PUCELLA RAPTA.

After all our long waiting from day to day in anticipation of the capitulation of Metz, that event came upon us with a strange suddenness. It had only been a few days previously that it was mentioned in the general orders from head-quarters that the negotiations had been definitively broken off; and when men heard this they set their teeth hard, and prepared for another spell of waiting, variegated with fighting. But there had been symptoms of the end being imminent in the haggard deserters who came among us from day to day, with their longing looks at our black bread and flesh. Orders had been issued to the railway people in Saarbrück to have material in readiness for repairing the railway communication direct into Metz; and this was another symptom. But still, when the report ran round the regiment, on the afternoon of the 27th, that the capitulation had actually been negotiated, some found it difficult to realise the fact—confirmation was wanting. It was true that the day before the generals commanding the several army corps had been summoned to Frescaty by an order of Prince Frederick Charles, and that some of us had the “straight tip” under promise of the profoundest secrecy; but everything looked so much in the ordinary way, that people could not realise the fact of the capitulation. Men went on the field watch as usual, and the confronting foreposts still continued to exchange shots. No white flag was visible, and the unbelieving Thomases of the 4th shrugged their shoulders, and would have none of the tidings. But general orders are convincing arguments, and even the unbelieving Thomases took to clapping their hands and capering, when the news came under the sign manual of the chief of the staff.

At twelve o’clock on the forenoon of the 28th each of the outlying fortresses was taken possession of by two battalions of German infantry, a squadron of cavalry, one heavy battery without tumbrils, 100 artillerymen with the complement of officers, and an engineer detachment. The following is the apportionment of the force of occupation. The troops occupying

St. Quentin were found by 18th Infantry Division. Plappeville ” ” 3rd Army Corps. St. Julien ” ” 1st Army Corps. Queleu ” ” 8th Army Corps. St. Privat ” ” Hessian Division.

At the same hour a battalion of the 7th Army Corps marched forward, and took possession of the Porte Serpenoise, one of the gates of Metz, and another battalion from the same corps occupied the Porte Moselle. Two hours before the occupation of the forts, I should observe, there were sent forward from each of the occupying detachments an artillery officer and a small body of under officers, accompanied by engineers, to take over the powder magazines and the respective forts, and they sent out the report to the effect that all was in order before the troops were allowed to march in. This precaution was no doubt dictated by a recollection of the catastrophe at Laon.

It was in orders that at one o’clock on the 28th the French army should formally lay down its arms. By reason of the confusion which reigned everywhere this disarmament was protracted and piecemeal, a large proportion of the force not disburdening themselves of the now useless arms till the following morning. There was no set ceremony, yet the affair was imposing from its very simplicity. It was conducted in detail, each corps laying down its arms in the neighbourhood of its own station. I saw several regiments of the 3rd Corps d’Armée—that of Lebœuf—disarm themselves. In straggling masses the men defiled past, piling their arms in great heaps at the word of command from their own officers, who laid down their swords as the men did their chassepots, building quite a little heap of them to the right of the great stacks of rifles. The disarmed French troops then returned into their bivouacs, which they occupied for one night more, before quitting for other bivouacs round which should stand German sentries. For this last night they preserved a semblance of freedom. The Germans left them to themselves. Except in the forts and at the two gates I have mentioned, not a spiked helmet was to be seen nearer Metz than had been seen a week before. The _Feldwachen_ were mounted as usual, the _replis_ were established, and the troops stood fast as ever in their long and weary watch around Metz. Indeed, in the course of the night there was a slight skirmish somewhere between Vautoux and Mey, conducted on their own account, as I afterwards learned, by a few men who thought proper to repudiate the capitulation. So late as when I passed Little Belle Croix on the forenoon of the 29th, I heard a few dropping shots on the slope to the right, but whether they were fired in anger I never was able to learn.

