. Grief of heart, I have been hitherto spared by Heaven's gracious preservation of those dear to me. Thou art nearly as favored, for the wound of Herbert is comparatively slight, and Bill—the hero of the astonishing episode thou hast related—has come off the field not only with four—I think Your Excellency mentioned four—rescued comrades, but without a scratch upon his skin?"

The simple, serious, almost childish tone of his harangue brought back the thunderclouds to the forehead of the Man of Iron. His grim mouth set, his bulldog jaw thrust forward, a dull cloud of red swept upward to his temples, chasing the sickly grayish hue. He said, stammering in his characteristic manner:

"Your Ex—Your Excellency and myself have, as you say, been spared the bereavement which will presently plunge the noblest Prussian families into mourning. But Heaven—looking down upon the Gorze Road, now white with the bodies of Von Bredow's Cuirassiers—or contemplating the field of Mars la Tour, heaped with the corpses of our Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans—might be inclined to disclaim arch-responsibility for the orders that in one instance hurled suss—six Prussian squadrons upon a French Infantry Division and the combined strength of Frossard's batteries, and in the other, pitted against eight regiments of French Imperial Guard Cavalry Von Barby's Heavy Brigade."

"Ei!" said Moltke, placidly ignoring the irony, but with a rosy heightening of the color in his wrinkled cheeks: "And Heaven would be in the right of it. Von Alvensleben in the first case, General Voights-Rhetz in the second, had been told in such and such an emergency to do thus—and thus. In the Wars of Joshua and David, as recorded in Holy Scripture, Heaven assumed the chief generalship. In the War of Germany with France, in this year of 1870, Heaven is pleased to let Moltke have his own way."

Verbal thrusts and riposte had the grind of edged steel on steel.

The Chancellor returned with elaborate suavity:

"And yet—I quote Your Excellency's own utterance, such use of cavalry as I have quoted has been condemned by Moltke as unjustifiable."

"And Moltke was right," trumpeted the indomitable veteran, "only you have not quoted me right. Such use of cavalry by a general is unjustifiable. Unjustifiable—absolutely—unless he wins!" He added, rather nettled by the Chancellor's criticism:

"Here we part, as I ride toward Gorze to visit the scene of Von Bredow's brilliant exploit, in the course of which, though Your Excellency has omitted to mention it, the French battery was cut to pieces, and an infantry column ridden down. Thus the loss of life in a military sense weighs nothing against the advantage!"

And stiffly returning the Minister's salute, the Warlock galloped away.

"I have trodden on Moltke's corns," said Bismarck, laughing, as his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen rode up to join him. "He grew testy on being twitted with our losses in cavalry." He added, as the low hedges bounding the road vanished, and the arena of the previous afternoon's conflict opened before them: "There is the King, whose face Roon has lengthened with tremendous lists of losses on our side. It will now be my business to shorten the royal countenance again. Roon and I resemble Ixel and Axel in the child's story-book, only that we manage better on the whole!" He explained as his cousin professed ignorance of the legend: "Ixel and Axel were possessed of a magical birth-gift, which worked in the same way, but differently.... Thus, Axel had a little finger that stirred sweet, while Ixel's stirred sour, only neither could remember to use his gift properly. Thus, Ixel would sour the coffee in the pot, spoil the beer, and turn the jelly in the house-mother's pipkins, while Axel would stir the sauer-kraut sweet and make sweet calf's head with cabbages!" He added, laughing: "If a dish thus flavored were now set before me, I should certainly make short work of it. Save for a bowl of the soldier's pea-soup given me by General von Goeben this morning—my stomach would now be as empty as the inside of Louis Napoleon's head!"

The scene of the Homeric battle of the previous afternoon, watched by the King, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke from the ridge south of Flavigny, was indescribable. Blue Prussian infantry, mingled with Uhlan lancers, Dragoons, and mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, covered the wide stretch of level common-ground between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont. So high were piled the bodies of dead men and dead horses, mingled with that sorrowful débris of shattered arms, scattered accouterments and ownerless headgear, that live men walked through narrow lanes and crevasses opening here and there among them, and failed to reach the surface at the full stretch of the arm.

