THE SIEGE.

Instructions caused me at this juncture to quit the advance upon Paris, and I left Meaux on the morning of the 17th September. It may not be altogether devoid of interest to recall the position of the German armies on that day so far as accorded with my knowledge. The troops had hourly been pouring to the front since first the 6th Army Corps crossed the pile-bridge at Trilport. The object, it was already known, was completely to invest the capital. The 5th Army Corps, with the head-quarters of the Crown Prince, striking south from Coulommiers, was pushing on through the villages to Chaulmes, and thence to Brie, on its road to cross the Seine at Villeneuve St. George; the pontoon train was in front between the field artillery and the infantry. The 5th might have marched faster, but that it had to tarry till the 2nd Bavarian Army Corps (still on the road from La Ferté) should have got up with it, taking the more circuitous route through the villages of Montceaux, Vanteuil, Boutigny, and so on to the great Melun road at Segy. The 5th and the Bavarians were then to push forward round in the direction of Versailles; the interval between their right and the Marne to be occupied by the 6th Army Corps. The destruction of the bridge over the Marne at Lagny had occasioned some temporary inconvenience, but this had already been remedied by the erection of a pontoon. The artillery of the 6th Army Corps had all gone to the south front. General Vinoy, with a field army, mostly consisting of regular troops, was reported by the Uhlans to be outside the cordon of forts on the south of Paris; and it seemed as if the 3rd Army might have to fight for its passage across the Seine. The Saxons were in force at Dammartin, touching our right, while the 4th Army Corps, the right wing of the Maas Army, was feeling round the north side of Paris. The King was expected to move forward in a few days, and occupy the château of Ferrières.

The bridges over the canals as I drove back to La Ferté on my return journey had already been repaired, but the Marne was still crossed by the pile bridge, although there was an alternative pontoon lower down the stream. Some little distance on the Meaux side of La Ferté I encountered the advance of the 2nd Bavarian Corps, and I had to strike off to the right on the road to Montmirail, till I came to a cross road, which brought me down again into the valley of the Seine upon Nogent, right into the rear of the Bavarians. There were no troops on this road, but it had been extensively traversed during the few preceding days, and the people were only just beginning to return to their homes. The villagers were very timid, and, I may add, very hungry, all along it, but it was wonderful how little damage the Germans had done during their transit. The poultry still strutted about the road through the village, and there was hardly a broken pane of glass to be seen. Furniture and valuables the people had secreted before the troops had come upon them, and the chief injury seemed to have been sustained by the straw stacks, upon which the men had drawn freely to make beds wherewithal in the empty houses. Over Nogent the wave had passed a little earlier, and the place had proportionately recovered more. Meat, both beef and mutton, was hanging in the open butcher’s shop. All the way to Château Thierry was visible the eager desire of the peasantry and farmers to overtake temporarily arrested agricultural labour. Except for the occasional traces of a bivouac and now and then a broken down vine stem, there was no evidence that a vast army had so recently traversed this road. The children played around the doors beside the old crones at their knitting, the men and women were in the fields working with a clumsy assiduity, and it seemed to me not uncheerfully. The vine-pickers were in the vineyards, filling their creels with the great clusters of somewhat over-ripe grapes; but their number was, no doubt, smaller than had peace reigned in the land. There were cattle in the pastures and horses at the plough and between the shafts of the carts. I do not think any one not aware of the fact could have gathered from outward appearance that anything of exceptional importance had recently occurred in the beautiful and smiling valley. In Château Thierry were a handful of Bavarian bullock drivers and a few footsore infantrymen. The people of this beautiful town had never forsook it in numbers so great as had the inhabitants of some other places; nor had they any reason to repent of their courage. Now it seemed as if they had fallen again into the somnolent routine of a provincial town. The burghers gossiped on the pavement, the young ladies promenaded in the avenues of noble trees, the lads squatted on the brink of the Marne, angling with a lazy pertinacity. The Hôtel de l’Eléphant was empty, changed indeed from that Elephant which I had seen a few days before, when Von Tümpling’s staff were buzzing the bottles in the _salle à manger_, and the cook was in a white heat at the multiplicity of orders. The landlord, a gentleman himself of the elephantine pattern, confided to me, with a sage wag of the head, that he would be heartily glad to see _Messieurs les Prussiens_ come back to stop as long as they could make it convenient, for they were the best customers he had ever had, never grumbled, and invariably rejected red wine for champagne, for which they paid promptly the price demanded.

At Dormans were a considerable number of Germans, but no regular force—only sick and convalescents, and stragglers, chiefly belonging to the 63rd Regiment. Neither here did I find any misery. The disconsolateness of Madame at the hotel only proceeded from the circumstance that she had a son in MacMahon’s Chasseurs de France, of whose fate at Sedan she knew nothing. The shops were all open, and the show in the windows was by no means despicable. Next morning, in and about Ville en Tardenoise, I met and passed the whole of the 11th Army Corps on its march to the front. The men looked fresh and well, and the horses in capital condition; but the ranks were considerably thinner than before that terrible struggle on to the plateau above Floing. Rheims was occupied by a division of Bavarians and another of Würtemburgers. Although this town had been in a state of remarkable ferment on the occasion of the first entry of the Germans, it had got used to the situation in a very short time, and now it looked as if the German occupation was a thing from time immemorial. It was Sunday, and citizens and Bavarians were streaming out of the noble old cathedral and the various churches of the city in all the apparent friendliness of fellow-worshippers. Among the poorer classes in Rheims there had been considerable hardship, owing to the dearness of provisions and the obligation incumbent on them of providing food for the soldiers billeted on them. The German authorities had, however, averted further distress from this source, by establishing a commissariat for troops billeted on all those unable to support them.

Although the route between Rethel and Sedan had been traversed by a large portion of the German host on its south-western march after Sedan, the district, at least as far as Boulzicourt, seemed to have either suffered very little, or to have recuperated with surprising alacrity. As in the valley of the Marne, field operations were going on briskly. Agricultural horses seemed plentiful, and I saw several great herds of cattle in the flat water meadows. I felt a deep interest in the portion of road between Flize and Sedan. I had traversed it several times before—once on the day of the battle of Sedan, when a few scared old women, sitting crouching by their black hearths amidst the crashing of the cannonading, and an occasional scanty group of timid-eyed men peeping out from behind the stone dykes, were the only evidences of resident population in villages that bore the red-fresh impress of the fangs of the war-dog.

The people were gradually coming back to Flize, Dom de Mesnil, and Fernois, the three villages between Boulzicourt and Sedan. In Flize it seemed that there must be plenty of wine, as well as plenty to drink it, for the auberge was crammed with the blue blouses. The females of the families had fallen into the old familiar way of sitting knitting in the sunshine outside their doors. But many houses were still closed up, and here and there the blackened skeleton of a roofless house, a grim memorial of the hot shell-fire. Over against Donchery the peasants were fishing the dead horses out of the Meuse, and burying them in great holes. It is impossible to describe the emotions which almost every step of this road called up in my mind—associated as it was with events fixed so indelibly in my memory. Here was the little house at which I had seen Napoleon alight from his carriage on the morning of the 2nd September. A child was playing on the spot where the Emperor and Bismarck sat in that earnest colloquy of theirs which I watched so intently. A woman was spreading clothes on the path in the potato plot, up and down which I had seen the ruined man moodily pacing as he tugged his dishevelled moustache, after Bismarck had drawn the white cap with the yellow band down over his eyes, and posted off to take counsel with his master. To the left was the ruined railway bridge over the Meuse. In my immediate front was the Château Bellevue, before which I had seen the perturbed meeting of the monarchs—Napoleon bowing low to hide the workings of his face; Wilhelm studying not to hide his emotion. Away across the low alluvial plain and the sweep of the river, that ghastly schlacht-feld sloped upward from the low bluffs,—now brown and bare, but, when I saw it once before, a fearful space in which surged to and fro, in the gaps of the white smoke, the heaving masses of maddened combatants—when I saw it yet again a ghastly expanse of death, here chequered with dead grey horses and gay-clad dead riders, there flecked with the more sombre uniforms of the German soldiers lying thick where the mitrailleuse hail had beaten them to the earth. Below it was the island, with the château in its centre, on to which I had seen the ceaseless stream of French prisoners pouring on the 3rd—the once-gay gardens of the château now bare, and the trees stripped of their foliage. And farther to my right lay Sedan itself, with the German landwehr sentry on its ramparts; and farther to the right, Bazeilles of ghastly memory.

The scene had changed since last I looked upon it. As I drove down the gentle slope into Sedan I met the townspeople, male and female, the Cook’s tourists, and the relic-hunting riff-raff of Belgium, sauntering in dilettante fashion along the road, which three weeks ago had a ghastly fringe of corpses. The relic-hunters were picking up the knapsacks out of the ditch, and stealing the sword bayonets that had been set up in lieu of tombstones. In the open space between the enceinte and the minor fortifications stood the captured French artillery—five long straight rows of cannons, seventy-five in each row, besides numerous mitrailleuses and tumbrils. A single sentry did duty over the vast park. In the moats, German soldiers were punting, and from the bridges they were bobbing for weapons of war hidden by the water, occasionally bringing to the surface the bloated corpses of those who had erstwhile wielded these same weapons. All the shops in the town were open, and business seemed tolerably brisk. That the spirit of enterprise was not wholly dead was evinced by huge posters announcing “an immense consignment of cigars,” and every _Débit de tabac_ was doing a roaring trade. The convalescent wounded, with pallid faces and thin limbs, were placidly sunning themselves on the steps of the public buildings or tottering feebly about the streets. One young sous-officer interested me greatly. The reader may have seen the matrix of a branch covered by a round plaster of clay to prevent the canker from getting into the heart of the tree. This quiet, pale-faced lad had lost his left arm at the shoulder. It seemed to me that the shoulder itself had been taken out close to the collar-bone, and the bandages stood out just like the clay bole to which I have referred. He must have made a very quick recovery to be able to walk about not three weeks after a capital operation of this nature.

The siege of Metz, to watch which was my new duty, had virtually begun on that woeful day for the French arms when the ravine of Gravelotte was stormed, and Bazaine, baulked in his last desperate effort to keep hold of any of the main roads leading Parisward from Metz, was hurled back under the guns of Fort St. Quentin. On the day after Gravelotte, the soldiers of Prince Frederick Charles and Steinmetz had begun, in the prompt and thorough German manner, to girdle the environs of Metz with a series of defensive earthworks, linked together by a continuous cincture of entrenchment, so well contrived and so formidable as to reduce to a minimum the apparent discrepancy in strength between a vast army free to make its concentrations on any selected point, and a host more numerous, indeed, but necessarily attenuated as regarded any one point by reason of the immensity of the circle around the radius-border of which it had to show an unbroken front. That there was a time, during which Bazaine could have hewed his way through this girdle, if he had commenced his effort with discretion, and prosecuted it with daring energy and regardlessness of loss, it does not appear that in the nature of things there can be any reasonable doubt. What effect his emancipation would have produced, had it been effected soon after Gravelotte, is a question involving considerations so various that, in such a work as this, I may be excused referring to them in detail. But it is obvious that had Bazaine been a leader of originality, self-reliance, promptness, and boldness, instead of, as I estimate him, an honest, rather sluggish man, thankful to get his initiative from some one else, instead of ready to take his own initiative—a military formalist mainly, distracted between his political and his military obligations, and utterly unversed in the rare art of regalvanising beaten troops,—had Bazaine been another sort of man, he might surely have seriously complicated von Moltke’s strategy.[3] Suppose that he had cut his way out in the obviously most eligible direction, somewhere between Plappeville and Maizières les Metz, and marched at the pace of the first Napoleon on the track of the Maas army. The Germans can march, but they cannot fly; the hot energy of the Red Prince could not have accomplished the impossibility of drawing in from the fringe of the wide circle an army strong enough to give Bazaine battle before he had won the start by several marches. It was the Maas army which met MacMahon in the teeth at Buzancy and Nouart as he came lumbering through the Argonne into the Maas valley; the third army had swung round, not in time to head him, but to take him on the right flank, extended in dishevelled march all along the valley. But if Bazaine had been close on the track of the Crown Prince of Saxony, the latter would have been in a vice. He could not have fought facing both ways. Had he elected to arrest MacMahon, Bazaine would have been upon him from behind; had he faced about and met Bazaine, the cannon of MacMahon would have been roaring on his new rear. His position, in fact, would have been untenable; and it seems plain that the only course open to him would have been to slip out of the _crux_ to the southward, and thus to have allowed the coalescence of the army of Châlons and the army from Metz. The outcome of a junction so formidable it would be folly to attempt to define. The French situation would still have been precarious—perhaps nearly as bad as it was the day before Sedan. For on three sides three German armies would still have hemmed it in, and there was nothing behind it but the frontier. On the other hand, there would surely have been much possible to an army of 300,000 men, supposing the troops in good fighting heart, and the generals worth the skin of an orange.

But Bazaine lay supine behind his forts till he got his initiative in the shape of the plan to co-operate with MacMahon. It seems clear that the planners of that general’s disastrous expedition contemplated that his march would be bloodless till he should have reached the north-western flank of the army environing Metz. Letters from Metz, intercepted by the besiegers, bore testimony to the fact that MacMahon was expected to make his appearance in that vicinity about the 30th of August. The signal for the Metz army was to have been three bombs fired in the air by MacMahon, and then a sortie was to be made at the same moment that the army of Châlons was to fall on the German rear. It is actually the case that Bazaine was cautioned against allowing the guns of the fortress to have too much elevation when fired in support of the sortie, to obviate the risk of the projectiles falling in the co-operating army on the further side of the Germans. But MacMahon had other fish to fry, and the three rockets never flashed into Metz the signal for co-operative action; so on the 31st, in blind bewilderment, Bazaine made his first great sortie, and made it in the direction in which success would have been most difficult to compass—in the direction of the north-east, the church spire of St. Barbe being seemingly his landmark. Apart from the actual difficulties to be encountered on unfavourable ground and against exceptionally strong opposing works, the selection of this direction for such a sortie seems simply inexplicable, unless Bazaine contemplated, not a junction with MacMahon, but a bold push into the Rhine provinces—a conception no admirer has ever dreamt of attributing to him. MacMahon was expected from the north-west. Bazaine, had he cut through on the north-east, would have had to march to the junction round a third of the circumference of the compass, giving time for a German concentration in the path of his circuitous march. But he failed to break out: it may have been for want of persistency, a faculty in which he seems to have been weak; it may have been that he recognised what the Germans contend was recognisable, that the longer he tried the worse he would fail; and after this effort, while his chances of extrication diminished daily, his prospects, were he once outside, grew more and more precarious. He seems in a great measure to have accepted his fate, and solaced himself with the reflection that, at all events, he was keeping from other work the great armies which constituted his besiegers. That not a man of those might be judged superfluous, he made sorties from time to time during the month of September, not of a character suggesting an attempt to break out, but in force enough to convince the makers of his toils that the ropes by which the captive elephant was bound were not a whit too strong. No doubt, too, although I believe Bazaine to have been a perfectly honest and loyal Frenchman, he was hampered in his generalship by political considerations—of all trammels the most ruinous to daring action. The last of these partial sorties, most of which seem to have had supplies for their object, took place on the 28th of September, the day before I reached the front, and from the Germans engaged in it I gleaned some particulars respecting it.

The German foreposts occupied, in no great strength, the village of Colombey, where there are three large châteaux, in the upper stories of which there had been left by the inhabitants a considerable store of grain. They had taken refuge in Metz, and probably acquainted the French of the existence of these stores. Anyhow, in the afternoon of the 28th the French, in large numbers, and covered by the artillery of Fort St. Julien, made a dash at Colombey, their advance followed by a number of empty waggons. For once they surprised the comparatively weak German foreposts, and drove them out of Colombey. Covering their operations by throwing forward tirailleurs into the woods to the front and towards La Planchette, they filled the waggons with the grain and started them on the return journey. But, meanwhile, the Prussian artillery had come to the front, and the shells fell thick among the Frenchmen in Colombey and the convoy on the road. The former scuttled back in great haste under the guns of St. Julien; the waggons went on at a gallop, but out of thirty-six only fourteen succeeded in getting safe off. The rest were arrested _in transitu_ by the influence which the Prussian shells exercised on the animals which drew the waggons—an influence which manifested itself in limbs blown in a variety of directions. There was no great loss in killed or wounded on either side. A captain of the 44th Regiment was killed under circumstances which were a disgrace to civilized warfare. When his detachment was in retreat he fell wounded severely, but not mortally. His men placed him in shelter, and then left him as they fell back. When they recovered the village, they found the corpse of their captain mangled barbarously—his fingers cut off for the sake of the rings he wore, and his throat cut from ear to ear. I found the Germans justly incensed at this atrocity.