On the morning of the 29th October—sombre day for the French arms—the Frenchmen came forth and rendered themselves to their captors—corps by corps, and under the command of their own officers. The 6th Corps (Canrobert’s) came from its bivouac by Woippy to Ladonchamps, where on the 7th so many of its members had stained the soil with their blood. Their prison-bivouac was on the plain in the rear of the wrecked and burnt village. The 7th Corps, that of Ladmirault, came out over the ridge between St. Quentin and Plappeville, and found quarters, inhospitable enough I fear, on the bleak plateau of St. Maurice. The Imperial Guard marched down to Longeville, crossed the railway bridge at Tournebride, passed on to Frescaty to the left, and found their bivouac in the plain between Orly and Augny. The garrison of Metz itself, consisting of about 20,000 men, chiefly of Mobile Guards, marched by Le Sablon, past the ruined village of Magny, and so forward to the outskirts of St. Thiebauldt. The 2nd Corps (Frossard’s), with Laveauconfied’s division, and the 4th brigade came out past La Posette on the great Strasburg chaussée, and found their bivouac behind the village of Ars Laquenexy. The 3rd Corps (that of Lebœuf) came out among us of the 1st German Army Corps along the chaussée leading to Saarlouis.

Each corps, as it marched out, was received by the German troops covering the respective section of the environment. They were led by their own officers, who formally handed over their men to the German officers, and then they were at liberty to quit their ranks and return to Metz, there to wait the trains which should convey them into captivity across the German Rhine. It should be mentioned that their parole was accepted from none of the officers of the army of Metz, a stringency adopted in consequence of the numerous defaults of honour perpetrated by officers released on parole after having been made prisoners. The men under the command of their under-officers were then marched out to the bivouac places, which had previously been partly prepared, wood for fires having been collected and a supply of provisions being ready for distribution.

I was with the 1st Army Corps when it took up its position to receive the corps of Lebœuf. From all the villages around, the villages inhabited for so many weary weeks, the villages made memorable by fights, by burnings, by graves, by sickness, and by deaths, streamed the regiments on to the chaussée. There had been much rain during the night, and although the sun broke out about ten o’clock, the watery haze hung about the bottoms of the valleys and the mud splashed as the troops strode through it. Mud! why we had had nothing but mud for weeks, and should we mind it now, looking at the errand on which we are bound? No. The “Wacht am Rhein” rises lustily from the pioneers in the front, and the regiments as they come down the side roads catch up the strain. On we go past the Brewery, with the grenade pits, the graves, and the entrenchments around it—itself a mere heap of shattered bricks—on to the gentle slope behind the village of Lauvallière. Then right and left wheeled the heavy columns, leaving the chaussée open, and a parallelogram of about 100 feet in width on each side of it. In front of the Brewery stood the artillery, before the artillery the serried ranks of brass-spiked helmets all the way down the gentle slope, almost to Lauvallière. Arms were piled, and there the Germans waited for the advent of the men with which it almost seemed, through the length of time that the armies had confronted each other, that they could claim a kind of personal acquaintance. While the troops waited I pushed forward towards Metz to meet the Frenchmen. Already, it is true, we had plenty of Frenchmen, but they were all civilians, and there were Frenchwomen too, and French children. The road had been opened in the morning, and they came crowding out, the poor creatures who had abandoned their village homes and crowded into the town when the pennons of the Uhlans had shown themselves on the fringes of the villages. On they came, waggon load after waggon load, with their trumpery household goods and their agricultural implements piled on the waggons behind the women and children. They knew not what it was that they had come out for to see. Perhaps they expected to find their cottage homes as they had left them—not roofless, wrecked, utterly ruined, as was the grim reality. Lauvallière seemed to give the first shock to their cheerfulness. Gaunt and grim stood its houses, burnt to the shell, the graves lying all around, the holes in the fields where the shells had burst, the breastworks behind which had stood the German foreposts. As each waggon and each knot of peasants came into Lauvallière there was a halt, and full many a “Mon Dieu!” In Lauvallière there was a large tannery, which must have employed many workmen, and been an important and profitable concern. It was now a mere shell—not a fragment of the woodwork is left. I chanced upon its owner standing on the bluff over against his property, and gazing upon it in moody silence. Twenty paces farther on I came on a little group, the extreme pathos of which made my heart swell. It was a family, and they sat in front of what had once been their home. That home was now roofless. The stones of the walls were all that was left. The garden was a wreck, and the whole scene was concentrated desolation. The husband leant against the wall, his arms folded, and his head on his chest. The wife sat on the wet ground, weeping over the babe at her breast. Two elder children stared around them with wonder and unconcern—too young to realise the misfortune which had overtaken all the family. The silence of the grief-stricken group was more eloquent than any words. No home, no food, a waggon, and a couple of starved horses, a field with four graves in it. This is the brief summary of the belongings and condition of the family. All were alike; although this family was the one I happened to see, because their home lay on my road in Lauvallière, some similar piteous sight must soon have been visible by every house in every village all around Metz. What need for me to occupy space by writing of what every one with a grain of human sympathy in his composition can picture and mourn for himself?