Bearer-sections of the German Ambulance were looking for survivors, burial-parties were collecting the German dead. Here and there the narrow lanes that ended nowhere had become crooked thoroughfares, owing to these efforts and the labor of bands of volunteers and peasants working under the Red Cross.

P. C. Breagh was one of these toilers. On the previous day he had helped the peasants clear the Red Ravine under the direction of the Gorze Sisters of Mercy, and darkness falling before the gruesome task was ended, he had kept on by torch and lantern-light until brain and muscles gave in. Then, staggering with weariness, he had gone back with the Sisters to their convent—had been dried and warmed, fed with soup and bread, stewed fruit and coffee, and had slept dreamlessly in the clean spare bed at their gardener's cottage—to wake, refreshed, in the light of a new day.

Morning had found every house in Gorze crammed with French and German wounded, and every able-bodied resident, willingly or otherwise, impressed into the service of the Red Cross. One single lady of the Sister's acquaintance, whose villa had been forcibly turned into a hospital, had retired to sleep off a nervous headache, setting her maid to guard her bedroom door. Which door, after an interval of trampling and violent argument, had been kicked open, revealing the kicker in the person of a Prussian General, muddy to the whiskers, hoarse from exposure and shouting, and red-eyed from the lack of sleep, who there and then forcibly ejected the hapless spinster from her bed, and telling her go and nurse the wounded, pulled off his spurred boots, and promptly installed himself in her place.

This was mild treatment, even tender, to the usage received by many other harmless non-combatants. P. C. Breagh had seen an elderly priest savagely hit in the face by a dismounted Uhlan, whom he had unintentionally jostled in helping to lift a disabled French soldier into a cart.

And he had been witness of other outrages. He had seen a wayside cabaret gutted, and the casks hauled up from the cellar, set up on end, unheaded, and emptied by a party of blue infantry-men. When they had dipped in and filled their water-bottles, they had drunk out of their helmets, and when they could drink no more, they had emptied out the wine upon the ground before the bush-decorated doorway, and with brutal jests and laughter watched the red stuff trickle away.

To this senseless waste the host had offered no objection. A blow from a gun-butt had previously knocked him senseless, and his wife, with her black hair hanging wildly over her shoulders, and her face blurred with tears and pale with terror, was trying to bring him round again.

XLIX

The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal picture—made him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the palms, shut his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down the deadly qualm.... It was worse than the Red Ravine a hundred times magnified. It was awful—inconceivably awful.... He found himself muttering:

"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"

With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove himself as far as possible from this attained vision of his great desire, by using the legs that had brought him to this hideous scene:

"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see War—as I gassed—not twenty-four hours ago—could be set down where I stand now, they'd find out, as I have found—that they didn't know what they were talking about.... Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw that German Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse, curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go sheer crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"

He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose his mental equilibrium. We are so weak to our own knowledge that it is always a marvel when we find ourselves strong. He found the nausea going and the dimness clearing from his vision. He could even breathe the dreadful air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage, stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death and tell himself that a not inapt comparison would have been Deal Beach, with ridges of dead men and beasts instead of ridges of pebbles, and flocks of carrion crows instead of gulls—flapping heavily from one place to settle down in another and renew their dreadful banquet, between hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"

Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and fat like the titmice and robins, who manifested predilections calculated to divest P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of belief in the tender fable of the Babes in the Wood. Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor greedily sipped blood in preference to honey-dew. Hares, rendered tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the corpses of men, their natural enemies.

Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the battle seemed to have raged desperately. For it was high-heaped with bodies of the green-jacketed Chasseurs on the bony brown horses, and ringed about with Red Uhlans and Dragoons in blue coats. The black and white lance-pennons were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that brought with it the appalling savor of death....

