Part 36

P. C. Breagh sat astride of a hot boulder, got out the Doctor's map and adjusted his cherished binoculars. They showed him the battalion he had marched with halted by the side of the river road. The bridge at Pagny showed black with solid columns of infantry, marching eight abreast; their sun-touched bayonets rippling lines of molten silver, each helmet-spike a flame of ruddy gold.

The First and Second Armies of United Germany, hitherto compelled to a strenuous inactivity, were having their innings with a vengeance now.... Looking Metzwards, one could see that three new lines of pontoons were thrown across the river below Yaux. A division of the dark-blue soldiers, with eight squadrons of cavalry and half a dozen batteries of mounted artillery, were crossing almost within range of the guns of Mount St. Quentin and Plappeville.

How thickly the white tents were clustered on the green slopes about both fortresses, Red Breeches swarming in thousands without and within the walls. Were the gunners of the huge bronze Creusots one had read of asleep, or lazy or indifferent? The answer came in a spirt of white vapor from an embrasure of the middle salient of St. Quentin's long, eight-pointed star. A white-hot flame leaped, a towering cloud of smoke soared, the roar of a heavy piece of artillery followed; and a shell of big caliber soared above Moulins and burst with a shattering explosion and an uprush of flame. Some Artillery-horses on the nearest pontoon reared, causing a momentary confusion. Their dismounted drivers quieted them, and the orderly crossing went on.

_Boom-Boom!_ Crack! A clatter like old iron and a heavy splashing and pounding of hoofs. St. Quentin had got the range.--No! the shrapnel shell had been fired from a French field-battery placed behind earthworks above St. Ruffine. Another shell hit the upper pontoon and must have smashed it adrift on the landing side. For dark-blue men and struggling horses were drifting away in the direction of Metz, and the green river was tinged with red. The wheelers of a gun-team, dragged downward by the weight attached to them, had gone to the bottom almost without a struggle. The leaders, submerged all but their wild heads and splashing fore-hoofs, battled a while with the current before one of them vanished. The other, whose rope-and-chain traces had somehow broken, swam gallantly down-stream, and finally landed on the farther bank.

Further successful practice on the part of France's artillerists may have followed. At this juncture the attention of P. C. Breagh became diverted by a curious fact. One of the stone-pines seemed to be lobbing cones at him. _Whiff-phutt!_ they were dropping on all sides. Or could it? ... A shrill whistling sound close by his ear, and a simultaneous bristling of the hairs upon his scalp and body, told him that it could. The missiles were bullets.

They came, sometimes with a sharp whistle that told of unexpended energy, at others with the pleasant humming that had at first attracted him, from the woods that clothed the rising ground northwest and west of the platform he occupied.

Were they Prussian bullets or French? At the moment, the question did not interest him. He had pocketed his map and crawling on his belly towards the southern edge of his platform, looked cautiously over, meditating descent. Beyond was a sandwich-shaped stretch of woodland climbing to a ridge; and beyond the ridge a considerable expanse of bush-dotted common bordered by a stream and speckled with a few farm-buildings. Quite a decent-sized town lifted its Norman church-tower nearly a mile away.

The town must be Gorze. Withdrawing his eyes from it, they dropped into a deep ravine or combe running parallel with the western and southern sides of the giant limestone rock he sprawled on. Ferns clothed the deep, hollow sides, and oaks and birches, springing from the bottom, lifted their bushy heads to the level of his face. Spying between the branches, he saw that the ravine was full of garishly colored lights and shadows, and that a steady current of glittering white metal snaked in and out between the tree-trunks, setting from west to east.

Bayonets, carried on the shoulders of red-breeched French soldiers, moving with startling rapidity over the dry leaves at the bottom of the ravine. A battalion, at least, of wiry, active-looking Voltigeurs, a mitrailleuse-battery, each weapon hauled by a team of three gunners.... Green-coated Chasseurs _à pied_, with cocks' plumes shading the peaks of their _képis_ followed. Would a surprise be intended for the cavalry-brigades that had crossed the railway-bridge and ridden eastward down the river-road a few minutes previously? In that case, what ought one to do?