The cargo which the train carried that left Saarbrück on the morning of the 29th of September, was of a sufficiently diversified character. There were country-women, with great tubs of butter, which they were taking up to the front to find a good market; officers and soldiers, new men and convalescents, both from sickness and wounds, on their way to join and re-join their regiments; Saarbrück merchants going up for orders; a few Englishmen, who nourished the idea that the fighting was chronically in progress just outside the station at Courcelles, and that, by walking a pace or two, they would be able to command a bird’s-eye view of the whole affair; marketenders, who had been making investments; and a few Frenchmen on their way to the intermediate towns, who were doing their best to seem as German as possible. Our way to Forbach lay through a corner of the ground on which was fought the battle of Spicheren, and, as the train passed through the woods near Schönecken, I saw not a few graves of the men who had fallen in the fierce fight of the 6th of August. Near St. Avold we passed the débris of the train which had been shattered in a collision that brought death to several French prisoners, and at this town also we found a large depôt of military stores and provender. There was a still larger depôt at Falquemont, where also were collected a quantity of artillery waggons captured from the French at Gravelotte. The station at Courcelles was a sight. It was a centre from which radiated in every direction long lines of waggons of every description, carrying stores of all kinds to the different army posts, north, south, east, and west. All around the deserted little village itself are great herds of cattle, piles of stores, whole pyramids of medical comforts, and long lines of sick and relay horses. The bustle was immense, and yet everything seemed orderly. There was of course an Etappen Commando in the station, but the worthy lieutenant who represented the said Etappen Commando knew nothing whatever about anything. All he could or would tell me was that Prince Frederick Charles’ headquarters were at Corny, on the Moselle, to the south of Metz, but he did not know the distance. He had no waggons, no horses, very little temper, and less time to gossip. The circumstances were sufficiently unpromising. One might as well look for quartern loaves in the kennel of Fleet-street as for quarters in or around Courcelles; and the field-post, the only and that a precarious means of getting to Corny, did not leave till three in the morning. I took the resolution of pursuing the policy out of which I often found luck eventuate, of going straight to the front till the foreposts would let me go no further. Striking northward then, and inclining westward from Courcelles, I passed in succession through the villages of Laquenexy, Marsilly, Ogy, and St. Agnan. All these I found occupied by troops, constituting the second investing line environing the fortress and town of Metz.

All the district was dotted over with the graves of the battle fought by Steinmetz on the 14th of August, and of men who had fallen in the various forepost fights. From Courcelles the scene was one of utter barrenness and desolation, wastes traversed everywhere by tracks of waggons, chequered by abandoned bivouacs, the leafy bowers of which, plastered with mud, stood forlorn and unused, all the troops having been got under cover except the foreposts who necessarily had to remain in the open. Very few of the inhabitants still remained in the district, and of these the plight was very miserable. Agricultural occupations were at a standstill; the vineyards, traversed by waggon roads and cut in two by entrenchments, were utterly ruined. The houses were wrecks, many of them wholly or partially burned by fires kindled by the shells. In Courcelles, the only living thing not German was a mongrel dog which stuck to his kennel when his owner ran away. The Germans had christened him “Courcelles,” and the time-serving rogue was already more than half German—traitor that he was. In the forepost village of Montoy, which I visited the same evening, I found a considerable number of inhabitants. One old woman sat placidly before the door knitting stockings, while the troops lined the entrenchment just in her front. I suppose she had got so used to shells and bullets that she did not mind them, or it might be that her despair had culminated in a sort of apathy of equanimity. The poor country folks and villagers around Metz were in cases so miserable that it seemed they must inevitably starve the moment that the Germans should withdraw. Though they had horses, and though the bullets had not been sweeping their farms, yet last autumn they durst not put a spade or a plough into the ground. Every field holds the “sacred and precious seed” that will germinate never till the last trumpet sounds. It is right comforting to know that good friends—Friends in more than the mere name—came to the aid of these poor wretches, with a promptness, tenderness, and efficiency characteristic of a sect that ever prefer acting to speaking. But this is anticipating. From St. Agnan I proceeded two kilometres, still in a north-westerly direction, till I reached the village of Flanville, where lay the 4th Regiment of East Prussian Infantry, forming part of the 2nd division of the 1st Army Corps. The regimental staff was comfortably located in a pleasant château, and liking the looks of the place and the friendly ways of the officers, I asked permission to attach myself for the time to the regiment, a civility which was frankly and unhesitatingly granted. I was informally taken on the strength, the good old Oberst made me free of his modest table, the officers of No. 6 company, right hearty fellows all, assigned me six feet by four of straw in the corner of the drawing-room, in which there was not a scrap of furniture but a grand piano, on which a sequence of voluntaries, sometimes accompanied by singing, sometimes by dancing, seemed constantly going on, and everybody was anxious to show attention to the Englander who had strayed on to the foreposts. In the afternoon Lieutenant Werth, the officer in command of the 6th company (vice the Hauptmann shot on the 31st of August), accompanied me on a ride round a considerable radius of the eastern forepost circuit, and the lucidity of his explanations enabled me to arrive at what I afterwards found was a correct idea of the position, as it was in the end of September.

Next the Moselle, and eastward therefrom, the 8th Army Corps kept watch and ward, its left on Ars-sur-Moselle, its right interlacing, at the village of Magny, with the 7th Army Corps. From Magny the 7th held the line of environment lying in the village of Peltre, the château and house of Mercy-la-Haut, shattered and burnt, and on as far as Ars Laquenexy. It had foreposts and _Feldwachen_ a little further forward, but not so far as they had been a few days previously, when the foreposts were at La Grange aux Bois. The left of the 1st Army Corps lay in Colombey, which was also considerably burnt, feeling the right of the 7th in Mercy-la-Haut. Its second line extended to the northward in the villages of Ogy, Flanville, Retonfay, Château Gras, and Ste. Barbe. The first line lay in Coincy, Montoy, Noisseville, Servigny, and Failly. The whole of this latter line was within range of the big guns of the great Metz outwork of St. Julien, which occupies the summit of a mamelon. Between the first and second line there was an interval of only about a mile. To the front there lay, first, the foreposts, then the _Feldwachen_, and lastly the single sentries, within 1,500 yards of St. Julien. The first line occupied a section of the continuous entrenchment which ran right round Metz. All the villages were roughly fortified by barricades, _chevaux-de-frise_, &c.; holes had been broken through all the houses for firing, and, indeed, every village formed a very respectable, if rough and ready fortress. The foreposts lay either in single houses, also well fortified by entrenchments and barricades, or in the field behind earthworks of no inconsiderable magnitude. The _Feldwachen_ chiefly occupied woods or the gardens of châteaux. A _Feldwache_ which may be taken as typical, I noticed in the village of Lauvallière on the route to Saarlouis, two kilometres nearer Metz than Montoy. Here lay two companies, arms piled close at hand, and ready for a sortie from the enemy at a moment’s warning. To the left, in the hamlet of la Plancette, was another _Feldwache_ in a deep ravine. Here I had to dismount and walk up the slope beyond to the knoll on which the solitary sentry kept his watch within point-blank range of a chassepot bullet from the French works at the hamlet of Belle Croix. We could see with the naked eye the Frenchmen moving about the forts of les Bottes and St. Julien, and circulating about the environs both of them and of the town, while the great eminence of Mont St. Quentin, with its mass of fortifications on the summit, shut in the scene, dominating the whole valley from the further side of the Moselle. All the front was pitted over with the craters of shells. The men of one of the regiments were erecting quite a permanent barrack of wood, the sides covered with earth, behind an isolated brewery a little way in the rear of Lauvallière. Further north, Noisseville was densely filled with German troops; Nouilly, which lies between it and St. Julien, was neutral ground, occupied by neither army, while the French were in force in Mey and Vantoux, villages still nearer the fortress. We went forward to the edge of a wood near Mey, accompanied by two Prussian patrols, and got a warning to go back in the shape of a sharp fusilade from out a garden in the environs of Mey. To complete the narrative of the localities, the environment was taken up on the right of the 1st Army Corps by the Landwehr Division, consisting of three brigades, each six battalions strong, under the command of General von Kummer. They covered at that time the ground round nearly to the Moselle on the north, but were afterwards moved to the other side of the stream, changing places with the 10th Army Corps. The General commanding the 1st Army Corps, his Excellency von Manteuffel, lay in Ste. Barbe, a little to our north rear. Our immediate commander was General von Pritselwitz, the chief of the Second Division of the First Army Corps, who had his quarters two kilometres behind us, in the little village of Puche, where likewise was the Feldpost.

Even so early as the time of which I am writing, deserters and the German prisoners whom Bazaine had sent back, concurred in representing the condition of the troops inside and around Metz as being very bad in the matter of food. They were represented as living chiefly on horseflesh, and as having neither flour, rice, nor salt—the latter want being the subject of much complaint. The discipline of the troops was said to be good, and the morale of a character very different to that of the disorganised horde who threw down their arms at Sedan. But the German returned prisoners united in abusing the domineering greed of the French officers, who cared nothing comparatively for their men, provided their own wants were satisfied. This selfishness seems forcibly to have struck the honest Germans, used as they are to treatment so different.

It could not fail to strike even the most cursory observer that the alertness and completeness of the German forepost system was a great feature of the army, and one of the leading causes of its success. At night the _Feldwache_ always went forward to the post occupied during the day by the farthest outlying sentry. Here it broke right and left into small picquets, leaving a strong nucleus in the centre. The front, at a distance of 200 or 300 yards, was continually traversed by cavalry patrols, who often rode right in among the sleeping Frenchmen, whose system of night vigilance was not brilliant. Then there would be a pistol shot and a round of wild chassepot firing in the dark, and the daring Uhlan would dash out through the red legs, back to his supports. Writing of chassepots, it may be noted that the German forepost troops were by this time extensively armed with these weapons to enable them to cope on equal terms with the French tirailleurs. Of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Regiment seventy-five men were so armed, or rather seventy-five chassepots were in use and were transferred from _Feldwache_ to _Feldwache_, as the changes of guard were made. This seemed to settle the question as to the relative merits of the Chassepot and the Zundnadelgewehr in the eyes of the Germans.

On the evening of September 29th it was officially made known to the troops that the French were constructing three bridges across the Moselle to the westward of Fort St. Julien, it was believed with a view to a sortie in the direction of Maison Rouge and Woippy. About four o’clock next morning the sky became brilliantly illuminated with the shells under the fire of which they attempted to carry out their design, and with the return fire with which the German artillery met it. In the thick darkness the effect as seen from our position (about four miles away) was magnificent. Between the louder crashes of the cannon was heard the sharper rattle of the musketry fire, singly and in volleys. The firing became fainter towards six o’clock, and by seven had died away altogether—the presumption being that the French attempt had been baulked, and this we afterwards learned was the case. A few days previously the garrison of Thionville had surprised and captured a German provision train, which was carried into that fortress. The food being more needed in Metz than in Thionville, it was anticipated that an effort would be made to fight the train through the German environment into the beleaguered fortress. In all probability the affair of this morning was a diversion intended to facilitate this movement. The Germans, however, were fully alive to the contingency, and they succeeded in foiling the attempt.

I found that the Germans were in possession of detailed drawings and full particulars of the French troops lying around Metz, the correctness of which I was afterwards able to verify. Bazaine’s forces—that is to say, the army driven back on Metz after the battle of Gravelotte—were not permitted to enter the town of Metz. The whole army was encamped on the slopes of the outlying fortifications either of the town or of the outlying strongholds, in the intervening country, and in the various villages which still remained in the possession of the French. The forts were garrisoned by Mobiles and National Guards. Bazaine’s head-quarters were at Ban St. Martin, outside the town, and around him lay the camp of the Imperial Guards. Opposite us on the east side lay the 3rd Army Corps of the French army—Lebœuf’s corps. Its forepost nearest us was in the wood in front of Mey, and the chain extended southward to the front of the hamlet Belle Croix. The mass of the corps lay to the rear. Within the previous few days a considerable camp had been established on the slope of St. Julien, looking toward us. We could see the white tents, and the red-legged gentlemen strolling about them. Their patrols, mounted and on foot, were wont to cross our front so near that the countenances of the men could be made out with the glass. The German _Feldwachen_ could have picked them off quite easily if they had chosen; but there was an order against firing at small detached parties. The French did not show the same civility. A single man could not show himself on the advance line without being blazed at by a regular volley, which seldom, however, took any effect, the firing being so wild. The guard changing was wont to be a great time for a waste of French powder and shot all along the line, and the field guns at Little Belle Croix made a point of spitefully throwing a few shells on the brewery on the great chaussée constituting the chief forepost on our right front.

When the French made a sortie, Lieutenant Werth informed me, their scheme of advance was very characteristic. They scuttled out from the shelter of the fortresses in the loosest skirmishing order and with great rapidity till they had reached intermediate spaces sheltered from the German fire, whether by woods or by the configuration of the ground. In those they accumulated their masses, and came forward in dense columns. But they had never, save on the great sortie of the 31st of August, and at Colombey on the 28th September, succeeded in getting to close quarters with the first line of the Germans. The artillery of the latter came into play with its deadly practice, and then there was no alternative but a rapid retreat. Their demonstrations were always accompanied by a cannonade from Belle Croix and St. Julien, but seldom by the discharge of field artillery. This latter circumstance had led the Germans to the conclusion that the French were short of ammunition for their field guns, and this seemed probable, looking to the lavish use they made of them at Gravelotte. There must have been artillery of great calibre in the forts, for Lieutenant Werth pointed out to me, by Lauvallière, lying in the ditch, a huge shell, which could not have been less than a 72-pounder. It was unexploded, a fact noticeable of a large proportion of the French shells.

The losses that had been suffered by some of the regiments of the 1st Army Corps since it had come within hail of Metz were stupendous. On the 14th August, and in the minor fights of the 30th and 31st of the same month, and those during the course of September, the 4th Regiment lost (killed and wounded) 35 officers out of a total of 60, and 1,000 men out of 3,000. The 45th Regiment, lying in its vicinity, had lost yet more of its officers. Out of 60 no fewer than 42 had fallen. The result had been that a large number of Vicefeldwebels and several sergeants had received commissions. As these were comparatively inexperienced in their new duties, they were daily receiving assiduous instructions from their seniors. These informal lectures were highly interesting—not a few officers of the British service would have greatly benefited by attending them. The troops also were drilled daily, notwithstanding their position in front of the enemy. On the morning of the 30th I watched a whole battalion at skirmishing drill, and a right pretty sight it was. The recruits that had come forward since the beginning of the war spent hours daily in perfecting their drill, and the efficiency of the whole army was sedulously maintained at the highest pitch.

I was present the same morning at the very interesting ceremony of the distribution to the 4th Regiment of the iron crosses awarded to members of it for valour in the field. The ceremony took place at Puche, the head-quarters of the general of division, who personally distributed the crosses in the presence of the officers of the regiment. The band played the old regimental air, the “Hohenfriedberg,” and the colours were on the ground. The gallant 4th had earned no fewer than twenty crosses already, and the award seemed to have been made with the most rigid impartiality, the men taking their full share of the coveted distinction with their officers. The 4th is one of the old regiments of the Prussian service, and its annals record a long and gallant career. Its regimental march, the name of which I have just mentioned, is secured to it by a special royal order in remembrance of the valour which it displayed at the battle of Hohenfriedberg, fought in 1745.

To understand the means of defence which the French army enclosed in Metz had to keep wherewithal the Germans at bay, a detailed description of the remarkable fortifications with which the virginity of La Pucelle was guarded may not be out of place. Although Metz is no longer French, these works still exist in their entirety, to say nothing of their having been strengthened, and therefore respecting them the present tense may be used.

The town of Metz, with the great Cathedral, lies for the most part on the east side of a branch of the Moselle, which forks off from the main stream near La Grange aux Dames, and forms the islands of Chambière, and lower down of Sauley and St. Simphorien. A large suburb, however, stands on the first of these islands. The inner fortifications surround the town continuously, with the exception of one gap to the southward, which is covered efficiently by the branch of the Moselle which divides the islands of Sauley and St. Simphorien. On the north of the Ile de Chambière are two important forts on the inner line, one at the north-western angle of the enceinte, the other detached in the plain of the island, but connected with the enceinte by a covered way. On the south of the inner line are the Redoubt du Pate to the east, and the Lunette d’Arcon to the west, both connected with the enceinte by a covered way. The western side of the inner line is covered by the great Fort Moselle on the farther side of the main stream of the Moselle, a double crown work of immense strength and magnitude, inclosing great magazines and arsenals. To the south of it the bastion of Ile de Sauley sends out a long spur of fortifications, which crosses the Moselle, and terminates in a redoubt on the farther side. Nor is the eastern side of the inner line less strongly protected. In front of the enceinte looms the great double crown work of Belle Croix, to the full as large as Fort Moselle, and more highly favoured by its natural position. To the south of it stands Fort Gisors, a minor detached fortification which serves to complete the circuit of connection with the Redoubt du Pate on the south. Thus the town of Metz is, in fact, environed by two lines of fortifications, the continuous enceinte with its bastions and what I may term the outer cordon of the inner circle having intimate connection with the enceinte.