One had come to work, not to make notes. P. C. Breagh got down from the limber into the trough between two towering wave-crests and looked about him helplessly, not knowing where to begin. A bearer-party of the Prussian Ambulance Service pushed by him. They were hard-bitten, brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely. A scared band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers made of hurdles and sacks and poles.

Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure. Was it a young girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed and blackly clad? A black silk veil covered the bent face, the small white hands were knitted across the narrow bosom. A white linen armlet with the badge of the Red Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain black merino dress. The little, daintily shod feet that showed under the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon them. Through the veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly moving from side to side, restlessly seeking....

P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of strained apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the sharpened faces of those crowds of black-clad men and women who hastened from all quarters to seek amid the brute and human waste and wreckage of battle, their own wounded or dead.

She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a fog, looking from side to side, questing amid blue and livid or waxen faces for the face, it was quite plain. Her look passed over bodies that did not wear the dark-green, silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red pantaloons of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial. She ignored faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp mustache and the Imperial tuft.

For whom did she seek? A husband, uncle, father? ... What lay in her path? Something that, did the little foot strike it unwarily, might bring to an end that anguished search.... The impact seemed so imminent that his voice died in his throat when he strove to call to her. He got out in a gasping croak:

"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For God's sake, don't touch it—it's a live shell!" ...

She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning, though he who uttered it had spoken in his own tongue. The edge of her skirt brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a potentiality fraught with hideous death. But she struck her knee against the wheel of the broken limber—would have fallen but for P. C. Breagh. Even as the slight figure stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of Juliette.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard.... Madame..."

"Ah, it is you—it is you!" she said gaspingly.

And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust out strong hands and caught hers that were still knitted over her breast.

They were so cold, so cold and tiny. They stirred in his grasp like little half-frozen birds. She freed one, and put aside the heavy veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can make in loveliness.... She said—in the toneless wraith of the crystal voice he remembered:

"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord had not forgotten me. Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love you bear your sister!—for the love of charity—do not desert me! Me, I am in the greatest extremity, or I would not venture to appeal to you now. In the midst of these appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who is all the world to me.... For that I may find him living I do not dare to hope..."

P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:

"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"

She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:

"Not my husband. My father, sir. It is since a week that I returned from Belgium upon receiving news of his captivity in the hands of the Prussians. The intelligence was false—I afterward learned. How—I cannot now tell you. At this moment, and in the presence of all these poor corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful, I can remember nothing very well. But this—that I have come from Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come altogether alone."

"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without papers?..." His face expressed the blankest surprise.

"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by whom I will not say now, so that from the Belgian frontier I might reach Rethel. When I quitted Rethel, I was given a military permit by the aid of which I returned to Verdun. From Verdun, in a train full of French wounded—in a fiacre part of the way—in a peasant's cart the remaining distance—I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain. But at Plappeville they detained me. A great battle was raging.... What thunder of guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible confusion, devastation, wounds, and death did I not behold!..."

She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had let go, felt for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold drops of anguish that stood upon her blue-veined temples and about her colorless lips. And P. C. Breagh could only look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder at the courage that bore the frail creature up.

"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased A poor peasant woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage, and shared with me the milk of her goat and her last loaf of bread. News came before day, brought by a wounded soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that the battle had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the Citadel of Metz. I asked this poor soldier for intelligence of my father's regiment, the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard. The reply was: 'Three regiments of Mounted Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor. You will find them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.' I cried out then, for the words had pierced me like sharp iron. I would have run out of the house to find my father, like a creature distracted, but that an ambulance of the Red Cross, accompanied by two English Protestant Sisters, passed through the village on the way to this terrible place. They brought me with them—'You cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without the brassard of the Rouge Croix.' This they put upon me, and then they bring me with them. Now I know not where they are, but I have found you. Help me, monsieur—and I will pray for you until I die!"