The stream of _émigrés_ continued as I came up the slope on to the flat, on the edge of which lay the improvised fortification of the village of Belle Croix. Belle Croix was ghastly in its utter solitude. Burnt and shattered by German shells, it must nevertheless have been a very strong position. All round the entrenchment across the road, was a moat of some depth. The angles were stockaded, the walls loopholed, and there still stood in position a couple of field guns, which, as the Germans had known to their cost many a time, were located with great skill. Owing to the block caused by the entrenchment the road had been diverted. It had been little enough used before this morning. The grass grew thickly on the chaussée between Lauvallière and Belle Croix. As the peasant waggons came crowding out, they stuck in the heavy mire of this détour, and many were the _sacrés_ before they were started again, the lean horses being too weak to pull them through the heavy ground. When I had passed Belle Croix I could not help owning to myself that I had never till then succeeded in forming a proper conception of the real strength of the natural position of Metz. On the right, with a valley intervening like a deep trench, lay the blunt-topped mountain, crowned by Fort St. Julien. On its slope were the bivouac fires of the troops of Lebœuf. Nothing could venture on this slope—a great natural glacis—so long as Fort St. Julien thought proper to forbid the passage. On my left, also on an eminence, although from the positions whence I had previously seen it, it appeared to be on a flat, lay Fort Queleu, square and massive, dominating the plateau to the left of the chaussée. But this plateau is closed in Metz-ward by a fortification all to itself—the great earthwork of les Bottes, whose grenades had so often burst in disagreeable proximity, and which now stood solitary and empty, with not even a sentry on its earthen summit. Over the top of Fort les Bottes were visible the towers of the cathedral, and the picture was framed in by the background of that great elevated ridge of which the two chief peaks are crowned by Forts St. Quentin and Plappeville.

It was just beyond les Bottes that I met the first French soldier—a cavalryman of the line. The fellow was as drunk as he well could be to be able to move at all. He staggered forward in tacks, dropping his kit piecemeal as he came. At a bend in the road behind Four-à-Chaux, I came upon the head of the prisoner column, marching onward to their reception at the Brewery. The men were in a very miserable state, covered with mud, wet, sodden seemingly, indeed, through and through with wet, many of their faces blotched and scabbed with scurvy, and quite one-third in a state of drunkenness. Not a few were in a state of bestial drunkenness, their clothes disarranged, and decency utterly disregarded. A little farther on, and right and left, lay the great bivouac before Fort Belle Croix. The troops were being collected by their officers in pelotons previously to being marched out, and several columns were already converging on the great chaussée. As each body got the order to go forward a cheer came from the slovenly and dislocated ranks, and from the columns on the march there broke out at intervals a fitful chorus of some lively marching song. Most of the officers were grave, taciturn, and downcast. Surely they must have despised the reckless throng which they nominally commanded. The men obeyed their officers and regarded the sound of the bugle after a fashion, but it was evident that they were utterly unaffected by the catastrophe which had befallen the arms of their country, and were eager only to get somewhere where a full meal of victuals awaited them. Poor wretches, after all it is not fair to be too severe on their disorganisation. How near actual starvation they had come to before their leader would give up the game, their faces pale through the dirt of days, their lean frames with the rags hanging about them, told far more powerfully than protestations, and were the most convincing reply to the easy untruths of those who would have had Europe believe that Metz was betrayed.