Even as he asked, the advanced company of Voltigeurs discovered the Prussian squadrons. He saw a ripple of excitement pass down the ranks, and the Voltigeurs hurry forward at the double. He saw the mitrailleuse-batteries string out in line, push up the sloping sides of the ravine, and scatter among the trees of the plantation that climbed the ridge. The Chasseurs followed. Their intention was obvious. They were going to enfilade the passing brigades from the cover of the wood.

Even as the hounds of hell seemed to break loose, and a sheet of pure yellow-white flame ran from end to end of the ridge where the trees ended, the foremost brigade of three Hussar regiments came in view, trotting over a track that traversed the common, became a road, and plunged between deep woodlands trending west. His map had told him that the road led to Rezonville and Gravelotte.

He heard the Prussian trumpets sound through the ear-splitting racket of the French rifle-fire. He saw through the thin haze of powder-smoke that hung above the wood, the massed columns split into squadrons, the squadrons divide into troops, the troops become units--scattered over the common, galloping to re-form again upon the road that led through the woods to Rezonville.

They were two of the brigades forming Rheinbaben's Fifth Division, under Von Barby and Von Bredow, pushing forward to join General von Redern in the neighborhood of Mac La Tour. Their mobility saved them from decimation on a grand scale, but they left dead horses and men and officers dead and wounded. Their retreat was covered by one of their batteries of Horse Artillery, and two squadrons of a Uhlan regiment.

In the distance a riderless gray charger galloped wildly over the common, and a prone figure in a brilliant scarlet coat lay motionless beside the track. More could not be observed just then, for the battery of Horse Artillery got into position, while the Uhlans dismounted and coolly returned with carbine-fire the enfilade from the chassepots in the wood.

They knelt, and aimed and shot without hurry, and that their shooting was effective was demonstrated to the noncombatant onlooker, by half a dozen French Artillerymen and Chasseurs _à pied_ who came staggering or limping back through the trees, and got down into the ravine. One toppled over in the act of negotiating the descent, and lay sprawling and head downward. Another, who kept putting a hand to his streaming cheek, and taking it away to stare at the blood upon it, was shot again in a vital part, spun around, and collapsed in a heap.

"_Lee-ee eer!_"

The wailing, stinging screech of a bullet that had shaved unpleasantly near was accompanied by the whisking of the sun-scorched straw hat from the head of P. C. Breagh, and an acute pang of deadly fear. In the same instant the Prussian field-battery opened fire. Beyond the trees four puffs of white smoke went up, and four tongues of bright yellow flame preceded the quadruple crash of the driving-charges. Lanes opened through the smoke-filled wood, as trees split into kindling and match-sticks. And heaps of green and scarlet rags mixed with bloody flesh and shattered bones mingled with the _débris_. And something that screamed like a devil unchained hurtled through intervening space, and plumped upon the limestone platform within a dozen feet of P. C. Breagh. And he shrieked like a shot rabbit as it exploded with a splitting crash, and a spurt of evil yellow fire licked the skin off his ear and cheek.

Dazed and stupefied, he removed himself to the farther and more sheltered side of the platform. But the skirmish was over, the Voltigeurs and the Chasseurs _à pied_, with what remained of the mitrailleuse-battery, had not waited for the Uhlans to charge, but were in pell-mell retreat along the ravine. He heard a French voice cry savagely:

"We are cut off! These woods are full of Prussians!"

And in the same instant, through the lanes that had been hacked through the trees, P. C. Breagh saw the Prussian artillery limber up and ride off with what remained of the Uhlan squadrons. They were wanted badly at the front, and the infantry-battalions with which P. C. Breagh had marched from Pont à Mousson, and the Division coming up from Pagny, striking into the Ars road, had crossed the upper end of the ravine. The woods were indeed full of them. And they also were wanted at the front and had no time to spare.

As blue uniforms and crimson faces topped by gilt-spiked helmets came crowding through the trees, the human river, flowing along the bottom of the defile, rose in a wave and splashed back upon itself. A red-haired young officer of Voltigeurs, drawing his sword, used his voice and the flat of the weapon to restore order; and succeeded so far that his company formed in straggling lines and began to send in volleys with the courage of despair. The gunners of the mitrailleuse that was not smashed by the German shell-fire could not use the piece effectively at the bottom of the death-trap. They were shot down in the attempt.