She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little frozen hands together—would have knelt down on the bloody grass to plead with him the better, if he had seemed to delay. But he caught fire at her flaming eagerness, and snatched at the wallet of Red Cross necessaries he had unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber to gaze over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:

"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search for him—and where? ... Tell me ... the regiment and the color of the uniform?"

Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing of one of the rigid figures near them. He noted the red and green plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian Dragoon. He muttered, even while mentally registering other details of the Chasseur's uniform—noting the crest embroidered on the green schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead rider's thigh:

"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other that they fought like devils yesterday.... Half a dozen regiments might have been cut up here! And we have to find one man somewhere in a square mile of piled-up bodies.... If one only had a bloodhound and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."

Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging dewlap. The issue of the search was to prove this. For an hour, as it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of dead men. Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning, the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation of musketry. Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.

About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the previous day had raged—the billows of the sea of Death had beaten fiercely. The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped sharply—from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and equine. But the slender figure in black moved between them—stooped to pass under them, seldom faltering. When the young man who followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without answering, and kept on. The silent gesture meant:

"Not yet! A little farther still!... Be patient with me, I beg of you!"

For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by myriads of stiffened arms.

She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely peaked and shrunken:

"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is failing.... See, see! O Mother of God!... O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"

The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's blood to snow-water. He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from some sight of intolerable horror:

"Wait! For God's sake! Wait!... Let me!..."

She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a baby's. She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a horse's rigid hind-limb. When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue hand.

It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust. But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have known....

Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies. She saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there. She kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it. Ophelia was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:

"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted again—never! Indeed, I have tried to obey thee—but I could not help coming back because I love thee so!... Thou hast been wounded, but I will nurse thee and cure thee. When thou art well again we will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come. For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own father!... I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."

She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard from her view. One of them was the body of the young subaltern who had borne the standard. Over him sprawled the colossal form of a German officer of Dragoons. He was not dead, for he moved, and blood was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped scalp of his unhelmeted head.

"Help! Some drink! Donner! how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.

P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite side. Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough Teutonic gutturals:

"Hereabouts or near. Begin this—widening the way until carts can get through to be loaded.... Kreuzdonnerwetter! is that a dog up there?"

Another voice answered:

"No, Herr Sergeant. It is either a nun or a woman!"

The Sergeant thundered:

"You silly sheepshead! Aren't nuns women? But you verdammte Catholics think such wenches are angels out of the sky. Turn her out of that—nun or woman!"

With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed cheeks and temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant Juliette. He thrust his head forward, peering down from his eyrie. The crouching little shape in black looked no bigger than a big dog. Near her stood a soldier in the white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry. It was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him civil farewell. Staring up from below was the copper-colored countenance of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt, not rendered more amiable by mud-splashes and powder grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar across the bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard. He bellowed to the ex-chemist:

"Speak to her! Ask what is her business."

The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head, and seemed to put a question. She lifted her drained white face, shuddered, then resumed her previous attitude. Interrogated from below, Private Kunz responded:

"She is deaf, or mad. She only shakes and stares at one!"

The Sergeant bellowed:

"Shout in her ear, fool! You are not courting your sweetheart! Tell her to get up and move out of this!"

Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the little ear shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled the order of his superior. She gave no sign of having heard. Copper-red with indignation, the Sergeant commanded:

"Turn her out, then! Promptly up with the baggage!"

Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally. At the touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face upon the rigid hand she held. And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging trailing in his wake. Casting caution to the winds, he shouted savagely to the ex-chemist:

"Let the lady go! Take your hand off! Damn you!—do you hear?"

The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant. For an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition. The next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian "needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind which his heart hammered and bumped. There was a creaking of leather then—and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space. Over the heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.

"Whom have we English here? Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"

From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude of Sergeant Schmidt. He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became vertical. He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh drew near. And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded suddenly from about the Englishman.... He was back in the tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. And the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:

"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume upon the fact too rashly. Had I not been within earshot just now, you would have paid with your life for your interference. German military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not to be turned aside."