Passing the columns of prisoners at a canter, I was back again before the Brewery ere the front of that column had reached the place where stood the Germans waiting for them. The dismounted cavalry came first, followed by the artillery; last of all came the infantry of the line. The cavalry seemed to have lost all self-respect; they greeted the Germans with cheering, and several men broke from the ranks and slouched forward through the mud with intent to salute with a spirituous kiss the German officers standing in front of their companies. It was curious to notice the opposite idiosyncrasies of the two nationalities. Grave and stern stood the German victors, with, as it seemed, a silent pity rather than contempt for the demented tatterdemalions who proffered them the undesirable greeting; while the Frenchmen chattered and gesticulated, “sacréd” and spluttered, sang and laughed, as they slouched through the gauntlet of humiliation. The officers quitted their commands as each reached the alley fringed by the German battalions, and returned to Metz or the vicinity. The prisoners, comprising the whole of the 3rd Corps, till the day before under the command of Lebœuf, and numbering about 23,000 men, were escorted to a position between Château Gras and Retonfay, where was fixed the site for their bivouac. The guards for the French prisoners were contributed in rotation by the several divisions. The daily quota for the bivouac at Château Gras was four battalions of infantry, one battery of artillery, and one squadron of cavalry. In command of it had been placed Colonel von Deitzen Hennig, of the 4th regiment, his adjutant being Lieutenant von Verzin. Food had been collected for the supply of the prisoners, who had, of course, to bivouac in the open air. From the 30th daily drafts, each 3000 strong, were despatched toward Germany _viâ_ Saarbrück and Saarlouis. In all the capture consisted of 173,000 men, including three marshals, forty-seven general officers, and 6000 regimental officers. General Kummer, the general in chief command of the Landwehr, was appointed interim Commandant of Metz. General von Kastrow took the control of all arrangements connected with the transport of the prisoners and the quartermastership generally of the district around Metz and as far as Thionville. The German troops which had formed the besieging army were not, it was arranged, to enter the town, except when marching through. Metz was, with the forts, in the meantime, to be garrisoned by the Division Kummer and the 7th Army Corps. The circle of environment was, however, greatly reduced in size from the day after the surrender. The 2nd Army Corps drew inward to Montigny. The 8th came on to Magny, the 10th to Woippy. The 18th infantry division, charged with the custody of the Imperial Guard, lay now at Longeville, Moulins les Metz, St. Ruffine, and Longeau. The 1st Army Corps came forward closer under the wing of St. Julien. The foreposts were still to be maintained, the chain of communications being kept up just as in the old days. It was anticipated that by seven days all the prisoners would have been sent away.

After I had seen Lebœuf’s command taken over by the 1st Army Corps, I returned towards Metz, meeting on my way a stream of straggling soldiers who had missed their corps, and were staggering out under loads of tents, blankets, and what not. The environs of the town were very desolate and very filthy. Mud, raw horseflesh, burnt-out bivouac fires, huts made of the branches of trees, old women, and skeleton horses, were the leading characteristics. There was no difficulty in getting into the town, where I found the shops all open, but with no great show of edibles. Meat hung in the butchers’ shops, although it was chiefly, if not altogether, horse; the cafés were crowded, and there appeared no exhaustion in the stocks of the shops devoted to the sale of any material. Tobacco was plentiful, wine, spirits, and liqueurs in great abundance. Making my way to the Hôtel de l’Europe, I found it crowded with French officers, and I also found there one Englishman, Dr. Ward, of the International Society for the Succour of the Wounded, who had just been decorated by the French military authorities for his attention to the wounded; and two Americans, Dr. Good, of the same society, and who had also been decorated; and Mr. Eustis, a commercial gentleman, who had spent forty-eight days of the siege in prison under suspicion of being a spy. The spy mania had raged very strongly in Metz. Seventy-eight persons were arrested on suspicion in one day. Eight in all I was told had been shot as convicted spies, including the notorious Shieull, to whose adroitness and accurate information the French believe Von Moltke was indebted for his knowledge of the weakness of the French dispositions on the frontier, and for the hint which he utilised into the successes at Wörth and Weissenburg. The following is a statement of the tariff of prices for food ruling in Metz three days before the capitulation, supplied by the manager of the Hôtel de l’Europe:

Beef 8 francs per lb. Horseflesh 10 centimes to 2 francs per lb.; “choice horse,” the tender loin, fetches the latter price. Eggs 1 franc each; have been 1f. 20c. Fowls 20 francs each. Pike (fish) 8 francs per lb. Coffee 6 francs per lb. Ham 8 francs per lb. Cheese 40 francs per lb. (nominal, all done.) Salt 5 francs per lb. Geese, fat 65 francs per pair paid yesterday. Oats 120 francs per sack of 200lb. Chocolate 5 francs per lb. Bread White, none since 16th October; brown, 41⁄2 sous per lb. Mutton None for two months. Wine Plentiful, and old prices maintained; bottle of champagne for 7 francs.

Notwithstanding these extraordinary prices, the tariff in the Hôtel de l’Europe was much the same as usual. I dined there in the evening at the _table d’hôte_ for seven francs, including half a bottle of wine. Breakfast was _à la carte_, about seven francs; bottle of champagne, seven francs. We had four courses for dinner, the waiter said none were horseflesh, and it is not seemly to call even a waiter a liar. The room was crowded with French officers. I dined at the same table with Colonel Michel Ney, a nephew of the historical Marshal. He had received some half-dozen sabre-wounds in the cavalry fight at Vionville, and was only half recovered. At the same table also sat General Duplessis, a French officer of distinction, who also had been severely wounded. In the evening there was a tremendous rush of German officers into the hotel, and quarters became impossible at any price. Forty officers were sent bedless away from the Hôtel de l’Europe, and I was indebted to a good-hearted American for half his bed. The French and German officers fraternized a little in the _salle_ after dinner. At first the Frenchmen were a little inclined to be sulky and reserved, but the heartiness of the Germans soon thawed the ice, and the champagne promoted the flow of kindly feeling. I was told that in the forenoon, when the officers of the Imperial Guard said adieu to their men, profuse tears were shed by both. There was no such emotion manifested by Lebœuf’s corps.

In the afternoon of the 28th, when the news of the capitulation was made known, there had been a sort of revolutionary riot in Metz. The National Guards made a display of refusing to give up their arms, ran to the Place d’Armes, where they congregated in large numbers and several shots were fired. The cathedral rang the alarm hell and the shops put their shutters up. The editor of one of the ultra journals was the ring-leader; mounted on a white horse, with a pistol in his hand, and others in his belt, he hounded on the mob to yell for Bazaine’s blood. That distinguished person, however, with great discretion, remained in his quarters in Ban St. Martin. The mob, composed in a large proportion of civilians, laid hold of an officer of the Imperial Guard, and holding pistols at his head, forced him to carry in the front the Republican flag. A hint from the mayor that the Germans would be sent for to put down the disturbance had its effect after the gamins had roared themselves hoarse shouting “Vive la République!”

It seemed it had not been until ten days before the capitulation that the troops of Bazaine’s army were forbidden to enter the town of Metz. Up till then they had circulated freely in the town, using the cafés, and spending their money in the shops. Until six days before it, a ration of bread of 100 grammes had been issued to each soldier. Since then they had had no rations, except horseflesh. The townspeople had been on bread rations as well as the troops, the rations consisting of 200 grammes of brown bread. Those who were able paid for their ration, the poor receiving it gratuitously. It surprised me that Metz had been able to hold out so long. The place had not above 50,000 inhabitants, if so many, and with no previous warning it had supported for seventy days a gross population of 230,000 mouths. These are the official figures. The dearness of provisions had been progressive. For instance, on the 16th of August butter had already reached the fancy price of 4f. per pound. On the same day chickens ranged from 6f. to 8f. At the date of the capitulation, butter could not be procured at any price, and the same might be said of chickens. Metz had certainly not capitulated for want of munitions of war. The fortress had ample supplies still left. Although Metz was an arsenal, no manufacture of cannon or projectiles had gone on during the siege. There had been no occasion for any such work, and if there had, the want of coals would have presented an insuperable obstacle. Powder had, however, been made in large quantities. All the coal used in Metz comes from Saarbrück, and there had recently been great scarcity—so much so that an order had been issued a week before the capitulation that the gas in the town should be extinguished at seven o’clock, under a heavy penalty. Candles were plentiful, and the deprivation was therefore not so seriously felt.