Of themselves these defences would make the place all but impregnable, but they are by no means the most important defences of this extraordinary fortress. There is an outer circle of detached fortifications, each of which is the complement of the other, and of which no one can be assailed without the assailant laying his account to be enfiladed by at least two of the others. Let me begin with these at the Moselle, on the north of the town at La Grange aux Dames, and work round, proceeding first in an easterly direction. After climbing the bank of the stream we come to the chaussée leading to Bouzonville, and crossing it we almost immediately come on the great glacis of Fort St. Julien. This is an outlying fort of the first magnitude, covering the whole of the round summit of a natural eminence, and having on three sides a natural glacis, therefore of great extent. It lies about two English miles from Metz, in a north-easterly direction; and a little to the north-east of it is the Monastery and wood of Grimont, the former of which Bazaine’s engineers had scientifically diverted from ecclesiastical to military purposes. About a mile and a half due south of St. Julien, and about a mile due east from Fort Belle Croix, is Fort les Bottes, a great bog-backed structure chiefly of earth, which was thrown up as a precautionary measure, either immediately before or immediately after the outbreak of the war. The Germans, I believe, are engaged in altering it from a “provisional” to a temporary fort. Its position is very important as a link between St. Julien and Fort Queleu on the south. It stands a little to the south of the great chaussée from Metz to Saarlouis and Saarbrück, while as yet the bisection has not taken place. Forward about a mile from les Bottes, and on the chaussée just before it bisects, is a hamlet named Belle-Croix, which must not, however, be confounded with the fort of the same name. Here, also, the French had strong earthworks mounted with guns, but these, for the most part at least, were field artillery, and paucity of ammunition kept them tolerably quiet. About a mile and a half south of Fort les Bottes, and about the same distance from Metz, is Fort Queleu, also an important structure, dominating the main road to Strasburg and the adjoining flat country as far as the telegraph on the elevated ground before Mercy-le-Haut. Turning now westward, and inclining to the south, we come to Fort St. Privat, at a distance of about two and a half miles both from Fort Queleu and Metz. Its value consists in the command it has of the eastern side of the valley of the Moselle, of the road from Nancy, and of the railway lines which converge behind it. Leaving it, we come to the Moselle again, this time on the south-west side of the town, and striking up nearly due north, we have nothing in the shape of permanent fortifications, although during the siege there were several temporary batteries, till we climb the great hump, on the top of which stands Fort St. Quentin, the greatest outwork of Metz. St. Quentin is a complete fortress in itself; it could hold out were all its neighbours taken, and it may safely be termed impregnable, looking at the combined strength of its natural position and its skilfully devised fortifications. Not only does it dominate the country to the south, south-west, west, and north-west, but it frowns outward to the east, and its great guns would play an important part in the defence against an attack on the inner fortifications of Metz. North-west of it, about a mile on the top of the bluffs, lies Fort Plappeville, or les Carrières, the natural position of which is not so strong as that of St. Quentin, because the elevation on which it stands is not isolated, while it is open in the rear, and therefore requires St. Quentin as the complement of its defence, a defect the Germans are remedying. It acts as a defence over a great tract of country to the west, and keeps a besieging force at a respectful distance, so that it cannot reach the edge of the bluffs and pitch projectiles down into Metz. Due north from Metz, about two miles, and standing in the middle of the plain, bounded by the Thionville Railway on the west, and the Moselle on the east, lies the improvised work of St. Eloy, the last and not the least important of the outworks of Metz. Its province is in combination with St. Julien to take care of the valley of the Moselle to the northward, and to dominate the great road to Thionville. All these fortifications (except the little Belle-Croix) were furnished with heavy guns of position, and the French had no lack of ammunition for the use of those great fortress guns, although field artillery ammunition might have been short. Besides their field artillery, the Germans had two or three batteries of siege 12-pounders on the western side of the Moselle, and I am not aware that during the siege they had either any more numerous or more formidable siege artillery on the ground. Their quiescently defensive, or rather obstructive, position, then, was dictated by sound military conditions, since a blockade answered exactly the purpose they had in view, viz., to reduce the place by famine.

None of the villages around Metz are very large, and Flanville is one of the smallest of them—consisting of a few hovels huddled by the side of a country road, under the lee of two large châteaux. Small as it was, it had to accommodate the whole of a battalion of the 4th. The men were packed closely in the houses, occupying lofts, passages, sheds, and every other available shred of cover. The officers occupied the two châteaux, both of which had been beautiful residences before war had laid them waste. The colonels château still had its garden undestroyed—in this autumn time a paradise of sweet-scented flowers, with here a fountain, and there a leafy bower. Our château had sustained harder fortune. A company of men, as well as a number of officers occupied its spacious chambers; on the lawn outside were stacked the needle-guns, ready for immediate use, and the flower-beds had been trodden down almost beyond the power of recognition. A Corporalschaft occupied the conservatory, and the flower-garden was a drill ground. The château had been pelted by the French in the battle of the 1st of September—it was still inside the range of their guns—and the roof had been shattered by shells. We occupied the drawing-room, in which were two great mirrors reaching to the roof. The one over the mantel-piece had been penetrated by a bullet exactly in the centre, and fantastically starred in all directions. Here is a sketch written on the spot, of the manner of our daily life, when the gentlemen over the way did not happen to be bellicose.

“In the grey morning, unless we have been previously roused by firing on the front, the soldier servants come into our drawing-room bedroom, bringing the morning coffee. Long before, the soldiers on the other side of the partition have been stirring, and they are the merriest, the most noisy set of Kerle imaginable. After coffee, drill begins. The young soldiers are at the goose-step in the flower-garden; the older hands practising skirmishing by companies in the neighbouring vineyards. At nine comes appel—a kind of parade without arms, at which the clothes and accoutrements of the men are carefully inspected. The appel only takes place occasionally, but the under officers have a minor appel every day, at each of which in turn there is an inspection of a separate article. Now it is arms, now boots, now cloaks—the under officer is responsible for the condition of his Schaft or squad, and he takes care he shall not incur a reprimand through any want of vigilance. After appel the officers breakfast. The feeding is homely, and eaten in a homely fashion—clean plates, or plates of any kind, not being plentiful, and the glass-ware decidedly deficient. But there never wants a hearty appetite; and for a guest like myself, a hearty welcome and a frank kindliness that I never can forget. Breakfast over, comes an interval of visiting, gossiping, and beer drinking, for we have our own marketender on the lawn, and Saarbrück is only forty miles away. Some write, some read, others sleep; it is astonishing how much sleep it takes to tire some people. The men employ themselves in tailoring, in seeing to the rations, in conducting the cooking of the dinner, and in smoking in the bright sunshine. Dinner is rather a discursive meal; you imagine you have finished it when you have eaten of the rice, the soup, and the mincemeat in your own particular room, but going the round you find another mess devoting their attention to plums and schinken, and you join in of course. Then you go a little farther, and find the inmates of another room topping off with chocolate or coffee and a _petit verre_. Of course you are asked to partake, and equally of course you do so. After dinner is the siesta. The quarters are then as quiet as in the dead of night. In an hour or two a sprightly officer awakens, and assiduously devotes himself to the stirring up of his more drowsy brother officers. A pack of cards comes to the surface somehow, and presently the round table is surrounded by a circle of card-players, the game proceeding with a considerable amount of noise, owing to a habit most Germans have of all speaking at once, each at the top of his voice. Those who are not at the card-table stroll out to visit the brother officer who is on the _repli_, drop in upon the worthy major and colonel, whom they find placidly smoking in their beautiful garden, or watch Fort St. Julien and the French tents through their glasses. Deep as the interest may be in the game which is being played at the card-table, that and all other local interest fades into nothing at the appearance of the Underofficer who has been over to head-quarters to the Feldpost. It is good to watch the countenances as the letters, hurriedly opened, are being pored over with eager faces. The eyes of the portly Dantzic premier-lieutenant on the sofa become strangely moist as the crumpled fuchsia and rosebud drop out of his letter, the fragrance still clinging about them as when they had been placed there as a love token from the children he has left at home. What is that which the handsome young lieutenant hurriedly clutches as it falls out of the envelope, and pushes inside his tunic on the side next his heart? I don’t think it is a bill from his tailor. He would not smile so if it were a dunning letter he was reading, and the most gushing man is not addicted to the practice of stealthily kissing a letter from his tailor ere he consigns it to his breast-pocket. Depend upon it the lieutenant is happy in the knowledge that the girl of his heart, far away on the shores of the Baltic, has not forgotten him. The domestic side of the German character comes out very strong in this interval of letter-reading. Nearly all the officers of the 4th are from the same district, and the letter of one officer commonly contains messages to others who at home are friends and neighbours. I was amused to-day by the amazed delight of a grizzled officer who must have seen close on fifty years, when he looked at the superscription of one of his letters. ‘_Gott in Himmel!_ its from the old mother,’ he cried. Then came quite a gush of interest as to the age of the old lady, and when he told us with some pride that she was close on ninety, the ‘Donnerwetters’ were many and hearty. After the letters come the perusal of the newspapers and gossiping as to their contents, and the probable designs of Bismarck—it is always Bismarck who is named. When darkness falls we have music and dancing. One of our volunteers is a brilliant instrumentalist, and he comes down from his lofty abode near the roof, and plays our piano in the drawing-room. Now it is ‘Die Wacht am Rhein,’ the officers chiming in with the words, and the men on the farther side of the partition and out in the environs taking up the strain, till the volume of sound must sweep over the glades and the ruined vineyards to the French field watches outside Belle-Croix and St. Julien. Now it is a waltz which the young volunteer plays, and then the spectacle would greatly delight Mr. Spurgeon, who is an advocate for male dancing with male. A nimble young officer, who, if he were not a gallant fellow with medals on his breast, would have made a capital dancing-master, treats us to a burlesque rendering of the cancan, and the music gets into the head of a rotund officer of middle-age, who executes the most fantastic capers with a suppleness, and at the same time a gravity, that sets everybody in a roar. He infects the rest, and for the time one might imagine he was in the company of a congregation of dancing dervishes. But we must not keep the men awake, and, in truth, nobody cares to be a late sitter himself. By ten o’clock we are all in bed, the whole place wrapped in slumber, save the sentries who surround us with a cordon through which a mouse could not creep. No more could a mouse creep into or out of Metz. The sentries’ orders are precise to allow nobody to pass through after nightfall on any pretext whatever. Last night an officer and myself, who had been out on the foreposts, allowed darkness to overtake us before our return. As we approached the chain of sentries, the stern ‘halt’ came to us through the darkness. ‘Officer,’ was the reply, but it availed nothing—notwithstanding that the sentry belonged to the officer’s own regiment. We had to stand till a party came to conduct us to the guard, and then the officer went back and praised the sentry for the creditable manner in which he had done his duty.”

After dark on the night of the 1st October the 4th Regiment marched forward into the first line, occupying the village of Noisseville, a position sufficiently far advanced to make its occupation very ticklish work. The village was within easy range of the shell fire, either from St. Julien or Fort les Bottes, while the field guns at the little Belle-Croix were, so to speak, just over the way. The village constituted part and parcel of the line of the German entrenchments; every cottage was a stronghold; in every street, alley, and gap was an earthwork. About 300 yards to our right front, in the bottom of a rather abrupt valley was the village of Nouilly, belonging to neither side. Just outside of it, on the French side, and to the north-west, begins the Bois de Mey, on the southern edge of which lies the village of the same name, occupied by the French. The wood swarmed with their tirailleurs; we could see their red breeches through the trees, and they also acquainted us with their presence by firing occasionally at our patrols when they imagined they came too near the wood.

At night I went on the farthest _Feldwache_ on our front, just behind the village of Nouilly, and remained there during the night with the lieutenant in command. As soon as he relieved his predecessors, he threw forward a sergeant’s party into Nouilly, with orders to hold it till daylight. About one o’clock in the morning our cavalry patrols, supported by an infantry detachment, felt their way to the edge of the Bois de Mey, and there encountered a fierce but wild discharge of musketry. They fell back on the sergeant’s party at Nouilly, who held the place till they could discern the advance of large detachments of French troops. The shots had stirred up the three battalions lying in and around Mey, and they had come out on the rampage to annihilate the patrols and whatever else should come in their way. The German sergeant in Nouilly, however, quietly fell back on his supporting _Feldwache_, where the lieutenant stood fast till he could see the Frenchmen swarming into Nouilly, and then fell back on the _repli_, which in turn supported the _Feldwache_. It did one good to see the coolness of the officer, a young lieutenant, not to all appearance over twenty-five, but who wore the ’66 medal. I asked him why, looking at the seeming strength of the approaching force, he did not give a general alarm. The apparatus for this purpose was complete. A fusee thrown into the bonfire on the edge of the _repli_ post would have got 40,000 men under arms in ten minutes, and the artillery galloping to the front in a quarter of an hour. But it was exactly the responsibility of such a general disturbance that prevented him from crying “Wolf”—although, to my judgment, there seemed cause enough. The event proved how wisely Lieutenant von Verzin had learned to calculate contingencies. The French were content temporarily to occupy Nouilly, and after a brief stay fell back on their original position at Mey. But if he refrained from giving the alarm, he did not allow a single precaution to escape him. His company was extended in skirmishing order on both sides of the post, ready to retard the French advance should it have taken place. As it was, a great number of shots were exchanged, but no harm was done on either side.

Around the church of Noisseville there was a _repli_ post, continually occupied by a company. The church itself, by the way, is, or rather I fear I must say was, a very interesting structure. Of great age and considerable architectural pretensions, it had been pounded with shells more severely than any building I have ever seen. The French had pelted it on one side, the Germans on the other. The steeple had been originally square, now it was roughly round; there were great gaps in the walls and holes in the roof, and the birds were singing merrily in the half ruined structure. The _curé_ had remained by his church, and, strange to say, his residence had escaped with very little damage. The colonel of the 4th was his guest, or rather he was the colonel’s guest, for he had nothing to eat but what was purveyed by our worthy _Oberst_. The good _curé_ spoke German fluently, and got a kindly salute from everybody; he took the firing very coolly, and seemed in remarkably good spirits, all things considered. But to return to the _repli_ round the shattered church. The 6th Company found it on the 2nd, and I found my way into Lieutenant Werth’s shanty after coming back from the _Feldwache_ in the grey dawn. Till about one o’clock all was quiet—the men lay about on the straw, smoking or sleeping, and the cavalry videttes, 100 yards to our front, circled leisurely. Suddenly there came a spattering chassepot fire from the riflemen on the little Belle Croix directed against an infantry party which was beating the foreground. The bullets came whistling over the _repli_ post as Lieutenant Werth and myself jumped up to see what was the matter. One hit the ground a little to our front, ricochetted between us, and lodged in the arm of a soldier who was lying down a little in our rear. The order was for all to get under cover immediately, but Werth had some difficulty in getting obeyed, so eager were his fellows to see what was going on. He himself stood coolly exposed as the bullets came whistling by, minding them no more than if they had been so many buzzing flies. Firing with the French is infectious, and it was taken up all along the line as far as Mey, for what reason it was impossible to say. The Germans did not think it worth while to reply, and the videttes phlegmatically continued their circling. In about an hour the French fire died away, having occasioned no casualty, save the wound to the man in our _repli_.

On the night of the 2nd of October a detachment of the 4th did a little job in the way of fire-raising. The neutral village of Nouilly, immediately to the front of Noisseville, has already been mentioned; it contained—or, at least, was believed to contain—considerable stores of provisions, which, however, were so secreted in the cellars and elsewhere, that the Prussians could not discover them. The inhabitants, however, had for the most part taken refuge in Metz, and it was natural that they should inform their military countrymen of the whereabouts of the provisions. It was equally natural that men on short commons should do their best to obtain all the food they could, from whatever source; and it is believed that when the French patrols had temporarily occupied Nouilly the night before, they succeeded in carrying away with them some stores. The place lay so directly under the fire of Forts St. Julien and les Bottes that it was not tenable permanently by the Germans, and, therefore, there was no resource but to burn it.

A little after eight o’clock in the evening I was sitting at supper with Lieutenants von Hosius and Fischer, of the 5th Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th regiment. The quarters these good gentlemen occupied would hardly have been considered eligible by a London working-man looking for lodgings. The house had been burnt out twice, and the bare walls were now roofed in with a few planks loosely covered with straw. Door and window were both gone, but their place was not inefficiently supplied with blankets. There happened to be left a tolerably decent table, and one side of the apartment was littered with straw for a bed. We ate rather promiscuously on the foreposts round Metz. If anyone had anything exceptionally good for supper it was sure to ooze out, and then the fortunate man had an exceptional number of callers who “dropped in promiscuous” just as the dainty dish was upon the table. The dainty dish on this occasion consisted of salt herrings boiled with onions, and washed down with beer warmed with meal, lard, and schnaps. Lieutenant Fischer understood no English, but had a faculty for expressing his meaning pantomimically in a manner which I never saw equalled. As a linguist Mr. von Hosius had a great superiority over his comrade. He knew some English. It is true his knowledge was not of a varied character. So far as ever I learned it was confined to “Good night,” with which he was wont to take delight in saluting me about five in the morning, and a verse of “Lucy Long,” with which he invariably essayed to follow up the conversation. Between the salt herrings, my German, Mr. Fischer’s pantomime, and Mr. von Hosius’s “Lucy Long,” we were getting on as well as could be expected, when a feldwebel entered with an order for Lieutenant von Hosius, which the latter read aloud:—

“Lieutenant von Hosius will parade at nine o’clock with 15 volunteers of his company, and will proceed forward to burn the village of Nouilly.”