P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:

"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."

"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover, too much may be risked and lost!"

P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with yellow-gray eyes that blazed tigerishly:

"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de Bayard, 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."

"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will speak to her!"

At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward, breasting a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley, terribly squeezing the Sergeant and his men.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.

"Excellency, she does not hear you! The shock has been too terrible," Carolan was beginning. He was brusquely interrupted with:

"People usually listen when I speak to them." And the curt command was issued—in French, suave and polished:

"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up and listen to me!"

The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted. He turned her head with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking steadily at the other female thing.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"

This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her small pinched face his way. In the haggard young mask of frozen anguish two wild eyes glittered, tearless and stony-hard. Then slowly, as though his powerful will impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her feet before him. He said, in cool, incisive accents:

"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier. I myself had the privilege of seeing how he died. I wish such a man had served a better master!..."

She answered, her white lips barely moving as they framed the sentence:

"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before Whom he stands now!"

His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation. He said in tones that had the clang of overbearing authority:

"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion. The battle-field is no place for debate, or for unprotected women and young girls.... In your own best interests I counsel you to return home." He added—and there was no flicker of recognition in the passing glance vouchsafed to P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer—or under the escort of this young Englishman.... I will promise you that your father's body shall be treated with respect!" His heavy eyes fell on the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing rigidly in the attitude of salute. "Where is the officer in charge of this burial-party?" he added, grimly enough.

"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant who had hurried up and was standing in the alleyway:

"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is recognizable by the daughter." He looked back at the daughter, saying curtly: "Your veil!"

She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist, who received the frail fluttering cobweb between his finger and thumb. Then the brown mare, in obedience to the iron hand upon the bridle, backed out of the alley of silent witnesses, baring her long, vicious-looking yellow teeth and showing the whites of her savage eyes resentfully. From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred with the heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little drama just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a sketch in charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.

But as the alley widened and his great beast surged round, switching her tail, putting back her ears and lashing out with her heels so as to nearly brain the officer, P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:

"Separate grave ... marked to find easily. All respect ... answer to me!"

More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing. For God had remembered her, and sent her tears at last.

She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of France, at Metz. And the intuition of love told her that the dead man must have carried this, the last message received from his daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed it—as in very truth we know he had—shortly before he died.

"See, see, my friend! Behold my own letter. His sacred blood has stained it.... His lips perhaps have pressed it!—it well may be that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me until my hand is cold as this is! Adieu, dear hand!" She knelt down to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force—would have returned for a last caress—a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her away.

"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested. "See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think it convenable that a gentleman should carry a lady so!..."

Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant. As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.

What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing in his arms his worshiped lady? He was footsore and aching in every bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion. His heart pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright. Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer. And as he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood burgeoned into flower. He might look back upon his boyhood with regret, contempt, or tenderness.... He would never be a boy again.

L

The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly heavy, when carried in the arms of a lover who long has borne her in his heart.

Thus to P. C. Breagh, stumbling with his burden over roads strewn with weapons, accouterments, mess-tins, and water-bottles, boxes of biscuit and halves of sugar-loaves discarded by troops retiring in haste, the appearance of a very tall peasant leading a little white-faced donkey came as an unspeakably welcome relief. For a franc in good French money the owner of the donkey was more than willing to hire out his beast. Thus, seated on this humble animal, P. C. Breagh's Infanta returned to the cottage where she had passed the previous night.

It was one of a hamlet boasting the name of Petit Plappeville. To reach it they skirted the frightful carnage at St. Hubert, threaded the wood of Châtel St. Germain, crossed the railroad, unmolested by the Prussian patrols, and, following narrow lanes hidden between copses, came at last upon its single street.