It was cool, scientific slaughter--merciless carnage. Before it began, a bugle cautioned attention. A flat-capped field-officer pushed his horse to the front and cried in stentorian tones:

"Aimed fire!"

The men of the chassepot made a gallant stand, but the odds were heavy, and the men of the needle-gun did not waste a cartridge. They loaded and aimed, fired and reloaded with machine-like precision. When the ravine was piled with bloody corpses the bugles sounded "Cease fire!" Then the Prussian field-officer spurred to the edge of the red ditch and shouted, looking down:

"Does anyone here ask quarter?"

There was a laugh. But something raised itself from a heap of bullet-pierced bodies. A rattling voice cried:

"No, dog of a Prussian!"

A revolver cracked, and the speaker, a Voltigeur, was silent. His voice had sounded like that of an old man, but he wore the epaulettes of a lieutenant and had carroty-red hair. At this juncture, being overtaken by grievous retching and vomiting, P. C. Breagh's observations ceased.

He sat up presently and wiped his dripping neck and mopped his forehead. It seemed to him that he had seen the whole French Army exterminated, and yet he had witnessed but a skirmish ending in a battue. He shook his wits into some order, and controlled the shuddering that took him in the pit of the stomach, when he remembered that in common decency he must go to Brotherton.

The descent from the rock-platform was nothing more than a risky scramble. There were plenty of pine and furze roots and jutting stones for holding to and clefts into which to thrust one's toes. But the crossing of that ravine cumbered with bloody corpses was not effected without revolt of body and soul. He slipped once and fell, and struggled up all horribly besmeared and sick and shaking. For the teeth of a head from which the face had been shot away had snapped close by his ear. Then came the negotiation of the bit of woodland. Here were more Voltigeurs and Chasseurs _à pied_ dead and horribly mutilated, and the wreck of a mitrailleuse, with two of its gunners. Some of these poor wounded creatures were living, and moaned for water.

"My God!--my God! how I suffer!" one feeble voice kept crying.

Help was coming, for from the direction of the town some carts were being driven, one by a stout priest in cassock and broad-brimmed hat, others by men with Red Cross armlets. Black-habited, white-capped Sisters of Mercy were in these vehicles, with baskets, and pitchers, and pails.

Seven dead Hussars showing hideously the effect of mitrailleuse-fire,--a troop-horse or two, and a White Cuirassier shot through the body and swearing horribly in Low German, were the fruits of the French enfilade. The fine gray charger had ceased careering; it grazed peaceably on the short herbage by the track that led over the common. But Chris Brotherton would never sit in saddle again.

P. C. Breagh turned him gently over and opened the gold-laced scarlet tunic. There was no blood upon it, only clean dust, nor was the dead man bruised or cut, having fallen where it was grassy. Upon the broad breast, under the white cambric shirt, was an oval miniature, pearl-set, of a pretty woman. The handsome mouth of the wearer smiled under the drooping fair mustache, and his blue eyes stared glassily. A bluish hole in the right temple and a bloody clot amid the hair upon the left side showed where the chassepot bullet had traversed the brain.

He had been high-handed, arrogant, and domineering, yet the Doctor and the horsey Towers had seemed to love him. No doubt that woman in the miniature had held Chris Brotherton dear.... P. C. Breagh would have left her fair face lying on the yet warm breast of her lover, but something he saw going on among the casualties upon the edge of the wood caused him to change his mind.

That gaunt-eyed, greedy-fingered creature in the peasant's blouse and Red Cross brassard, who glided from body to body, rifling pockets, should not plunder the Doctor's friend. With this determination, Carolan took away the portrait, a packet of letters, and Brotherton's watch and purse and pocketbook, then went forward to meet the Sisters, just descending from the foremost of the string of peasants' carts; and began:

"My Sister..."

The nun addressed turned a pleasant face upon him, and cried, with a sympathetic clasping of her small, work-roughened hands:

"There is blood on Monsieur! ... He has been wounded."