Von Hosius was fond of salt herrings, and fond, too, of an opportunity of distinguishing himself. The Iron Cross for Valour was already in his button-hole. There were still herrings on the plate, and the hour was only half-past eight. Fischer, by his direction, went outside to call for volunteers, while he finished the herrings. The men lay about in a couple of dismantled rooms, and in the garden at the back of the house. “Volunteers to burn a village!” roared Fischer, into the midst of the sleeping Kerle. Had he thrown a bomb among them he could not have caused a more instantaneous and universal start. Volunteers! He wanted fifteen, and here was the whole company round him like bees. He picked his fifteen, taking the men who had no wives at home in the Fatherland, and then came back to see if the mulled beer was done. By this time von Hosius had demolished the last of the herrings, and as time was short was setting about getting ready in the most systematic manner. Having pulled on his long boots, he pulled out of his portmanteau the little dagger which every officer wore to ward off the vultures of the battle-field in case of being wounded, and shoved his “Adams” revolver into his belt. Then, with a final glass of the composite beer, he sallied out to the spot where his little band was drawn waiting for him, and gave them a word or two of advice and precaution.

In truth, the undertaking was a most dangerous one. It partook, indeed, not a little of the nature of a forlorn hope. A few hundred yards in the rear of Nouilly we, it is true, had a _Feldwache_, but the French were nearer it on the other side by Mey and the Bois de Grimont, and had strong temptations for entering it by night. It might be that he might encounter a force of French inside the village. In that case, of what service would be his fifteen volunteers? It was almost certain that, if this contingency should not occur, the party would encounter a fierce foe in the execution of their task, and it was probable that on their return they would be shelled both by St. Quentin and les Bottes. I left Hosius giving his order, and went on to the _repli_ ground, through which he had to pass to get across the wine berg, and down into the valley in which Nouilly lies. In a few minutes came the measured tread of the little party, marching at the German quick step, which is faster than that of any army I know. Von Hosius as he passed hailed me laughingly with a parting “Miss Lucy, Lucy Long,” and then disappeared in the darkness. For a while we could hear the crashing of the little band through the vines, and then came the hoarse challenge of the _Feldwache_ rear sentry. Then all became quiet. The group by the watchfire in the _repli_ gave sufficient evidence of the ticklish character of the enterprise. For a few minutes the officer in command of the _repli_ and myself were the only persons who enjoyed its genial warmth. Then through the gloom came stalking the major, and, after a long look towards Nouilly, he squatted silently down by our side. Presently another form appeared, that of the genial colonel himself, who had been moved to forsake the society of the _curé_ to come and see what success von Hosius should meet with. I don’t know exactly how they came, but in half an hour nearly all the officers of the battalion were around the bright wood fire. Everybody tried to appear unconcerned, but it was equally certain everybody was fidgety. The regiment had never yet failed in any duty assigned it, and if it failed now? Nobody liked to broach the subject, but I could see it was uppermost in the mind of all. And von Hosius was a tantalisingly long time in putting us out of our suspense. An hour had gone—Nouilly was but ten minutes forward from Noisseville—and the colonel’s nervousness was undisguised as he hacked at the burning log with his naked sword, and drove his spur into the leg of his chair. The major had taken to walking up and down the inside of the entrenchment, and only the adjutant exhibited a thorough nonchalance, but then he was very sleepy.

The vigilant lieutenant of the _repli_ gave a smothered shout, and we all sprang to our feet. Flame-coloured smoke at last and plenty of it. But surely, suggested the major, it really cannot be so far away as that. Why that lowering smoke is on the other side of the Bois de Grimont, and must be a private bonfire of the French—not the one which von Hosius was to fire. It was too true, the alarm was a false one. The colonel sat down again moodily, and the major began to mutter something that seemed to me very like swearing. As for the adjutant he went to sleep, and I very nearly followed his example. One thing was favourable, the dead silence that reigned in the valley. It was evident that von Hosius had encountered no French in the place, else the rattle of the musketry would have been heard long ere now, and the battalion, which was standing to its arms at the various company posts, would have been lining the entrenchment with the needle-guns poked over the earthwork.

Another half hour of suspense, and then a loud “Ha!” simultaneously from the lieutenant on duty and the sentry. This time it was Nouilly, and no mistake. Von Hosius had taken his time, that he might do his work thoroughly. Not from one isolated house, but in six places at once, belched out the long streaks of flame against the black darkness, and the separate fires made as much haste to connect themselves as ever did commanders who were eager to feel their supports right and left. In ten minutes the whole place was in one grand blaze, the church steeple standing up in the midst of the sea of flame, as if it had round its turret the old motto of the Scottish Kirk, “_Nec tamen consumebatur_.” But, church steeple as it was, it had not the attribute of the burning bush, and a whole pyrotechnic display of sparks bore testimony to its fall. Here and there against the flame could be seen a human figure in frantic flight; and on a bluff just outside the village I saw in the strong light a woman standing wringing her hands. These were the innocent victims of war, the victims not of the Germans, but of him in whose ears the poor serfs would three months ago have shouted “Vive l’Empereur.”

Presently we heard again the crashing through the vine-brake, and our outpost sentry challenge. The watchword was returned in the hearty voice of von Hosius, and in five minutes more the little party was inside the entrenchment of the _repli_. Von Hosius, of rather a portly figure, was panting with the exertion of climbing the vine-hill, but he found breath enough to greet me with “Miss Lucy, Lucy Long.” The affair had been singularly successful. The duty had been executed without the necessity of exchanging a single shot. The village, which burnt till five next morning, had been so effectually fired that all the stores which it might have contained must have been burnt; and so coolly had the enterprise been gone about, that a respectable old horse which was found in one of the stables of the village was led back in triumph, as a trophy. I suppose the French held their fire because they did not know whither to direct it. To have shelled Nouilly would only have been to play into the hands of the Prussians, and the destroying party might have come from Servigny, Noisseville, or Montoy. I lay down among the straw, and went to sleep with the echo of “Miss Lucy, Lucy Long” still haunting my ears.

On the foreposts we came to look upon the fortresses environing the town of Metz, much as the Naples people regard and talk of Mount Vesuvius when that mountain is in an uneasy condition. During all the 3rd of October St. Julien had been quiet. St. Quentin had not emitted a single puff of smoke, and les Bottes might have been a flower-garden tended by pretty girls. The same calm reigned on the morning of the 4th up till eleven o’clock in the forenoon, and the martial population of Noisseville were taking it as easy as discipline would permit. To the left of the Brewery, an isolated house on the chaussée, a little in rear of Lauvallière and parallel with Noisseville on the south, a large body of troops were engaged in constructing large wooden barracks just in rear of the entrenchment line. These were being built for the accommodation of the troops holding the post of the Brewery, which had been reduced to ruins by the many bombardments which it had undergone. The French in les Bottes could see the progress of this work and the number of the men engaged in it; and the idea seemed to strike them that it might not be out of place to attempt to interrupt the building operations. Anyhow, they commenced rather a fierce shell fire on the unfinished barracks, and also on the unfortunate Brewery, under the shelter of which the working party was withdrawn when the first grenade came hurtling over the trees. The Brewery must by this time have been thoroughly well used to the visitation of shells, and there was this consolation for it, that had it been exploded bodily it could not have been ruined much more utterly than it already was. All that it was good for was that the heap of stones which once had composed a rather imposing structure afforded a kind of shelter for troops drawn up in its rear. But even this office the Brewery was now rendered incapable of performing. The shells sent its loose stones flying in all directions, and it was thus that several men were wounded. The contagion of firing was communicated by les Bottes to the foreposts. These began blazing away at each other in a very level fashion, the Germans replying to the French fire with the chassepots, the use of which they had been practising sedulously for the last few days. Everybody had got so much used to this intermittent outpost fire that the only notice it met with was a whistle occasionally from some soldier moving about our village when a bullet went singing past him, or hit the wall a yard or two above his head. From firing at the wooden barracks and the Brewery, les Bottes took it into its head to throw a few shells into Servigny, the village to our right, and then St. Julien chimed in with its great cannon balls. Noisseville occupied an intermediate position between the Brewery and Servigny; but up till about one o’clock it had unaccountably escaped the polite attentions of the two French forts. About that hour, however, a great cannon-ball came whistling across from St. Julien, crashed through the wall of a house in which most of the officers were quartered, and tumbled in among the stacked arms in an open space in the street, making a hole in which a horse might have been buried. Nobody was hurt; but the paymaster was nearly smothered with the débris which fell from the wall through which the great ball passed. Les Bottes followed St. Julien’s example in firing into Noisseville, the latter projecting 42lb. and 64lb. shells, the former confining himself to cannon-balls. It was a great waste of powder and shot. Nobody was hurt, and all the effect was that a village already for the most part burnt and in ruins was destroyed a little more. The church was terribly wrecked by the cannon of St. Julien. Already the exterior had been knocked out of shape, but the inside retained much of its original integrity. A shell from St. Julien crashed right through the altar, and brought the cross on to the pavement in splinters. The fragment of a shell from les Bottes shivered a beautiful marble monument, splitting it right up the centre, and cutting in two the commemoration of the merits of a respectable defunct villager. The Virgin Mary, as she stood in marble against the wall, had a limb amputated, and was otherwise dismembered; and if the pastor had been in the pulpit when another shell struck it he would never have preached more. So hot became the cross-fire from the two fortresses that it was judged advisable to withdraw the troops out of the village a few hundred yards to the rear. The _Feldwachen_ were of course left in their positions, as also were two companies in the _repli_ by the church; but the rest fell back into an orchard behind the village. It was great fun, in a sense, to be here and listen to the French pelting the village, under the idea, no doubt, that it was full of Prussian troops. We could hear the crashing of the rafters and the smashing of the walls as the huge projectiles tore through them, the shells exploding as they struck, and sending into the air a cloud of fragments. All this time the musketry fire on the foreposts was unceasing along a large portion of the line, and anyone dropping in casually upon the scene would have imagined quite an important battle was in progress. So little was this the case that the troops supporting Noisseville and lying in Flanville and Retonfay were not put under arms. The whole affair was an utterly useless ignition of powder, and its only effect was to suspend for the day the construction of the wooden barracks. When the firing had ceased we came back into the village, and several found that the quarters which they had quitted at one o’clock were no longer in existence at five. A few houses more or less ground to powder in Noisseville was, however, quite a trifle when the whole village might have been called a ruin. It surprised me to observe with what extraordinary force some of the projectiles had fallen. In a field beyond the church there was a hole in the earth that might almost have served as the shaft of a mine. It marked the spot where had fallen a shell from les Bottes. The pioneers dug it out in the evening. They had to go to a depth of about six feet. The huge ugly affair had not exploded, and two men extricated it gently, and bore it in triumph, quite a little procession following, to lay it at the feet of the colonel. The shell was reckoned to be 110-pounder. Just fancy a missile of this magnitude striking a man full in the chest! It would hurl him in little pieces in all directions. Or fancy it exploding in the centre of a group, or in the heart of a column, and scattering its great skin, an inch and a half thickness of metal, in a shower of morsels, each about two inches square.

During the night, as I was told in the morning, les Bottes and St. Julien renewed the firing on Noisseville. I confess to sleeping so soundly, that I was in blessed ignorance of the circumstance, but when I turned out in the morning I fell into a hole that was the crater of an exploded shell, about two paces from the place where once there had been a door. Several other shells fell in the immediate vicinity, and the poor church got another blow or two. The 4th Regiment, on the morning of the 5th October, was relieved by the 44th Regiment, from Retonfay, with whom it exchanged quarters. Retonfay is a squalid village, which was included in the second line of environment. Close to it was a fine château, inhabited for the time by General Zglinitzky, who commanded the brigade. It was the turn of the 4th for a spell on rest, and the officers who, in the front line, were not at liberty to quit their commands for an hour, were now comparatively at large for the time. As soon as we reached Retonfay, and had taken up quarters, one of them was kind enough to accompany me in a ride as far as the Moselle, on the north side of Metz. We everywhere traversed the extreme edges of the foreposts, and the ride was a very interesting one. From Retonfay we struck the first line at the unfortunate Servigny—that once pretty village, at which St. Julien seemed to have so especial a spite. There was not much of Servigny to speak of—a few gable ends of walls, and here and there the walls of a house without a roof. A battalion of the 45th contrived somehow to find quarters among the ruins, and a few villagers still wandered about in a ghostly fashion. From Servigny we passed over a considerable ridge, to the charming village of Poix, lying snugly at the opening of a valley which tends downward toward the Moselle. This village is surrounded in all directions by beautiful villas, the summer residences of the wealthier inhabitants of Metz. An isolated suburb near the top of the ridge had suffered severely from the fire of St. Julien—indeed, occasional shells were bursting in it as we passed, but the village itself had not been much injured, and the German troops dad respected its amenities in a very surprising manner. A Division General dwelt amid roses and honeysuckles, in one of the principal chateaux, built in rustic Elizabethan, and beautifully furnished—the Feldpost inhabited the gardener’s rustic lodge in the grounds. Vremy lies a little to the rear in the bottom of the valley, which here assumes the character of a gorge, and the road compels a detour into it, which was repaid us by the observation of the admirable manner in which its houses and churchyard walls had been converted into defensive works, thoroughly blocking up the gorge. Leaving Vremy, and the hospitable officers who dwelt therein, we rode down the valley to Failly, a considerable village, in which, until a few days previous, had been the head-quarters of General Kummer, commanding the Landwehr, now gone across the Moselle. From Failly there is a direct road to the Moselle at Malroy, but, by a slight detour, the opportunity offered itself of getting very close to the Bois de Grimont, which was full of French troops, and of inspecting, at a comparatively short distance, the fortress of St. Julien. An officer in Failly told us laughingly, that there were two very beautiful young women in Villiers l’Orme, the village which is so near to the Bois de Grimont, and I am not certain that this information did not operate with my companion as an additional argument for visiting the place. L’Orme is a very prettily situated little village, just on the edge of the tableland on which stand Grimont and St. Julien. We saw nothing of the beautiful maidens, but the place was full of inhabitants, and the children were playing merrily about, quite regardless, to all appearance, of the fact that the place is within three hundred yards of the French outposts. L’Orme was unoccupied by the Germans during the day. At night a small party, under the command of an under officer, was wont to go forward, and take up a position behind it. Occasionally, stragglers from the French outposts visited it, we were told, in search of food. From the shelter of one of its houses, we could see quite easily with the naked eye, the French outposts—the men cooking or lying down, and the sentries walking to and fro. Behind was the forest, and then the Monastery of Grimont, while over the whole of the quiet little scene, St. Julien frowned grimly, casting forward his dark shadow in the afternoon sunlight. L’Orme had wonderfully escaped the ravages of war. Both parties seemed to have agreed to respect it, probably on account of the number of villagers who still continued to reside in it. I was told that not a single shell had been fired into the village. But while we were there, the shells were flying over our heads towards Vany and Charly, and it seemed strange to see the children playing in the street, the girls driving home the cows, and the old women placidly spinning in front of their doors, when the missiles were whistling through the air above their heads.

The French might have respected l’Orme, but they assuredly had no such tenderness for anybody happening to traverse the space which intervenes between l’Orme and Chieulles. The track led athwart an open field, with a hedge in the rear, and the French posts lined the wood continuously, at a distance of about five hundred yards. The distance is about half a mile, and, unless we chose to make a very considerable detour, there was no alternative but to run the gauntlet. My military friend went first, at a brisk hand canter. He had hardly shown his horse’s head beyond the cover of the houses of l’Orme, when the Frenchmen commenced saluting him with chassepot bullets. I followed at a short interval, and as the bullets became thicker and faster, our canter became a gallop. The horses were fresh, and also desperately timid; ever as a bullet whistled past them, and cut the twigs in the hedge, they gave a bound and a shy that necessitated very close adhesion to the pigskin. I was by no means sorry when we got into Chieulles, a village a little farther retired from the point-blank range of fire, and which had also, by mutual consent, been held as a neutral territory. There were in it plenty of inhabitants, who seemed to have got quite familiarised to their strange position, and carried on their ordinary avocations as if the war were miles away. The village is rather a large one, and contains several considerable buildings. From it our road lay to the left rear, to a _Feldwache_ outside the village of Vany, and then into the village itself. The French outposts gave us one parting salute as we sallied out of Chieulles, and this evoked a response from the _Feldwache_ for which we were making. We left the hostile outposts firing away at each other very briskly, and rode forward, accompanied by a cavalry officer, into Charly, a beautiful village, containing many châteaux, and standing embowered amidst orchards. Here one of the points of the battle of the 31st August was contested with great desperation. All around the village the graves lay thick, now German, now French. The bayonet had been at work that day in the environs of Charly, and in one of its alleys took place a fierce and long-continued hand-to-hand contest. It was very pretty to see how tastefully the German troops had decorated the graves of their dead comrades. They had made them up with turf, and planted flowers and shrubs on the ridge, while at the head of each stood a wooden cross, on which was painted the name and rank of him who lay below. The French graves were not thus tended, but neither were they neglected. Brave soldiers never draw distinctions between the last resting-places of foes and friends. The graves of the French had been surrounded by hedges of shrubs, and the cross had been set up at the head of each.