Of sick there were altogether, in and around Metz, on the date of the capitulation, about 20,000 soldiers, of which about 9000 were wounded men. The latter had chiefly been wounded in the sorties. Of the wounded in the battles of Courcelles and Gravelotte most were either recovered or dead. Very many mutilated men were to be seen in the streets. Latterly almost every operation had ended fatally. Pyæmia, hospital gangrene, and typhus had their sway on frames previously debilitated by hardship and famine. Of hospital stores the greatest lack was in the matter of leeches. For two of these Dr. Ward had on the previous day paid 180 francs. His colleague was down with brain fever, and he paid this wildly fancy price to save his life.

Three or four newspapers continued to be daily printed in Metz up to the capitulation. Since no outside information had reached the town for so long, the newspapers had chiefly concerned themselves with local gossip, hopes, fears, and canards. A file of one of them was a curious sight. The stock of paper had long run out, and the journals had been printed one day on red paper, another on blue, a third on buff, and so on—advertisement placard paper having necessarily been had resort to. The last issue of one journal was printed on brown packing paper.

All the afternoon of the 29th, the division of General Kummer came pouring into the town, with bands playing and colours flying. The great Landwehrmen stared around them with undisguised curiosity at the nut which they have found so hard to crack. The townsfolk jabbered among themselves as the troops defiled, and there were not a few scowling faces. What cared the Landwehrmen for the scowling faces? From the slush and mire of Maizières and Ladonchamps they had come into a reasonable prospect of beds and bottles of wine. They were quartered for the most part in the Caserne du Génie, the Hôtel de Ville, and other public buildings. The officers were in private houses. Ye gods! with what zest did they devote themselves to champagne in the _salle_ of the hotel! Generals, lieutenants, Vice-feldwebels, all in the lump were there, and one and all speaking after the German manner, at the top of their voices—the din was deafening. The French officers cleared off early to bed, all save two, who sat on moodily in a corner, pulling their moustaches and drinking absinthe—the poison that has sapped the virility of the French army.

Some officious patriots had made themselves busy during the night of the 28th, with the statue of Marshal Fabert in the Place d’Armes. When capitulation was first mooted, a wreath of immortelles and laurel was woven round his head, and a flag stuck in his hand. On the morning of the 29th, the Marshal appeared draped in a full suit of crape, with a hole in it, through which was visible the inscription—the words which the gallant Marshal addressed to Louis XIV:

Si pour empêcher qu’une place que le Roi m’a confiée ne tombât au pouvoir de l’ennemi, il fallait mettre à la brêche ma personne, ma famille et tout mon bien, je ne balancerais pas un moment à le faire.

Bazaine had not quite the grit in him to act up to the programme chalked out by the staunch old Marshal.

Two or three days elapsed after the surrender of Metz before a regular and reasonably quick postal service was established from the city, and for any one to whom time was an object it was necessary to despatch letters from Courcelles, the interim terminus of the railway. To reach this point I quitted Metz early on the morning of the 30th October, compelled to wriggle now right, now left, to circumvent the numerous entrenchments still blocking up the main roads.