Madame Guyot, stout, hospitable, and voluble, received Juliette with cries of welcome and open arms. Mademoiselle should have something better than dry bread on this occasion, for a neighbor had that morning killed a calf. Hence veal cutlet, fried in batter—for some of the hens, scared by yesterday's bombardment, had already begun laying—and an omelette with fine herbs. No less than young demoiselles, wounded soldiers require nourishment, and here behold, English Monsieur accompanying Mademoiselle, here upon the pallet-bed in the corner of the kitchen one of France's brave defenders in the person of my Cousin Boisset. Pardon that he cannot rise to salute you, for the Prussians have made it impossible. During the battle of St. Privat yesterday, my Cousin Boisset was twice wounded while serving with the Eighteenth Field Battery of the Sixth Army Corps....

Thus introduced, the gunner told his story, and told it with vivacity in spite of his evident pain. His bandaged head and the useless leg roughly swathed in a homespun towel of Madame Guyot's told their story no less than his nimble tongue and vivacious eyes and hands.

"We were overcome by force of numbers.... The Germans know nothing of scientific warfare.... Believe me, Mademoiselle and Monsieur, we swept them down in rows like ninepins painted black. At twelve hundred yards, and again at fourteen hundred—and the more we killed the more there were to kill. Name of a pipe!—pardon, Mademoiselle!—it was inconceivable! We were compelled at length to cease our fire because our ammunition failed us, and it was not possible to butcher any more!—Worst of all, our generals lost their heads, and issued contradictory orders!—Commissariat broke down before the ammunition-service—we had had nothing to eat for two days—then we ceased to have shrapnel with which to feed our guns.... So we stood in front of a wood in which we might have taken cover, being peppered by Prussian fire of infantry and artillery, for three whole hours!—Three solid hours, Monsieur and Mademoiselle—until we were remembered, and ordered to retire. When the order came, few officers remained, and not a single non-commissioned officer was left to us. Of the three batteries of our brigade Division, two-thirds lay dead upon the field. With my wounded leg trailing behind me, I crawled over rank after rank of bodies, pausing over many of my old comrades.... Then I lay in the wood till dusk, and made crutches of saplings I cut down with my penknife. With the day I reached my cousin's house.... You may say 'All this is War'—but what kind of War? is what I ask you.... I—a soldier when has fought and bled for France!"

It was the voice of Juliette that answered from the corner of the blackened oaken settle, where she sat huddled in the leaden stupor that is born of grief and fatigue:

"Soldier of France, I will try to answer your question.... I am young and ignorant, but I have read and thought much. And now I have experienced what never can be forgotten.... I have sat by the corpse of my father on the battlefield.... I have looked in the face of the great man who is my country's cruel enemy...."

Madame Guyot, who was frying a panful of veal cutlet, started and looked round from her sputtering, savory-smelling cookery. The wounded gunner, propped up on the pallet-bed that stood in the corner of the low-ceiled, stone-built kitchen, turned keen dark eyes and a resolute bearded face toward the quarter whence came the silvery voice:

"It is Bismarck's War," she said. "Stone by stone he has built up Prussia until her vast shadow has swallowed up all Germany. He has seen—this huge man of colossal ambitions—that the road to Power greater still leads through the gate of France. And Diplomacy could not steal the key, so War is the lever with which he opens it."

"Alas, Mademoiselle," returned the gunner sorrowfully, "it would never have opened while a French soldier was left alive—if we had not been betrayed! Have you seen the picture of Cham in last week's Charivari? It reached my battery through one of our officers. It is true—mon Dieu!—it is desperately true. There is the Little Napoleon of To-day dressed up in the old cocked hat and the tattered rags of the capote that used to be worn by the Great Napoleon. He begs at the street-corner for sous—and even the prostitute turns away from the impostor. 'The End of the Legend!' is written underneath. It is furiously chic and terribly clever—and frightfully true, Mademoiselle. For the Napoleonic legend is done with—finished, for good and all!"