From Charly we rode on to Malroy, a considerable village lying on the Moselle, about two miles north of Fort St. Julien. It was necessary, however, to ride up the stream some distance to find the first pontoon bridge crossing it at Argancey. Some distance higher up, at Hautconcourt, there was another pontoon bridge, and close to it, at Ennery, a very large depôt of provisions and stores for the supply of the northern portion of the besieging army. Immediately on crossing the Moselle, we came among the Landwehr men. “These men need not fear comparison with the finest regiments of the regular army,” that was my first remark to my companion. So far as I could discern, the only distinction lay in the fact that the Landwehr had more hair on their faces, as a general rule, than the line troops. About eight-and-twenty to two-and-thirty seemed the general age of the Landwehr men; and as regards a martial carriage they would not suffer alongside the Guards.

Riding leisurely back by a more circuitous route than that we had pursued in going, we were near Failly when the sun disappeared in a glorious setting behind the yellow crest of St. Quentin. Hardly had it disappeared when a flash came from out of the shadow over against St. Agathe. The roar of a heavy gun came booming across the valley, and the sound had not died away before there was another flash and another roar. In five minutes the whole slope for a distance of nearly a mile and a half was lit up by continual flashes of artillery fire. Then the batteries of St. Eloy took up the reply, with a slower but steady fire of its heavy guns, their roar coming to us deadened by the thick fog which was rising from the Moselle. The sight in the growing darkness was indescribably grand. We sat on horseback on the summit of the ridge at Poix, watching and listening, till St. Julien thought fit to chime in on his own account, and his big shells gave us notice to quit the ridge by the suburb of Poix on which we were standing. About eight o’clock we returned to Retonfay, on the plateau before which we found the brigade-general, and nearly all the officers of the battalions lying there, standing watching and listening to the gun-fire. Soon after eight it began to slacken, and presently died away altogether; all through the night both St. Julien and les Bottes kept the German lines on the alert by an occasional reminder, consisting of a 64-lb. shell.

The 6th was a quiet day on the east side, although the din came to us of a continuous bombardment from the other side of the Moselle to the north side. By special request of the troops stationed in Retonfay, there was divine service in the morning in a meadow in the village. The division chaplain officiated, and the brigadier-general was present with his staff. It was a fine sight to see the six battalions, numbering as many thousand men, drawn up in a hollow square, with the clergyman and the regimental band in the centre. The service commenced with a hymn, in which all the troops joined with fervour. Then the minister preached a kind of informal sermon. He selected no Scripture text, his text was the duty of a Christian soldier in war time. His words evidently came from the heart, and as evidently went to the heart. When he spoke of the friends at home longing for tidings from the front and yet half afraid to hear them lest they should learn that the loved one had fallen in battle, many were the heads bent down on the manly chests, and many a gallant soldier held his hand before his eyes to hide the starting tear. It was remarkable what an effect the chaplain’s words had in stimulating correspondence when the service was over. Round each Feldwebel there was quite a little crowd eager to obtain the “Correspondence Karte” on which the troops mostly wrote their brief epistles, and the post corporal had enough to do to carry the great bag with which he went over to the Feldpost in Flanville. A little after the service I was sitting with the paymaster and another officer, when a knock came to the door, and there entered a great hulking fellow from Dantzic, who sheepishly asked the paymaster to accommodate him with paper money for his bullion. How much do you think he had? Why, counting pfennigs and a queer collection of kreutzers, he could make up just one thaler, and this huge remittance the great honest manly fellow wished to send to the Frau away on the shore of the Baltic. It was only three shillings, but it was the last stiver the man had, and he would go without his glass of beer till next pay day came round. Fancy an English soldier coming to his officer with a handful of half-pence for conversion into paper money! But a German regiment is one great brotherhood, and the paymaster pocketed the coppers and gave the man the paper thaler with a kindly word and look, for has he not a Frau of his own in Königsberg, whose portrait lies against that broad chest of his?

In the evening there was a camp fire, an institution not unknown at Wimbledon in the early days of the Volunteer movement, when as yet the encampment was but small, and when Lord Elcho’s sonorous voice could be heard over the whole gathering. During peace time, there is a camp fire—or a gathering equivalent to it—once a week in every Prussian regiment, to which the married officers bring their good ladies, and whither also the “beauty and fashion” of the garrison town are invited. “Beauty and fashion” were represented in Retonfay by a few French crones of fabulous age, who confined their remarks to muttering “Mon Dieu” continuously, and who, I suspect, would gladly have poisoned the whole regiment if they could have done so without risk to themselves. But nevertheless we had our camp fire, and that, too, under quite imposing circumstances. The spot selected was a pretty meadow by the side of a stream, about two hundred yards from the village. An officer of taste, and with a capital eye for landscape gardening, had devoted himself from a very early hour in the morning to perfecting the arrangements. With a fatigue party, he had thrown a pretty rustic bridge across the stream, and lined the path leading to it with green boughs. With these, too, he had enclosed a large circle, with a smaller area close by for the band, and in the centre of the larger circle a great bonfire had been built, its foundation raised by the earth excavated from a trench dug around it. All the chairs in the village were collected, and most of the tables, and placed in picturesque confusion around this central point. The officers began to gather about five o’clock. They were all so smart that I felt ashamed of my old tweed shooting jacket and dilapidated wideawake. The parade coats had been dug out of the bottom of portmanteaus, and looked quite spruce and natty. Boots had been polished to a pitch that might have stimulated the admiration of Day and Martin. Spurs and buttons glittered brightly in the setting sun. Then our worthy colonel—Oberst von Dietzen-Hennig—made his appearance, accompanied by his staunch ally the major. The colonel, too, was evidently on ceremony, for he wore the sword which King Wilhelm had presented to him with his own hands the evening of one of the battles of the 1866 campaign. All rose to greet the commanding officer, and immediately that he was seated, the band struck up. So thoroughly was the affair managed, that an elaborately written programme of the music was laid on the colonel’s table, of which I took a copy. It may interest English readers to know what music a Prussian regimental band played, while the bass accompaniment was furnished by the roar of the guns over against us on the other side of the Moselle. Here is a copy of the programme:

Fest Overture Fischer. An der schönen blauen Donau Walzer Strauss. La Belle Amazone Loischhorn. March Potpourri Bach. Künstler Fest Quadrille Hermann. Fanfare Militaire Ascher.

It was a very pretty sight. About forty officers were present, grouped picturesquely around the tables. Military servants circulated everywhere, serving the company with glasses of beer. The outside of the bough-enclosed circle was lined with the men of the various battalions, who crowded to the spot, under the attraction of the music. More hearty good fellowship could not be imagined. The colonel and the youngster who won his silver shoulder straps but the day before were on the most equal footing. In an interval of the music a young officer came into the circle who had just returned from the hospital at Düsseldorf, whither a bullet through the foot in the battle of the 31st August had sent him. Then he had been only a Feldwebel, but he had got his lieutenancy when lying on his back, and this was his first appearance among his comrades since his promotion. As he came forward the colonel rose and called for a bumper to the health of his gallant young friend. The young fellow bowed and blushed as all obeyed the chief’s order, following the draught with a cheer that must have been heard at St. Julien. Then the colonel was good enough to disarrange the programme for the introduction of “Rule Britannia” as a special token of consideration to the Englander present. By this time the darkness had begun to fall, and the bonfire was formally set fire to, the circle breaking up from the tables, and re-forming around its cheerful blaze. The band exhausted the programme, and took to playing song tunes, the officers chiming in lustily with their voices, and the men on the outskirts taking up the chorus. The scene was one in which a painter would have delighted—the bright wood-fire lighting up the faces of the circle around it, and ever and anon, as it shot up more brightly, dissipating the thick darkness beyond, and flashing on the faces of the men through the boughs. But no painter could give effect to what was to me the most weird phase of the affair—the measured thud of the cannonading sounding between every pause in the music or lull in the din of the conversation; and it was strange, too, to reflect that, as we sat here cheerily, we were still within the range of the great guns of St. Julien. I could not help thinking of the effect which a forty-two pound shell would have had had it fallen and exploded right in the heart of the bonfire. The good fellows of the 4th, however, troubled themselves with no such speculations. It was sufficient for them that St. Julien was quiet, and that the fire was cheery, the company good, and the beer reasonably plentiful, and palatable. In the course of the evening one of the captains gave a toast, which was received with intense enthusiasm—the health of the gallant comrades who had won the decoration of the Iron Cross. It was on the breast of at least half those who sat round the fire. When the cheering had subsided the band struck up the “Paris” march, a _souvenir_ of 1813, in remembrance of which campaign the Iron Cross was first instituted. About half-past eight the colonel gave the toast of “Our Comrades of the Artillery,” in honour of some gentlemen of that service who were present, and then, after the band had played “God Save the King,” said good night, and went away to his supper. I followed him in a very short time, but when I came outside to smoke my cigar in the moonlight, before turning in among the straw, I could still hear the merry chorus down in the meadow by the camp-fire. It was then about eleven o’clock, and how long after the last of the roisterers may have kept it up I have not the slightest idea.

The foggy morning of the 7th October ushered in what turned out to be the most important and determined sortie made by Bazaine since the failure of the 31st of August. I know not whether the French gave to the affair a name; the Germans recognized it as the “Schlacht bei Maizières.” Battles there were in plenty in this bloody campaign that showed a larger total of killed and wounded; but the “Schlacht bei Maizières” made widows and orphans in the Fatherland far beyond proportion; for the men who bore the brunt of it were husbands and fathers,—the stout Landwehrmen of the Division Kummer. I had quitted Retonfay early in the grey morning with the intention of making the complete circuit of the environment of Metz before my return. The morning was extremely misty. As I reached the eminence at Poix I could barely see Mount St. Quentin above the fog in the valley, the sun’s rays striking upon its warm grey peak. It seemed as if a general armistice had been declared; even the forepost fire had dropped. Crossing the Moselle at Argancey, I made first for the Château of Amelange, and afterwards in a direction due Metz-ward, until I reached the furthest _Feldwache_ at Maxe. Then I struck across the valley, inclining rather to the rear, first to Grandes and then to Petites Tapes, in both of which there lay only an under-officer’s guard of nine men; and avoiding Ladonchamps, by advice, I reached St. Rémy, where I found on duty the 59th Landwehr Regiment. Thence my journey lay still athwart the remotest foreposts to Norroy and Plesnois, the latter village being in the heart of the Bois de Saulny, and my road then lay straight southward on St. Hubert, on the south-west of Mount St. Quentin. I detail the different stages of this ride as it was right across the theatre of the afternoon’s fight, and because the quietude everywhere in the morning formed so strong a contrast to the sudden hurly-burly of the afternoon.

Near Plesnois my horse cast a shoe, and as the road was rugged I was rather in a fix, when there rode past a staff officer attached to the head-quarters of Baron Schüler von Senden, commanding the 2nd Division of the Landwehr. This gentleman was quartered in Maizières, and he most courteously invited me to return with him thither and be his guest for the night. On the return journey this gentleman gave me some information which contributed materially to an understanding of the events which followed. In the bombardment of the two previous days the position occupied by the batteries of German heavy guns had been at Frenecourt, near the commencement of the rise of the hills some distance to the south-west of Maizières. To speak more precisely, they were stationed on the low heights of Le Horiment, on the rising ground behind which there stood an observatory commanding the whole plain. But the Germans had batteries considerably to the front of Frenecourt. Six field batteries stood mid-way between it and Sennecourt, and on the 6th they had pushed forward a second battery as far as Sennecourt itself. From these several positions the bombardment of St. Eloy had been going forward intermittingly, and also a shell-fire into the village of Ladonchamps, some little distance nearer Metz than St. Rémy, on the line of railway. Till lately this village had been reckoned neutral territory, but on the 2nd October the French had seized it, and established a battery in front of it. The village itself had been burnt the same night by German shells, but still the French had retained the position, and the German fire in the intervening days had been partly directed to the dislodgment of the enemy from a position which was important, as the occupants of it could enfilade the whole front across the valley. On the 6th nearly a thousand shells had been thrown into Ladonchamps and the neighbourhood, and late in the evening the French had evacuated the shattered fragments of a once smiling village. The Germans had at once thrown forward troops in its direction, establishing their _replis_ in its rear, and sending forward sergeants’ parties to occupy it and Grandes and Petites Tapes villages, to which its possession was the key. St. Rémy constituted the chief support, and here lay the 59th Regiment of the Landwehr. Maxe, close to the river, and considerably in advance, was occupied, as I already knew, by outposts detailed by the 10th Army Corps, from the other side of the Moselle. The two divisions of the Landwehr stretched right athwart the valley from the bridge at Argancey, where they touched the 10th Army Corps, to near Marange, where they met the 3rd Corps, and to the Landwehrmen was thus confided the duty of keeping the flat alluvial tract on the western bank of the Moselle. This was the substance of the information which my friend of the staff communicated to me on our ride to Maizières. Here I found the head-quarters of General von Kummer. About one o’clock I was sitting at lunch with two staff officers in an arbour in his garden, when the guns of the German batteries by Sennecourt began to give tongue. “Only a few Frenchmen loafing round Ladonchamps,” observed one of the officers. “There will be nothing serious to-day; there is too much mist in the valley.” Certainly it seemed as if he must be right. When I had been on the heights at Sennecourt I could not see the villages in the valley below, nor the Cathedral of Metz. Fort St. Quentin, our constant landmark, had been utterly invisible. But the roar of the guns grew louder and louder, and then came first one great boom, and then another, from the big guns lying behind at Frenecourt. The officers fidgeted, but still would not own that anything was the matter. But their _nonchalance_ gave way when an aide-de-camp came up at the gallop, spreading the alarm everywhere as he went, and dashing on to the general’s quarters for instructions to guide the front. In five minutes more we were all in the saddle, and, after a short gallop, were looking out on the scene of action from the fringe of the wood in front of the Châteaux of Brieux and Amelange. That the reader may understand the tactics of Bazaine and the manner in which they were foiled, it will be necessary to give a brief description of the ground. From Metz to Maizières there is a long trough, with a flat bottom—the alluvial margin of the Moselle. This tract is about four English miles wide. On the west it is bounded by the heights I have already named, and nearer Metz by those of Norroy and Saulny. On the east it is bounded by a lower series of bluffs, on which stand the villages of Olgy and Malroy; but between them and the flat bottom runs the Moselle, infringing considerably on the flat expanse just opposite Olgy. Across this bottom, at the narrowest part thus formed, lies a series of villages—the two Tapes and St. Rémy, with Maxe and Ladonchamps respectively slightly to the east and west front. More or less, there were German troops in all those. The dispositions detailed to me by the staff officer had been substantially maintained. Bazaine had laid his scheme with great art. Covered by the dense fog, he had made his dispositions with such adroitness that when it lifted, a little past one, his arrangements were already all but complete. In the first instance, he directed a strong assault on Ladonchamps. The Landwehr outpost held the place as if they were 10,000 instead of 100 men, and the French sent their infantry swarming into it, while their artillery played upon it. “Only an attempt to re-occupy Ladonchamps,” quoth my friend of the staff, as he lit a fresh cigar; “the guns will teach them the folly of that, and we can go back to our arbour.” It seemed, truly, if any argument could be convincing, that the German artillery must be so. The white spurts of smoke were visible all round the valley. On the right front the batteries at Sennecourt were hard at work, and also others nearer us on the flat, while the great guns at Frenecourt were sending shells at a long range right over Ladonchamps in among the advancing French. Then, on our left, before Amelange, two other batteries were maintaining a semi-cross fire; and from the bluffs, on the other side of the Moselle, between Olgy and Malroy, the Prussian field artillery were also roaring. But my friend of the staff was not, for an hour or two at all events, to see the arbour. The attack on Ladonchamps was a diversion. Suddenly the villages of Grandes and Petites Tapes, of St. Rémy and Maxe were overwhelmed by a cataract of Frenchmen. The battalion of the 59th Landwehr which held St. Rémy would not fall back, as it should have done in common prudence, but stood up there in the street till the French having played upon it with their artillery, and rained on it chassepot and mitrailleuse bullets, finally pushed backwards the shattered remnant on to the chaussée by dint of sheer numbers. The Fusilier battalion of the 58th occupied Grandes Tapes, and it occupied Grandes Tapes when the fight was done, but the occupation consisted of the dead and the wounded. The battalion would not give ground, and may be said to have been annihilated as it stood, the men with their backs to the wall and their faces to the foe. It afterwards transpired that 300 men of this battalion were made prisoners, after a desperate resistance, and sent into Metz. The other battalions of the same regiment suffered terribly. So far, then, Bazaine had succeeded. He had re-occupied the chain of villages athwart the valley, and had got a few batteries of artillery out to their front to reply to the German fire. But the status quo he neither wished to, nor could retain. The German artillery, throwing its projectiles from three sides of the parallelogram, interfered with the realization of the latter conception. As regarded the former, it seemed clear that Bazaine would not have done what he had if he did not contemplate something more. That something, I have not the remotest doubt, was a sortie to establish connections with Thionville. His tactics were well conceived. From St. Rémy and the two Tapes he kept the German fire engrossed, both musketry and artillery. He sent forward from Grandes Tapes great swarms of tirailleurs, who fared extremely ill at the hands of Landwehr men. But, besides this, he massed in the rear what was, beyond all question, a very large force. There must have been nearly 20,000 in all on the bank of the Moselle, and under cover of the houses of Maxe. The head of this force he hurled forward to cut through the German cincture where it was weakest, close to the river. The moment was a critical one. Those regiments of the Landwehr which had not already been sent forward against the villages were too far to the westward to be in time to meet this attack as it ought to be met—directly face to face. But the 10th Army Corps had been crossing the pontoon bridge, and massing between the river and Amelange. Their general, Voight Rhetz, was in nominal command of the days operations, and he gave the order for several regiments to advance. It was a sight never to be forgotten. First came the Fusiliers, extending at a rapid run into skirmishing order, and covering the whole plain with their long thin lines. Then the dense columns of companies of the Grenadiers, the bands playing and the colours unfurled—unwonted sight. But all the work was not left wholly for the infantry to do. The artillery, for the moment, left the villages alone, and concentrated their fire on the advancing columns of the French by the Moselle. There was but little response from the French field artillery, but the sullen sides of St. Julien flashed out smoke and fire, and from the earthworks of St. Eloy came missiles at the shorter ranges. The mitrailleuse venomously sounded its angry whirr, making the skirmishers recoil nervously as they crossed the line of its fire, and tearing chasms in the fronts of the solid masses of which they were the forerunners. The artillery and the skirmishers were enough for the French. The dense columns staggered and then broke. Through my glass I could see a continuous _sauve qui peut_ into the village of Maxe. But when they had once got stone and lime between them and the Germans, the French were obstinate and would go no further. In vain the German artillery pounded into the villages, advancing closer and closer in alternate order of batteries with a precision and rapidity that could not have been exceeded on Woolwich-common. That obstinate battery in front of Grandes Tapes would not cease, and the French tirailleurs still lined the chaussée in its front. By this time it was nearly four o’clock, and there was a lull on our side that seemed ominous. As we stood in this suspense a staff officer galloped along the front line with orders for a general advance to take the villages by storm. The attack he hurriedly told me was to consist of the four brigades of the Landwehr, with a division of the 10th Army Corps on the left and supporting. In a few minutes more the command came sounding along the line, and the men sprang from their cover and went forward with that steady quick step so characteristic of the German marching. The shells from the battery in front of Grandes Tapes tore through the line, the mitrailleuse and chassepot bullets poured against it their leaden hail, but still the Landwehr, silent and stern, went steadily to the front. The oldest veteran in the field was never in a more furious fire than that to which the centre of this line was exposed. General von Brandenstein, commanding the third brigade of the Landwehr, was shot down close to me, and several of his staff were wounded. At length the entrenchments were reached, behind which were lying the shattered remnants of the 59th and 58th Landwehr. The fraternisation consisted in the cry of “Hurrah Preussen!” and then “Vorwärts—immer vorwärts!” and the line threw itself to its front at a run. The gunners from the battery, brave men and stubborn, had barely time to run round the corner before the Landwehrmen were upon them. The guns they left perforce. In the villages the French made a last stand, but it had been better for them that they had run away at first. The Landwehrmen, with less of the conventional warrior in them than the Line, were not so much inclined to give quarter as are the professional soldiers. With many a Frenchman this afternoon the shrift consisted of a bayonet thrust. They fought like devils in the narrow ways of the villages, and used the mitrailleuses with rare judgment and effect. But then there came the steady inexorable stride forward of the Landwehr men, the bayonet lent force with that huge thigh and back power which is the leading characteristic in an athletic sense of the German physique, and the villages were cleared of all save victors, dead, and wounded.