P. C. Breagh explained with economy of words how and where he had been watching the fighting, and whence came the ugly stains upon his clothes. The nun glanced toward the wood, paled and shuddered, and said, making the sign of the Cross upon her starched, cape-like _guimpe_:

"But all cannot be dead who lie bleeding in that _ravin_--the hollow where our poor school-children gather primroses in Spring?"

"I think they must be. The massacre was carried out deliberately. Aimed fire--and there is not a movement, not a groan...."

P. C. Breagh shuddered, remembering the crossing of the red ditch. The nun said with energy, as other black habits and white guimpes came crowding round her:

"We must make sure.... Each of those bodies must be lifted and examined. Life often lingers, sir, when it seems to have fled. We learned that in the Crimea, when we worked in the base-hospitals of Kamiesch. What of these things?" P. C. Breagh was holding out the portrait, purse, pocketbook, and letters. "You wish our Reverend Mother to take charge of them? They belonged to that dead officer yonder, in the scarlet uniform? He was English, you tell me--and you, too, are of England? Very well! It shall be as you wish, Monsieur--I am free to decide, as I am the Superior of our community. But I will not receive the valuables at your hands until you have helped us to clear that terrible ravine. We have only our good priest with a few peasants and one surgeon, and some charitable ladies and gentlemen of the Association of the Red Cross. Everyone else is panic-stricken--they have barricaded themselves within their shops and houses, and taken refuge in the cellars.... The explosions of cannon have been so terrible--they are becoming yet more alarming, and when the fighting came quite close.... Our people are not brave, you think!--Still, everyone cannot be courageous.... But, Monsieur, who watches men being killed by guns to gain experience--we may look to Monsieur for help?"

The clear woman-eyes went to the sun-browned, freckled face of the young man in the travel-worn, dusty, blood-stained clothing, and realized that a struggle was going on within him. She said:

"If Monsieur is of necessity compelled to go and leave us, I will take charge of the dead English officer's property for Monsieur. But a great blessing is for those who succor the wounded. Our Lord has always promised this!"

No one listened to the little colloquy; some of the Sisters were already stooping beside the prone bodies, two of them were helping the vocal Cuirassier into a cart....

With a great longing P. C. Breagh had longed to make the ridge south of Flavigny, and see with his own eyes how the Man of Iron comported himself in the clash of war. And to stay behind and forego the possibility cost him poignant anguish, but one could not leave the Superior and the Sisters to dabble unaided in that ghastly ravine.

"I will stay, Reverend Mother," he said, with a bow that might have been more clumsy. Next moment Brotherton's property had vanished into a huge pocket hidden somewhere in the black habit. The nun clapped her hands, crying to the peasants:

"Thanks! thanks! Come, Antoine, Pichegru, Eloi, Bénoit! Dubois! To the wood, my friends! and the hollow, where are many sufferers! I place you under the orders of this English Monsieur."

XLIV

Upon that battlefield of Gravelotte, France, driven to bay, fought like a royal tigress. How many times the dark blue Divisions were thrown back in their assault upon positions zoned with death-bellowing cannon and death-barking mitrailleuses, History relates. So murderous was the fire of her chassepotiers from their densely manned rifle-pits that you could trace Moltke's plans of assault in mounds of dead Uhlan cavalry and long regular swathes of motionless blue objects that had been Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz....

Yet if the Warlock had said within himself, "_This shall be above all a battle of cavalry_," it would seem as though the determination had been formed upon the other side.

For this day that saw the death-charge of Von Bredow's brigade upon the Gorze Road--Uhlans, White Cuirassiers, and Dragoons of the Guard hurled in a solid column of shining steel against French field-batteries and battalions of riflemen--also saw the cavalry of Frossard, of Ladmirault, and Canrobert ride down whole squares of German infantry, who rose again and poured in volleys from their needle-guns, to be beaten down by the storms of leaden hail ground out by the mitrailleuse.

A glowing, coppery sun looked down on those six square miles of fiercely contested ground. Over its whole expanse there was not one patch as big as a National School playground without its _débris_ of arms and accouterments, its ghastly or ludicrous tokens of war.