She did not answer, the momentary flash of interest had died out. With her sad eyes fixed upon the ebony and silver crucifix of her rosary, she was murmuring a prayer—doubtless for her father's soul. Seeing her thus absorbed, the soldier glanced at her companion, shrugged significantly, and tapped his own forehead, as though he would have said:

"It is well that women have faith in Heaven. See!—she turns to her beads, the poor little one. She is able to pray!—that is fortunate.... Otherwise, grief would turn her brain!"

Meeting no response from P. C. Breagh, who sat upon a backless straw-bottomed chair in the chimney corner, raptly contemplating the small, sorrowful face, the gunner shrugged again, and exchanged a wink of intelligence with Madame Guyot, as she took the bubbling pan from the fire, proclaiming the cutlet cooked to a turn.

Who has loved and does not remember the first meal partaken in the company of the beloved. To one guest at Madame Guyot's board, the fried cutlet and tomatoes eaten from her coarse platters of red-flowered crockery, the home-baked loaf, the jug of thin red wine, the country cheese and the dish of purple plums that served as dessert, made a banquet worthy of the gods. To sit opposite that little drawn, white face with the lowered, swollen eyelids, and watch her brave pretense of relishing their hostess' victuals, would have been torture had it not been bliss.

When the homespun cloth had been drawn, the crumbs shaken out upon the threshold for the hungry poultry, the cat accommodated with a saucer of scraps, and the hearth swept, P. C. Breagh, glancing at the cuckoo-clock that had hiccuped twelve, and now pointed to the half-hour, got up and reluctantly tore himself away.

"You are going?... Back to him?... To make sure that those soldiers have obeyed the orders of M. de Bismarck? Ah! that is what I have been praying for! Our Lady has put it into your head."

She said it eagerly, with her hand quieting the flutter in her bosom. Of what else should de Bayard's daughter have been thinking, P. C. Breagh asked himself. He entreated, his troubled gray eyes wistfully questioning:

"You won't leave this place until I come back? Pray do not!... Promise me!"

The soldier, chatting in low tones with the good woman of the cottage, pricked his hairy ears at the unfamiliar accent of the English words. Juliette answered in the same tongue:

"Monsieur, I give you my parole of honor. When you come back to this house, if I am alive, you will find me here, under the manteau of Our Lady. May she protect and guard you. Au revoir!..."

P. C. Breagh echoed the final words, and held out his big hand. She considered it a moment, hesitated, then laid her own in the broad, blistered palm. As he shut his strong fingers over the fragile captive, it struggled, then lay still, throbbing like some small imprisoned bird. And a dimness came before his eyes, and he hurriedly released her, stammering:

"Take—take care of yourself, won't you? I'll—not be very long away!"

She called him back. He knew a shock of joy and hurried toward her. She slipped her Rosary into his hand with a gold coin, faltering with eyes brimful, and quivering lips:

"This ... to be buried with him!... This—for a priest to read the Office and offer Mass ... if one can be discovered!... Oh! if I might come with you!... but no!—I will not be unreasonable. Again, it must not be that you carry me, as you did to-day!"

He trembled at the poignant recollection. She went on, breathing fast and eagerly, lifting her eyes, poor rain-washed scillas, to his—laying her small hand timidly on his shabby sleeve.

"Me, I have an idea!... There is now in Heaven a great saint who was priest of a little village that lies not far from here.... Since he died, it is eleven years.... I speak of M. Jean-Baptiste Vianney, the Blessed Curé of Ars...."

P. C. Breagh nodded recognition of the shining name she mentioned. She went on, her small fingers pinching a fold of the rough brown sleeve:

"Sacrifice—mortification—the Cross—these things to the holy Curé were the Keys of Heaven. The poorest and simplest of his peasants was not poorer or simpler than he. Even before his death Our Lord gave him the grace to perform miracles, and always did Our Lady regard him with tenderness.... See you well, I will pray to the Blessed Jean Vianney to intercede for me, that God may send a holy priest to read the Office for the dead!"