To the Landwehr must be conceded the honour of the fray. They it was who checked the rush of the French advance by holding the villages till they had not a man that could stand upright and fire the needle gun. To them also was entrusted the grand final advance which swept the French out of the villages. I had seen the German Line soldiers fight before this day. I had learned to believe that they could do aught any soldiers in the world could do. But it was not till now that I gauged the calibre of the Landwehr, how that in all things they were the equals of their brethren of the Line. Cool in the intrenchments, when they lay calmly in position, picking up the bullets that fell among them—resolute, indomitable, in their steady quick march forward, and then irresistible in the final rush with which they carried the villages—they were troops to delight the heart of a man with a soldierly instinct. Nothing was more observable than the cool manner in which the wounded went to the rear in the general advance—every man depending on himself if he could walk at all, declining the services of assistants to help him out of the fray. Nor were they slight wounds with which these gallant fellows struggled unaided to the rear. One, for instance, to whom I spoke, was shot right through the lungs, and at every step his breath came panting through the bullet-hole. It might be that he struggled on till he reached the straw in the court-yard of the Château of Amelange, where the doctors were toiling up to their elbows in blood; but I fear his was one of the many bodies that checkered the green fields behind the advance. Gallant fellows as they were, it went to one’s heart to see the Landwehr fight and die. Not like a linesman could they take their life in their hand and go down into the fray conscious that nobody would hunger because they fell. For every second Landwehrman that fell at Maizières there was a widow in the Fatherland, and, with children of my own around my hearth, my heart swelled to think of the number of unconscious orphans made that sunshiny autumn afternoon in the pleasant villages and the quiet plains of Deutchland. Pray God that, fight who may, there may be no more deadly battles in which the Landwehr shall have to take part. Not that, as it seemed to me, they dwelt upon the thought of Frau and Kinder. The hairy Kerl, with the grey in his beard, and who knew how many young birds were in his nest, went straight to the front as boldly as the sprightly young volunteer who had only a girl to weep for him if he fell. But they are a prayerful people those Germans, and I fancied, when the word “Vorwärts” came sounding through the ranks, that many a man bent his head for a moment into his hand, as if he were entering a church.

On my way to the rear, after the brunt of the fight was over, I looked into the court-yard of the Château of Amelange, where the doctors were hard at work. The men lay all around waiting for their turn, and smoking like so many lime-kilns. Here already by five o’clock there were quite two hundred wounded, and those in Amelange were but a handful compared to the gross number that had been wounded. The doctors, with shirt sleeves up and coat off, were toiling with blood-smeared hands with cool but nimble dexterity. One of them seemed something between a cannibal and a butcher as he looked up for a moment from a case with a bloody knife-blade between his teeth.

In the evening, postal celerity being an object, I left Maizières to ride to Courcelles. Immediately after crossing the pontoon bridge at Argancey, a detour became necessary. The German artillery was still firing in the moonlight from the heights above Olgy, and St. Julien was sluggishly throwing projectiles on to the tableland, seemingly to shut up their fire. All the ground in the rear of Charly and toward Fany was pitted with shells that had fallen and burst during the day. A brisk musketry fire was still going on in front of Chieulles and l’Orme, so quiet when I had ridden through them in the morning. The French, pouring down out of the Bois de Grimont, had made a feigned attack in considerable force up this valley, and the old women and children in Chieulles must have had their equanimity not a little disturbed. All I could hear as I rode through the villages was, that a good many had been killed and wounded; and I met a large ambulance train coming forward into the fire from out the village of Vremy. Poix had been shelled during the day, but all was now quiet there. A little further on I came to the rear of Servigny and Noisseville, from which I met my friends of the 4th returning singing triumphantly. The French from Mey and the slope in front of St. Julien had sent three battalions into Nouilly, and thence had attempted to storm the _repli_ in front of Noisseville, but had been repulsed with considerable loss, the German artillery driving them out of Nouilly into the wood. I was in time to accompany a tentative advance of the German artillery along the chaussée right under the earthworks of Little Belle Croix, which was chiefly remarkable from the circumstance that St. Julien made no effort to arrest the operation. I afterwards learnt that there was further fighting in the early part of the night in front of St. Rémy, and that a battalion of the 81st had been forced to retake Ladonchamps at the bayonet point, losing in the task five officers and over one hundred men.

It is not difficult, I think, to form a tolerably correct opinion as to the plan of Bazaine’s tactics of the 7th. I am aware that the importance of this sortie has been belittled by testimony from the interior of Metz, but I have a habit of believing in what I see, and the evidence of eyesight was corroborated as well by prisoners taken in the affair as by conversations with responsible and well-informed men on the other side, after the capitulation of Metz. At the lowest estimate Bazaine must have had 100,000 men, who, so far as the defence of Metz was concerned, were superfluous, and, therefore, detrimental. A hundred thousand men will sooner consume a given quantity of provisions than will twenty thousand; and when the larger number reach starvation point, the surrender of everything—field troops, garrison, fortress, and town—must occur. But for their appreciation of this eventuality, nothing would have pleased the Germans better than to have opened a fair passage to Bazaine any hour in the twenty-four. He might have come outside the cordon and welcome with 100,000 men, and in the course of the following day, when he was holding a council of war, and debating, _more Gallico_, whether to march on Sedan or strike southward and cut the German communications, a hundred thousand Teutons and more would have fallen upon him from all points of the compass and smitten him hip and thigh. But if his field army had been chopped into fragments, the fortress of Metz, with its garrison left inside, would still have confronted the besiegers, and its reduction would have been postponed in proportion to the procrastination of the starvation point effected by the fewer mouths to feed. Of all this Bazaine, a capable man, whose merits, within certain limits, the Germans acknowledged frankly, could not have failed to be aware. He objected to capitulation simpliciter in the fortress, or to the alternative of capitulation or annihilation in the open field. But there lay the Moselle, beckoning him on to the half-way house of Thionville, and beyond Thionville, at the distance of a single forced march, lay the frontier. Oh! if he could only dash out through that vexatious cordon. True, across the broad plain lay the divisions of the Landwehr. A regular soldier himself, Bazaine had probably learned to despise the Garde Mobile with all the contempt of a veteran used to command veteran troops; and nothing was more natural than for a Frenchman to reason from a false analogy that, as the Garde Mobile, so were the Landwehr. The result gave him to digest his misconception as best he might. But the conception of Bazaine’s effort was creditable to his knowledge of the military art. While he made his grand effort against the Landwehr in the valley, he did his best to keep the other sections of the environing circle from finding leisure to concentrate in support of them. The attack on Vany, L’Orme, and Chieulles was well calculated to engross the 10th Army Corps; that from Mey on Noisseville and Servigny might well perform the same office with regard to the 1st Army Corps; the 7th Army Corps might be supposed to have their hands pretty well full with the sortie against Peltre, Mercy-le-Haut, and Ars-Laquenexy, and with luck this sortie, too, might get through as far as the depôt at Courcelles, and bring back of its abundance to the Gardes Nationaux, who were plying the big guns on the ramparts, and to the hungry citizens. The well-conceived feint against Ladonchamps was intended to keep the 3rd Army Corps in play, occupying as it did the slopes between the valley and the fort of Plappeville. And then—there was but the Landwehr to cope with, and surely 40,000 veteran French troops might crash through the lines of these citizen soldiers, weakened as those lines were by elongation across the whole plateau. Then, hey for Thionville! only ten miles off, where a secure lair might be had under the guns of that fortress while the columns caught their wind; and then, picking up by the way what superfluous troops there might be in its garrison, who could say what next for an army with no impedimenta? Had the design succeeded Metz would have been a tougher nut for the Germans to crack than ever, for their policy of starvation would have been seriously compromised.

The two grand blunders which defeated the scheme were the misconception on Bazaine’s part of the strength, prowess, and effective dispositions of the Landwehr, and the mistaken idea that his feints to the right and left would so engross the 10th and 3rd Army Corps as to prevent them from aiding the Landwehr to give him check on the plateau. His error on the former point must have come to him when he saw his regulars recoiling pell-mell from the Landwehrmen in the villages; the salvoes of artillery sent by the 10th Army Corps from Malroy, Olgy, and other heights on the east side of the Moselle, and by the 3rd Army Corps from Frenecourt, Sennecourt, and the heights above St. Rémy, all coigns of vantage on the bluffs on the western fringe of the valley, must have made him comprehend that a feigned attack, even if inconsiderable, was not capable of engrossing the full attention of a German Army Corps. The batteries on the positions I have named enfiladed him ruinously. Down the valley there tore a fierce direct fire from the batteries at Amelange and those in front of Brieux, which advanced by alternate batteries with as much coolness and precision as I have seen the troops of a cavalry regiment working in the Phœnix Park; while from the heights on either side came such a cross-fire that I was filled with respect for the troops of Bazaine, when I realised the fact that they waited for the infantry assault to dislodge them from their position. Add to Bazaine’s disadvantages that he was miserably short of field artillery, and the conclusion is obvious that he could not but have failed under the circumstances, while the deduction was no less patent that the frustration of any future attempt was equally inevitable.

On the morning of the 8th, the aspect of affairs was still threatening. It seemed as if the turn had come round of the 1st Army Corps on the east side of the environment. When the sun rose the French were seen accumulated in dense masses between Fort St. Julien and the village of Mey. Both St. Julien and les Bottes maintained a continuous if somewhat discursive cannonade, making the stones fly all about the village of Noisseville, whither I had hurried on the first alarm. From 7 A.M. till early in the forenoon, there came the din of warm artillery fire from the direction of Peltre and Mercy-le-Haut. At daylight the whole of our first and second lines were drawn forward in support of the first line, and the advance posts had fallen back. At nine a battery of German field-artillery opened on the French infantry from the angle of the church of Noisseville, and located in a cunning overbank emplacement, was not to be dislodged by all that St. Julien and les Bottes could do with that intent. About mid-day, however, a furious pelt of rain came down and washed the heart out of the French, if there had been any in them from the first. Gradually the forts, as the infantry retreated into their rear, gave up firing, after having thrown in the course of the morning over 100 shells into the fragments of the village of Noisseville. The fire gradually died away to the south, and about 2 P.M. came the order for the reserves and the artillery to return to quarters, and for the outposts to be reinstated in their old positions.

The rain which quenched the ardour of the French lasted with scarcely any intermission for forty-eight hours, and made its impression on the health of the besieging army. Bronchitis and diarrhœa were the chief complaints engendered; typhus, which soon after became almost an epidemic, now first gained serious head. One saw waggon load after waggon load of sick men going down to Courcelles. Much might have been done, that was not done, both by German organisation and by those other organisations set on foot through the liberality of nations sympathising with human suffering, to ease the hardships of those poor fellows. It would not have been difficult to have organised a cheap and serviceable ambulance service to have accommodated both sick and wounded. Around Metz, in the third line, there are everywhere practicable roads. District depôts might easily have been established, one, say, at Ste. Barbe, another at Olgy, a third somewhere behind Sennecourt, and a fourth at Gravelotte. To these depôts might have been consigned the sick and wounded Germans from the several regiments and brigades—the poor fellows whom I saw making long weary journeys to Courcelles, in springless country carts or on foot. Between each of these depôts there might have been a continuous service of vehicles resembling elongated Irish jaunting cars. Such vehicles are the true pattern of an ambulance. They would hold a man on either foot rest slightly broadened, two more on the seats, and one above the well in the centre. Four poles at each corner, with a tarpaulin, would make an efficient protection from the weather. Thus, by easy stages, and resting at intervals in the depôts, the sick and wounded might have been brought down in ease and comfort to Courcelles, whence the trains were ready to convey them to Germany. These hospital trains were the most complete things of the kind I had ever seen. The carriages were built on the American model, with entrance at either end. There were two tiers of beds down each side, three in each tier, and the beds had every appliance calculated to give comfort to the occupants. One carriage was devoted to the purposes of a laboratory, another formed a living and sleeping room for the volunteer attendants, and a third was a kitchen. To a callousness for suffering, which must be characterised as general, there were two exceptions which must be named. One was the German depôt at Courcelles, of which Baron Von Kramm was the life and soul, and which did an immensity of good without pretension. The Baron himself was one of the most energetic men I have ever met, and wrought day and night with the supremest contempt for the good things of this life. The other exception was the branch of the English ambulance, which had its head-quarters in Remilly, under the control of Mr. Austin Lee, a young gentleman endowed with unquestionable administrative talent and great energy; he was ably supported by his assistant, Captain Norman, and within the sphere of my own observation accomplished much really good work.

On the 11th, a French deserter from Metz was brought into Retonfay; he belonged to the 59th of the Line, and to the Army Corps of which Marshal Lebœuf had the command. His regiment, along with two others, was lying, he reported, on the slope on which stands the village of Vantoux, a little behind Mey. He told us that his desertion was a matter of arrangement with a large body of the soldiery. Lots had been drawn who should make the first attempt, and if the experiment succeeded, the others were to desert likewise. He dodged along the verge of the Bois de Grimont, and then came sneaking through the vine-bergs till he reached the German _Feldwache_ behind Nouilly. Many Frenchmen were observed apparently watching his career. The man was an Alsatian, as, he said, were most of the men of his regiment, and he spoke German well. He said the French soldiers lying around Metz were tired of their lives. Nominally, the force to which he belonged lived under canvas, but the stench in the tents was so strong, by reason of cutaneous diseases among the men, that almost all slept in the open air. This for several days before must have been tantamount to sleeping in a water-butt. The skin disease was chiefly of a scorbutic character, caused by the want of vegetables, the absence of salt, and the almost exclusive living on horse-flesh. The poor fellow’s mouth and face were in a very bad state from scurvy. He stated that numbers of his fellows were similarly affected. The spirit of disaffection was, he reported, almost universal; even the Guards were tainted with it. Since the defeat of the 7th the troops had positively refused to make any more sorties, and it was with difficulty that the officers could prevail on the men to go upon outpost duty. Of bread, the deserter said, there was considerable scarcity, and the quality was bad; the quantity of rice served out was a tea-cup full per day between two men. This, with the bread, was all the food besides horseflesh the men had. They had eaten the horses of several cavalry regiments, and were now masticating battery horses.