In an intermittent lull of the racket you could hear the dry earth, that had been pounded bare of verdure, sucking moisture as though after heavy rain. Only the rain was red. The faint, sour smell of it came to the nostrils mingled with the smell of burnt gunpowder, human and equine exhalations, and the acrid stifle of burning wood.

For Flavigny was yet smouldering, the farm-buildings at Gorze were burning, Malmaison was a furnace; houses and barns at Verneville were wrapped in clouds of black smoke shot with lurid flame.

Exhausted battalions, sick and stupefied with slaughter, were lying down among the dead and the wounded to snatch a wink of sleep. Others opened their haversacks to snatch a hasty mouthful, or drained their canteens of the last drop. Surgeons were going up and down among them, patching up flesh-cuts with lint and diachylon, temporarily plugging bullet-wounds of the minor order. "There!" they would say to the Schmidt, Kunz, or Schultz so treated; "now you are fit for fighting again!"

Perhaps you can see the Man of Iron in his white Cuirassier cap, black undress frock with the pewter buttons, and great steel-spurred jack-boots, standing, grim-jawed and inscrutable, behind his King's camp-chair. Through the stress and storm of two long days of hot fighting, that patch of high ground south of Flavigny had been the point to which orderlies and aides-de-camp furiously galloped from every point of the compass, and from which they galloped back in even more desperate haste.

In the rear of the camp-chair, not so close to it as to draw fire, were the King's personal military staff, a bevy of Princes, and the representative of the British War Office, Colonel ----. Several Councillors and Secretaries of the Chancellor's traveling Foreign Office stood about, stout, gray-haired, important-looking persons in semi-military uniform. The carriages that had conveyed them waited at Tronville. The King's charger and those of the other great personages were in the care of orderlies. The Escort waited by their horses in the background.

Moltke stood apart, taciturn and inscrutable, nursing his thin elbow and cupping his long chin. Roon, who contrary to his custom was not wearing his helmet, gloomily champed his cap-strap, unable to disguise his anguish of anxiety. He would have given a year of life to say:

"Old man, so cool in the midst of this hellish slaughter, can it be that you do not know how things really are going? Since two of the clock the French have had the best of it! The chassepot you termed a 'magnificent weapon' has justified your eulogism. The mitrailleuse we despised, not comprehending its terrible capabilities, has revealed them to our undoing. The Army of United Germany bleeds at every pore!"

He tore his mustache, the dye upon which had not been renewed recently. His heart swelled with the flood of pent-up speech.

"The Commander-in-Chief's dispatches to the Queen have been cheered in Berlin. Throughout Germany they are hailed with joy.... '_France now fights with her back to the Rhine_,' the people say. '_Our Army stands arrayed between Bazaine and Paris!_' Is it possible they do not realize that the situation is critical? Have they no suspicion that the tables might be turned?"

He wrung his knotted hands together in torment, and the sweat started in gouts upon his livid skin.

"Before us the Army of Bazaine--behind us at Châlons the Army of MacMahon. Were the Duke of Magenta with his recuperated Divisions to advance energetically and swiftly to the relief of his brother Marshal--could the Crown Prince hold him back? And if he could not, what were our chance worth?..."

The sentence had escaped Roon without his knowledge. Moltke's wrinkled visage turned his way. The scarlet-rimmed eyes glittered on him a moment. Roon leaped as the dry voice said:

"Not so much as a pinch of snuff!"

The War Minister stammered:

"Pardon, Your Excellency! You spoke to me?..."

Moltke answered quietly:

"I asked if you could spare me a pinch of snuff. My box is empty." He opened the little silver receptacle and turned it upside down, tapping it on his finger nail: "Neither have I a single cigar!"

Roon had forgotten his cigar-case in quarters. He fumbled for his snuff-box, thought it must be in his cloak. A resonant voice said from behind the King's camp-chair: "Will Your Excellency take one of these?"

"Why not? why not? If they are not too strong for me...." The Warlock smiled, showing his toothless gums. The Chancellor said, opening and offering the plain green leather case with the coroneted B stamped in gilding on it:

"It may be they are stronger than you are accustomed to smoke?"

Moltke's keen, swift glance met the heavy blue stare of the Chancellor. He returned:

"I will answer Your Excellency when I have tested them."