Confined to quarters for several days, by an accident which befel me on the 10th October, I had leisure to note that inattention to sanitary conditions, which was the weak point in the otherwise almost perfect organisation of the German army. The French inhabitants around Metz were outer barbarians in this respect. The hamlet of Tully Veolan, as described in _Waverley_, was an elysium of cleanliness compared with the little French villages which everywhere dot the territory around the city, and in which were quartered the bulk of the besieging army. Before every door a large and venerable dunghill reeked; in the back cellars, and in the sties immediately behind the houses, dwelt colonies of swine, whose lairs, apparently, had not been purified within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. In dry, warm weather, these dunghills and pigsties impregnated the air with the pungent fumes of ammonia; in wet weather, their ooze percolated everywhere, and was indescribably fœtid. Thus the Germans were the inheritors of nuisances not of their own engendering. But they were by no means behindhand in the race of nuisance manufacturing. The entrails of slaughtered cattle, instead of being collected into one deep receptacle, and there buried deeply after having been strewed with quicklime, were strewed at random around the villages and in the gardens, with a little loose earth thrown over them, through the interstices of which a piece of paunch was often visible; and no disinfectants were used. Then the establishment of, and the enforcement of resort to, latrines, placed in suitable localities and assiduously disinfected, seemed to be almost wholly neglected, and the consequences were, a state of filth in the immediate vicinity of the houses, to allude to which further would compel the use of plainer phraseology than the reader might stomach. It is quite an erroneous belief that it is important only in warm weather to study sanitary conditions. Cold, raw weather, with fog, opens the pores of the human animal nearly as much as the most relaxing tropical climate, and is far more depressing to the spirits. Open pores, and dulled spirits, are the conditions exactly fitting a man for the reception of malarious particles floating in the air; and a heavy fog, when the ground sweats again, and the air is almost stagnant, is just the atmosphere in which one can hardly move without coming in contact with such particles.

Living as I did, with regimental, as contradistinguished from staff officers, I enjoyed considerable opportunities for estimating the thoroughness of the German system of military training and education. A German general ought to be a good despatch-writer, considering the training in this line which he must have undergone. He began to write despatches as soon as he acquired a separate command, were it only of half a company. The despatch system of the German army is perfect, and the compilation of an accurate and detailed narrative of each campaign ought to be very easy. Take an instance. From Retonfay, on the morning of the 12th October were transmitted to divisional head-quarters, the despatches from the 4th Regiment, recounting the doings of that contingent in the action of Noisseville, on the 31st of August and 1st of September. The colonel sent in his summary of the manœuvres of the three battalions under his command. The major of each battalion likewise made his report of the proceedings of his own battalion, and every captain or officer in command of a company, also sent forward a succinct statement of his company’s doings. These reports were accompanied by a chart on a large scale, showing the positions of the regiment at various periods of the battle, and drawn in this instance by a young lieutenant of our mess, the most accurate and rapid military topographist I have ever known. To be a practical draughtsman is imperative with every German officer. The puzzle with me was to find out what accomplishment is not imperative. The prickles which surround the rose of a commission are many and sharp, and, after all, the rose (at least in a nursery-gardening sense) is no great thing. Take the case, for instance, of my own especial comrade in the 4th, which presented no exceptional features. He came to the regiment from the gymnasium, in the capacity of avantageur. An avantageur is neither more nor less than a private soldier who aspires to a commission. On joining he had to pass an examination to demonstrate his general scholarship. For twelve months he served in the ranks, rising meanwhile to the non-commissioned rank of Vicefeldwebel, and then he went for a year to the military school. On leaving this, he had to pass an examination on everything relating to the art military, and then he came back to the regiment as a Degen fähnrich, that is to say, as the wearer of a sword without commissioned rank, for six months longer. The officers of the regiment then voted him eligible for a commission, and expressed their readiness, by the same vote, to accept him as a comrade and a credit to the service; this step being an indispensable prelude to a commission. Whereupon the King was graciously pleased to sign his commission as second lieutenant, a rank which he had contentedly held for six years, and may hold still, for aught I know to the contrary. He wore the medals for 1866; he had commanded the company for the last two months, because his seniors had been killed off; he was looking forward with hope to be a premier lieutenant in the course of another year, and a captain in perhaps ten more. His pay in war-time was about 11_l._ 10_s._ a month, in peace he had not much more than about half as much. And he was a thoroughly contented, even-minded, German gentleman, proud of the service, proud that he bore a commission in it, very hungry for the Iron Cross, fond of fun, and fonder still of work and fighting. I have simply cited him as a typical example; his fellows were as like him as peas. Who would not like to see a few peas of such a pod in the British army?

Reluctantly obliged to quit the front, as the result of the accident already alluded to, I spent the time from the 14th to the morning of the 18th invalided in Saarbrück. Having partially recovered, and reaching Remilly early in the forenoon of the 18th, I found ready to start five fourgons belonging to the English Ambulance Company. These were about to start for a journey round Metz, and I had the opportunity afforded me of a seat in one of the carriages. Our journey to Corny lay behind the foreposts through a chain of villages in the rear of the great bulk of the Prussian regiments in the south of Metz. As we passed Pontoy we emerged on the upland plateau lying to the south of Forts Queleu and St. Privat, and before us to the north lay those sulky-looking fortresses which refused to be enlivened even by the rays of the afternoon sun which fell full on their sullen sides. St. Privat was speaking with its great guns, firing in the direction of the Moselle, but close to us lay a German field battery in utter quiescence, sure token that nothing of importance was going on. At dusk we reached Corny, and applied to the Etappen Commandant for quarters. His answer was an imperative suggestion of the same character as that which the Gardes Mobiles made to Mr. Malet on his way from Paris to Meaux. We had no resource but to sleep under the beautiful stars. They were fortunately in our case visible, and we bivouacked not uncomfortably in an orchard outside the town, which was greatly preferable to finding harbour in any of the houses of Corny, infected as they were to the very ceiling with malignant typhus. A visit for purposes of information to the fine old château occupied by Prince Frederick Charles resulted in my being told that the parlementaire which came out a day or two previous had returned into Metz without any definite result, and that it was believed that Metz would now hold out to the bitter end. Further, that there was to be no change in the Prussian tactics. Still “masterly inactivity” was to be the policy, and the intelligence received from Metz of a reliable character was of a nature to indicate that this policy could not possibly, ere long, fail to effect the desired results. Prince Frederick Charles had been suffering seriously from dysentery, and was still far from fully recovered, but he was able to sit his horse, and he had never devolved his functions of commander-in-chief on any substitute.

Corny lies in a trough on the edge of the Moselle, shut out from even a distant view of Metz by two curious conical hills, which are part of the series of which the hill of Mousson and the range of St. Quentin and Plappeville are also summits. The peak nearest the river and also nearest Metz is known as the Mont St. Blaise. Its elevation is considerable, and its position renders it highly eligible as a look-out station. On its summit there was an observatory, and this observatory I visited on the morning of the 19th, notwithstanding the black looks of those in authority in Corny. The whole hilltop is honeycombed with artificial caves, formed, I suppose, in the old days, when the ruin on the summit was a castle inhabited by some magnate of Lorraine, who from his eyrie here dominated the beautiful plain before him, and the valley of the Moselle. Alongside of this ruin, and at an equal elevation, stands a lonely farmhouse, and in front of it the Germans had erected a wooden look-out post, open toward Metz, and mounted with a very powerful telescope. Not a man could move within the scope of vision that the action was not noted by the officer who constantly sat with his eye at this instrument. A series of telegraph wires from the several head-quarters of the different army corps converged into a little office in the rear of this look-out post, and the intentions of the French were thus known as soon as they proceeded to manifest them by action. The post was occupied by two officers belonging to the Second Army Corps—and they had at their disposal a detachment of soldiers to act as orderlies, messengers, &c. What a glorious view opened out before me as I stood on the little plateau in front of the ruin of the Castle of St. Blaise, and looked Metz-ward! On the left lay the narrow valley of the Moselle, with the slope of the vinebergs in front of Gorze rising beyond. At our feet, to the left, lay Ars-sur-Moselle, skirted by the railway, with the old Roman aqueduct spanning the Moselle with its antique arches, and the new road-bridge nearer Montigny, where is the junction of the railway lines from Nancy and from Saarbrück. A locomotive was dodging about the junction as I looked down upon it, and right before me stretched the rich and beautiful plain, variegated with green and brown and yellow, according to the tint of the crops and the foliage, and with the great twin tower of the Cathedral of Metz standing up defiantly in its centre. The river wound through the flat in three great stretches: one close under the frowning bulk of Mont St. Quentin, that sulked blackly across at us on the left front; the other twisting in a long half-loop far away to the right. As it seemed immediately under us, Fort St. Privat peeped spitefully out over the poplars surrounding the pretty village and château of Cuvry, and further to my right the grim earthwork front of Fort Queleu showed itself over the plain like a huge beaver-dam. The prospect was vast. Carrying the eye over the spires of the cathedral, I could see to the north of Metz the long link of the Moselle trending eastward toward Olgy and Malroy, and with the powerful telescope in position I could even discern St. Eloy and beyond it the blackened ruins of St. Rémy, Ladonchamps, and Grandes and Petites Tapes, where on the 7th I had seen the Landwehrmen die in their tracks rather than yield the post they held, although bidden thereto by an overwhelming number of enemies. It may be interesting to give the positions of the hostile forces as seen from this summit, since the status quo then visible was unaltered when the capitulation took place.

To begin at the now well-known Mercy-le-Haut. Opposite this point the French were in force in front of Grigy, from which position they, on the previous night, had burnt the remaining houses of Peltre. Working westward, the French foreposts were in Bevoye, Magny, in front of Montigny, and thence across the Moselle, at Moulins-les-Metz, which had been burnt about a fortnight previously. From Moulins the forepost line ran up toward St. Hubert, between St. Ruffine and Chazelles, hence in front of Scy through the valley close under Mont St. Quentin to Lessy, and thence northward with a slight sweep allowed by Plappeville to Lorry, and thence to Vigneulles and Woippy. The completion of the circle I have already detailed. The German foreposts, commencing from the right, stood at Peltre, and thence westward in front of St. Thiebauldt, and in la Papeterie (opposite Magny). Then there was a sweep comparatively close to Metz, as the Moselle was neared, and the Teuton foreposts stood impudently at Frescaty, whence the sentries must have been able almost to discern the complexions of the gunners in St. Privat. The line crossed the Moselle to Vaux, considerably in front of Ars-sur-Moselle, and then made a dart forward to Jussy, right under the guns of St. Quentin. Longeau, where there was a battery of 12-pounders, continued the chain to Chatel St. Germain. Across the plateau and the wood of Chatel ran the links of the strong forepost chain, giving a wide berth to the big guns of Plappeville, behind Lorry, through the Bois de Vigneulles to Saulny, from Saulny, still further north-east, to Villers-le-Plesnois, and so by Norroy to the bloodstained Ladonchamps, and the villages whose names are known in connection with the combat of the 7th, to the Moselle at Maxe.

So much for the positions of the two hostile armies in this portion of the investiture. A few words now as to the position of the French inside their outposts yet outside the town of Metz, the gates of which were sealed to Bazaine’s army as rigorously as was the road to liberty. The French had in all, in the environed space and outside Metz, four great lagers or camps. The first and probably the largest was on the slope of Mont St. Quentin, looking toward Mont St. Blaise. I could see the rows of tents athwart and athwart the slope, past the village of Scy, and stretching almost down to Chazelles. Another great camp almost joined the first at Longeville, a village on the west bank of the Moselle, and this lager straggled up the river margin first to Ban St. Martin, where Bazaine had his head-quarters, and so on to the north as far as Devant-les-Ponts. A third camp was in front of St. Julien, toward Vantoux, Vallieres, &c., concerning which detailed information has already been given. The fourth camp was around Borny and Grigy. Besides those camps of soldiers there seemed two great collections of sick, so far as I could discern through the telescope of the observatory. One of those was placed on the esplanade of the town of Metz, and along the river brink. I saw the sick being carried about on stretchers, and the curtains of the tents looped up to give air to the inmates. Another great sick camp seemed to be on the Island of Sauley, where it was believed the cases of typhus fever were as much as possible isolated.

After quitting Corny on the 19th, our way lay across the river by Noveant, the means of transit being a pontoon bridge. Just outside Corny we came on a graveyard, which the Germans had improvised for the bodies of those who had died in the hospitals there, whether from sickness or wounds. They were burying the dead now in deal coffins, but the coffins were put in the ground with very scant ceremony. I saw a fatigue party putting a couple into a hole, the coffins lying on the grass while the men dug their receptacle.

Gorze was very much changed for the better since the last time I had visited it in the days of blood. From the summit of the great convent on the hill there still was flying the hospital flag; but under it lay few or no wounded men. The hotel was tenanted by the cheery officers of the staff of Prince Louis of Hesse, who commanded the troops lying in the town, consisting of several regiments of Hessian men, with the lion instead of the eagle on their helmets. The inhabitants had all come back to their houses, and lived not alone on amicable, but seemingly on cordial terms with the stalwart Hessians billeted upon them. Madame of the hotel, who in August had moved about in a stolid apathy of despair, utterly disregarding any questions that might be put to her, and with hardly energy enough to wring her hands, was now blithe and sprightly, moving about briskly in response to the requirements of her numerous guests. The stains that blood had made on the floors were still visible—indelible probably while the boarding lasts, but Madame’s despair was much more evanescent, and with her return to good spirits the landlady’s instinct of charging stiff prices had returned. In August, when I asked her whether I should pay her anything for the quasi shelter I had had for the night under her roof, she only stared blankly in my face, and I could not get an answer from her. Now, when I asked her whether she could give me a bottle of good wine, she eagerly replied in the affirmative, and placed before me a really good bottle of Muscat, for which she put on, with a smiling face, the fancy price of twelve francs.

The road from Gorze to Rezonville consists, first of an ascent through a narrow gorge into a corner of the Bois de Vionville, and then it traverses the plain in a line with the close of the battle of Vionville on the 16th of August. On the bleak October forenoon all that we saw in the way of traces of the fights of August were the many graves and occasional heaps of the _débris_ of the battle-field. But another sense than that of sight bore testimony to tokens of carnage. Every grave-heap had beside it an eccentric tombstone in the shape of a barrel of chloride of lime; yet, notwithstanding this disinfectant, the taint in the air was unmistakable and indescribably fœtid. In the village of Rezonville were still some of the more severely wounded, and the doctors were heartily glad to see the stores which the English ambulance fourgons contained. At Rezonville the troops were Hessians, belonging to the 7th Army Corps. After a short halt, to enable Mr. Lee to distribute his stores judiciously, we pressed on to Gravelotte, where we were most cordially received by the officers of a battery of artillery quartered there. Afterwards we were permitted to go on to the foreposts in front of Chatel St. Germain, looking over to Fort St. Julien. The chain of sentries stood just where it had done on the morning of the 20th of August, looking down into the intervening valley. The French had a large cavalry forepost in the bottom of the valley. On the slope around the pretty village of Scy lay the white tents of the French camp which I had seen on the previous day from the top of Mont St. Blaise. Walking some half a mile in the direction of the Moselle, we came presently on a promontory that juts out into the valley, and commands a view of the whole country. It seemed that at our very feet lay the huge pile of the Cathedral; the tin on its spires flashing up in a watery ray of the morning sun, and the great mass casting a dark shadow across the Place d’Armes. On the Isle of Sauley we could see the “isolated” crawling about the river’s edge, and between the ramparts and the great southern camp a locomotive was at work on the railway.

As we walked back from the extreme foreposts we passed many rifle-pits on the crest of the rising ground forming the sentry-line, and also a regularly-constructed battery, with earthworks in front and casemates and magazine in the rear. On the platform were mounted six 12-pounders, and in the rear, near Chatel, were several batteries of field artillery. The 12-pounders looked across at Fort St. Julien in the most impudent manner imaginable, as if to say, “Your fortress exists only on our sufferance; we could blow you to little pieces with a round or two if we chose, but we prefer leaving you alone, out of our tender mercy.” And St. Quentin, on its part, seemed to look across at the 12-pounders with something of a risus sardonicus on its grim grey features.

Returning to Gravelotte, we set out for the completion of our design to make the circuit of the Prussian position. Our road lay past the blackened ruins of Malmaison, in which, on the afternoon of the 18th of August, 200 French wounded were burnt, by shells fired from French guns. The smell in the shell, which was all that remained of a once large mansion, was horrible. The tiles had fallen in and hidden the charred corpses of the miserables who perished in the conflagration; but here and there projected a ghastly blackened hand, or a gartered leg swathed in discoloured red cloth. The place was one vast horrible grave, never to be thought of without a shudder. In a lonely upland valley we came upon the forlorn and ruined hamlet of Champenoise, utterly burnt out, smashed and pounded in all directions with shells, pitted all over with the dents of chassepot bullets, and its precincts full of mounds, below which lay, side by side, defenders and captors. Further to the north, in the rear of Amanvilliers, was a twin battery to the one at Gravelotte, very daintily constructed, and fenced round with _chevaux de frise_, and I rather think some pleasant little surprises in the shape of mines. From Amanvilliers the road trended away to the left to avoid the entrenchments in the vicinity of the foreposts at Saulny, and presently reached the village of Jerusalem. Lying in a sequestered and somewhat isolated tract, few students of war literature have heard much about this tiny namesake of the great Hebrew city of antiquity. Nevertheless, it was the scene of a terrible conflict on the evening of the 18th of August. It had its Titus in General von Pape, but there was no Josephus to chronicle the episodes of the fray. Yet as eloquently as any pen could have described them were they indicated now by the silent yet expressive grave-tokens sown thickly all round the little spot, whose ruin was so utter that it might, to complete the parallel with its namesake of old, have been sown with salt.

Quitting the plateau lying to the north-west of Fort Plappeville, we drove through a great wood, chiefly of underbrush, and suddenly came out on a bluff overhanging the valley of the Moselle. Our point was just before Feves, and the view was glorious. Moy before us in the valley, one could easily trace the line of the German foreposts stretching across to the river; nearer to Metz again was the French line, and behind it the white tents of the camps, with columns of troops moving about in the interval. We could see the zig-zags of Fort Moselle, and of the enceinte surrounding the town. At Feves, just below us, and in a splendid position, was a battery of 12-pounders, the same that I had seen speaking to such good purpose on the afternoon of the 7th. Getting down into the valley, we crossed the Thionville road, and struck for the temporary wooden barracks erected on the railway to the right front of Maizières, in which was quartered the Fusilier battalion of the 81st Regiment, which had distinguished itself in Ladonchamps on the night of the 7th. In front of the Baracken was another battery of 12-pounders, and on the other side of Maizières, before the Chateau of Amelange, stood yet another. We crossed the river at Hautconcourt, and came down to Charly in the gloaming. Next morning I quitted my good friends of the fourgons, and struck across for my old comrades of the 4th Regiment, whom I found quartered in Château Gras, a little village some half-mile to the north rear of Retonfay.

Among the “kent faces” that greeted me after my absence I missed one or two whom I had learnt to reckon friends. The adjutant of the battalion, a joyous lad fresh from the schools, a youngster of eighteen summers, had succumbed to the hardships of the situation. The marrow was not “set” in the growing boy’s bones, and where seasoned men found it not an easy matter to keep sickness from assailing them with success, the dart had penetrated through his green frame, and he had been compelled to go back to the Fatherland, a shattered veteran ere he had attained his full stature. I missed, too, another face, that of a lieutenant, whose determination to consider himself well while as yet the fever had not left him, I had respected in one sense, while in another I had deprecated. Wounded in the fight by Noisseville on the 1st of September, he had been sent back to St. Wendel, where in the lazarette fever had laid hold of him. His wound healed, and the fever in part abated, the soldier lusted to be again with his comrades in the forefront of the battle, and he had quitted the lazarette while as yet the dregs of the fever had not been eliminated from his frame. On the day of his arrival he lay beside me on the straw, with the alternate cold and hot fits working their will of him, and then I told him that his return had been premature. My words were made good by the fact that two days after the doctor had peremptorily insisted on his return to St. Wendel, and so he had gained nothing by his enterprise save another strain on his constitution.

A friend had kindly kept for me a little diary of the siege events on this face which had occurred since my retirement to Saarbruck, but they were of so little importance as not to call for reproduction. The only actual sortie made by the French troops, and that in comparatively small numbers, had been on the 16th, in the direction of the Brewery. Of course they were driven back. They could have hoped for nothing else. All the damage they did was to shoot through the chest the Feldwebel of the 6th Company. King Wilhelm had no better non-commissioned officer in all his vast army. Strauss smoked his cigar while the doctor cut the bullet out of his back, the lieutenant beside whom he was shot holding him up while the operation was being performed. Then he quietly squared up his company-book, and counting the money in his hands (the Feldwebel is the pay-sergeant of the company), handed everything over to his successor in right trim, and went away philosophically in the waggon to a lazarette. Deserters had become so numerous as to engender a suspicion that there was a design for depleting the garrison by this device, and so eking out the stores of food. A few deserters are useful, and not to be discouraged. Assume that none of them speak the truth; King David tells us that “all men are liars,” and yet from our fellow-men’s utterances we contrive to extract some grains of truth. In like manner a little wheat can be winnowed out of the chaff of a deserter’s farragos, and one or two are acceptable. But now that their name was legion, the order had been issued to receive no more bodies of deserters into the lines, but to send them back whence they came by the powerful argument of the needle-gun. How was it that so many of the deserters were drunk when they came in? Was strong drink on tap in the outposts round Metz, or were the men dosed for the attempt? The latter hypothesis might seem to be borne out by the fact, of which I was assured, not by French prisoners alone, but by German doctors who had administered to the French wounded, that the French tirailleurs who pushed so boldly to the front at Maizières on the 7th were all full of brandy. Ichabod! Ichabod! How had the glory departed from the French arms when the leaders were compelled to infuse Dutch courage into their soldiers! The French were the readiest to scorn the Russian serf-soldier because, when he came up through the fog wreaths on the morning of Inkermann, his sluggish pulses had been quickened by corn-schnaps. Now, it seemed that they found the same unsoldier-like stimulant requisite in their own case.

I have heard Count Bismarck compared to an elephant’s trunk, as one for whom nothing was too great or too small. But Bismarck was not the only German in this war who looked after all little matters as well as the great. I was much amused by an item in one of the orders of the day from Prince Frederick Charles’s head-quarters. It was to the effect that whereas an unprincipled rascal of a Hamburg cigar merchant had been selling boxes of cigars to the troops, the upper tier of which consisted of good weeds while the lower ones were unmitigated trash, the military authorities of any place where this astute gentleman should present himself, were enjoined to lay hold of him and transmit him to the head-quarters at Corny. At such an entry one may smile, but I defy him to refrain from respecting the all-pervading care and watchfulness which took cognisance of such a matter as this. In such care and watchfulness lay the root of much of the Prussian success. A campaign is not made victorious by dint of fighting alone; success more than half depends on efficient organisation, even as regards seeming trifles.

Château Gras must have been a beautiful village before the tide of war came and strewed sand and shingle over its charms. A fine old chateau is the principal building in it, the noble garden of which had been very little injured, while the furniture had also suffered very little. In a room on the ground floor the books still stood on the long ranges of shelves upon the wail. So careful were the Germans to prevent injury to property that on the door of every room occupied by them was pasted an inventory of its contents, for which the successive occupants were held responsible, just as in a barrack at home. The chateau till lately had been a large Feldlazarette, occupied by the wounded of the fights before Noisseville of the 31st of August and 1st of September. The smell of the chloride of lime was still so powerful in the beautiful rooms that some of the officers preferred more modest quarters in the houses of the village. When the owner of the chateau came back he must have shuddered at the legacy the war had left him. Of the wounded in the great lazarette, not a few had succumbed before the grim king of terrors. In a quiet corner of the garden, looking out through the trees on to St. Julien, St. Quentin, les Bottes, and the great towers of the cathedral in the centre of the plain, is a graveyard, where lie those who died of their wounds in the lazarette. It is prettily enclosed with a wooden paling. The one great grave, over 100 yards in length, is banked up with green sods, and the surface trimly raked. It is flanked up by a great wooden cross bearing the simple inscription:—“Hier ruhen 285 Preussische und 5 Französische tapfere Krieger.” There are besides several graves of officers, which are adorned with box-wood crosses planted in the soil and with wreaths of immortelles.

By the 25th of October the symptoms grew more and more pronounced of a speedy ending to the siege, apart altogether from the accounts of negociations which we had from line to head-quarters. On the night of the 24th I had a conversation with a deserter whose information seemed of considerable exactitude and apparent truthfulness. He spoke of a rapid and continuous diminution in the rations served out to the troops, and of increasing irregularity in the supply. Eight days back the bread ration had been half a pound a day for each man; now it was reduced to four ounces, and there was difficulty in procuring this morsel. The man understood that the Imperial Guards who lay around Bazaine at Ban St. Martin, received rather more food than the other troops, and they were used by reason of their superior discipline and their greater contentment as a means of keeping in some semblance of order the line regiments. To each peloton a live horse was given per day, but the man described the brutes as consisting of little else than bones and hide. There can be little wonder that the number of sick was greatly on the increase under such circumstances. Out of 800 men of which this man’s battalion consisted, 200 were sick and unfit for duty. Those who were nominally able men were, he said, in a state of great weakness, and certainly his own appearance corroborated this statement.

Various statements appeared to have been made within the last day or two by the French generals to their troops, to keep them from falling into utter despondency. Another deserter brought out a cock and bull story about a general order, to the effect that the Empress was to arrive in Metz on the 25th, and to assume the supreme power, and that then on the next day the whole army was to march away to the north by permission of the Germans. The authorities seemed to interpret these and kindred statements as giving intimation of a sortie in force towards the north on the 26th. The line to the north of Metz on both sides of the river was accordingly greatly strengthened, and the troops in the third line all round were called out at five o’clock in the morning of that day, in positions enabling them to act efficiently as reserves and supports for the first and second lines. These precautions were no doubt wise, yet on the face of things it seemed that a sortie was physically impossible. It had rained with hardly any intermission for three days, and was still raining. Except where the macadam of the chaussées afforded a hard bottom under the mud, it was impossible to traverse the country on foot. One floundered helplessly in the slippery stuff till he got to a deeper place than usual, and then had to struggle vehemently to prevent himself from sticking outright. No regiment could have kept its formation in ground so holding; and to move artillery or train, except on the macadamised roads, must have been utterly impossible. Following the caution of the Germans, I rode round early to Malroy to be on the ground, if anything, contrary to my belief, should take place; but the alarm, as I had anticipated, turned out to be false.

The 26th October was a great day with us in Château-Gras. Metz had not quite capitulated. There had been no sortie. The rain was coming down unceasingly, and the country was one huge slush. But nevertheless, I repeat, it was a great day with us. It was our doctor’s birthday, and there was no reason why we should not keep it, while the generals were finishing the more serious business. Our doctor was a man unknown to fame, but he deserved it more than many a man who has earned it. He was of the fighting jolly style of medico; although his business was to cure wounds, he had no objection, but the contrary, to cut out work for himself. If you had met him in Cork, you would unhesitatingly have set him down as a native, with his merry black eyes, wide laughing mouth, and—how shall I put it delicately?—his nose with the Hibernian bend. And it was the birthday of this excellent fellow.

I could not make out in the morning why _appel_ was hurried over so rapidly; but I was soon to learn. The adjutant tucked my arm under his, and marched me off into the chateau. Of the _salle_ the officers had made a mess-room, and it was into this fine apartment that the adjutant guided me about ten o’clock in the morning. We were one and all, it seemed, the guests of the doctor on this the anniversary of his natal morn. Nor was the doctor hospitable without the means. A certain good lady, calling him husband, and dwelling in Königsberg, had not forgotten the day, and, as a birthday present, had sent her good man a great chest. The sum total of the contents of that chest, the world through me can never know. The enumeration I heard indeed, but I lost the tally when the doctor was about half through with it. Suffice it to say that the table groaned under a load of delicacies. I had seen a telegram from Berlin, to the effect that the troops before Metz were living on mutton. The telegraphist would have opened his eyes had he dropped in this morning. There was Schinken and boiled ham, there was a German sausage, as big as the good heart of the doctor’s wife, there was a snug little barrel of sardellen, pickled with bay leaves; there was German gingerbread and rusks; there was fresh butter, and there was compot of plums, and I don’t know what all else. Then, for drink, there was the choice of Malaga and claret, rum, brandy, Hamburg bitters, and absinthe, and a hearty welcome to season all. We had a curious way of eating in the foreposts, what may be styled, a miscellaneous manner of feeding. Sausage, gingerbread, sardines, and compot, were seen on one plate at once, and served to season one another in a very impartial way. I don’t think the doctor could reasonably have complained of the appetites which were brought to his feast. He had one appetite of which he could have had no anticipation. Just as we were in the middle of the feast, a miserable devil of a French deserter was brought in from the foreposts. I never before saw the wolfish glare of absolute hunger darting from a man’s eyes. Wet, dirty, half-rotten, seemingly from scurvy, with puffed lips, and hollow cheeks, this gaunt spectacle of a man devoured the food with his great staring eyes. He could not reply to any questions, so concentrated was he upon his gaze at the meaty ham-bone, and when the Hauptmann threw it to him, it positively made one shudder to see the dog-like style in which he fell a-worrying of it. When all, including, I hope, the poor wretch in the lobby, had eaten their fill, the senior Hauptmann called for full glasses, and in a neat speech proposed the doctor’s health. The doctor was very waggish in his reply. He suggested we should dedicate a bumper to St. Julien and les Bottes, because they had been courteous enough not to intervene to the detriment of the crockeryware, and expressed, further, a fervent wish that Bazaine were making one of the company. By twelve o’clock the doctor was drunk out—that is, his stores were—but a happy thought struck a lieutenant concerning a barrel of beer which he had in his room. This was fetched, and its contents went the way of the doctor’s stores.

As we broke up, I heard the word go round that there would be a “picnic” in the evening. One is apt to associate the idea of a picnic with leafy glades, blue muslin, bad champagne, and lobster salad. None of these _agréments_ had we in Château Gras. The rain was falling fast, the winter wind was blowing bitterly, and the idea of a picnic seemed about as wild as would have been the suggestion of an oratory. But nevertheless the “picnic” came off, although not quite according to my preconceived notions of this institution. It was an indoor picnic; in point of fact, it took place in the hall where the doctor gave his breakfast. It was on the mutual co-operation principle—everybody was expected to bring something. My contribution was a box of sardines, a lump of butter, and a bottle of rum. I am afraid this was not quite up to the general mark; but what I had I gave—I could no more. I stood in the lobby awhile, watching the arrivals and their several contributions. One Hauptmann was accompanied by his servant carrying half-a-dozen of red wine, a lieutenant had a leg of mutton and a bag full of sugar under his cloak. The hall looked quite civilised. On the great round table in the centre stood an actual moderator lamp, with a painted shade atop of it, its pedestal resting on a mat. Talk of war times, here was refinement with a vengeance. A great wood fire blazed cheerfully on the hearth, and the glasses—somewhat nondescript in shape and size, it is true—sparkled on the board. After a brief pause, the first service of tipple was brought in, contained in a white soup tureen and an antique china vase. The drink was very good. I regret being unable to furnish the recipe for its composition. I may state, however, that among the ingredients were red wine, white wine, rum, cognac, schnapps, cloves, and cinnamon; of the proportions of each I could learn nothing. I incline to the opinion that a “stock” pot with the red wine was put on, and, as contributions came in, that they were emptied into the pot promiscuously.

For about two hours conversation, alternated with story-telling, was the order of the evening. The talk fell once upon the causes of the French defeats, and after various explanations had been started, a sententious premier lieutenant, who had not previously opened his mouth, struck in with this original illustration and very sound theory:—“The chief rabbi of the Dantzic Jews had taken a new house, and his flock determined to stock his wine butt for him. An evening was set apart for the affair, and one after another the Jews went down into the cellar, and emptied each his bottle into the big vat. When the rabbi came next day to draw off his dinner wine, he found there was nothing in the cask but water. Each and every Jew had said to himself, that one bottle of water could never be noticed in so great a quantity of wine, and all acting up to this, the rabbi had not got a drop of wine in his butt. Now it was just the same with the French army. One soldier said to himself that it would not matter a copper if he sneaked away—in so great a multitude he would not be missed. But the devil of it was, that one and all took this line of reasoning, and the result was that nobody was left to look our battalions in the face.” Everybody laughed at the premier lieutenant’s quaint illustration, and then we had a stand-up supper at the sideboard. That finished, singing was the order of the evening. It surprised me not a little when one of the officers struck up “My hearts in the Highlands,” and almost all were able to chime, not alone with the tune, but the words. The doctor treated us to a composition of his own, composed to illustrate passing events, for the burden of it was—“The Bois de Grimont oh!” The Bois de Grimont was the wood out of which the French sharp-shooters so persistently peppered away at our foreposts. Encouraged by the success of this effort, he gave us another song _pour l’occasion_, the chorus of which mixed up “Mercy-le-Haut,” and “Ter Teufel,” in some mysterious manner. It may interest the British music-hall patrons to know that a translation of “The Captain with the whiskers” is one of the chiefest favourites with the German officers. They rattle away at its lively chorus with great delight. We had it to-night over and over again. At ten o’clock the “stock” pot being empty, we broke up with great joviality, and betook ourselves each unto his respective straw.