On my way from Colombey to Courcelles my track lay through the prisoner-bivouac of the 2nd French Army Corps (Frossard’s). It was a very miserable scene. The fires of the previous night had burnt out, and the morning fires had not been lit. The miserable prisoners lounged about in seeming utter despair, the fine rain wetting them through and through, and keeping soft the mud with which their coats were plastered. Some few had erected tents, but the great mass had spent the night in the open standing round the fires, for to lie down must have been impracticable. I saw a couple of corpses lying in the ditch by the roadside, and was told that six or eight poor wretches had succumbed to exhaustion and exposure during the bitter night. If it was any consolation to the prisoners, their German guards were in as miserable a plight as their captives. The chain of sentries posted all round slouched backward and forward on their posts, and the fixed corporal-schafts leaned gloomily on their weapons. In the road in front of Ars Laquenexy a kind of market had been established, but the dealers had hardly waked up under the tilts of the carts. They were marketenders chiefly from the German frontier about Saarlouis, and the bulk of their wares consisted of spirituous liquor. The French prisoners were by no means short of money. All the cash in the bank and military chest in Metz had been disbursed in paying up the troops’ arrears of pay, and there were plenty of francs in their pockets.

In Courcelles I saw the arrival of the first column of prisoners to be sent down by the train to Saarbrück. There were 2000 of them, and five trains, each containing the same number, were being despatched every day. Poor fellows, they seemed very miserable, but they bore their misery with a fortitude which filled me with respect. The rain poured down upon them in a deluge as they stood in the road, which was a foot deep in mud, of the consistency of pea-soup. Here they had to wait for about an hour, while the arrangements for their transit were being completed, and it was good to see the courtesy and quiet fortitude which they manifested. I went among them in the mud. Everywhere the poor fellows stepped aside with a half bow to let me pass. If one accidentally jostled me, the “Pardon, Monsieur,” was prompt and warm. I found these French prisoners here as ignorant as those whom I had seen at Sedan. Some of the sergeants asked me for news of the outer world, but the men seemed chiefly concerned to know whither they were going, and what kind of country Germany was. I named several towns as among their probable destination, leading cities of Germany, but very few had more than heard of them, and knew nothing either of their magnitude or of their locality. At last the prisoner-train was ready, some sixty carriages packed as closely as the men could sit or stand. Several open trucks had been brought into requisition, and it seemed to me as though the men were actually stacked upon them, so thickly were they packed. With a whistle the heavy train sluggishly set itself in motion, and away it rolled with its freight of Frenchmen down what was once one of the most charming valleys in France. The Frenchmen were prisoners on their way to expatriation, the valley was a wilderness. On the ramparts of St. Quentin, which from a distance overlooked the scene, paced the square-built men with the brass-spiked helmets. The virgin fortress of France, never till now profaned by the foot of an invader, was held by the Landwehrmen, and the streets of the town echoed to the clash of the German subaltern’s sword.

As I drove out across the glacis of Fort Belle Croix, I was struck with the alteration which had taken place there since the previous day. Then the whole expanse swarmed with life. Cavalrymen, artillerymen, infantrymen, were blended in chaotic confusion, out of which it seemed impossible to evolve order. Now the expanse lay blank and bare. Cavalrymen, artillerymen, infantrymen, had been drafted off it. Nothing was left but the mud and a few horses, too debilitated to be removed, and dropping, even as I passed, into the slush out of which they should never rise. There was a horse market in Metz on the 30th, or rather just outside the gate. I imagine a good many horses changed hands to which the parties who disposed of them would have had some difficulty in proving a valid title. Prices ranged from a franc and a half up to five pounds, but this latter was a fancy price, and only given for an officer’s charger of breeding and substance.

After seeing the prisoner-train leave Courcelles, I drove away northward, and after visiting the headquarter staff of the 7th Army Corps at Puche, and my friends of the 4th regiment at Retonfay, went into the lager of Lebœuf’s corps on the slope between Château-Gras and Retonfay. It was getting towards evening by this time, and I was in the right time for seeing the Frenchmen making their preparations for bivouac. What splendid fellows they were to be sure at this kind of work. Already the tents had a drain through each to carry off the surface water. The great poplar trees on the chaussée—those that the Germans had left standing—were falling fast. Those that the Germans had felled the Frenchmen were chopping up into lengths, and carrying off to the bivouac fire. Others stood round the bivouac fires or lay on curious improvised beds, contrived with dexterously-placed stones to keep their constructors out of the mud. In the blaze of the fires were pots and saucepans; rather than part from a saucepan when he has once secured it, I believe a French soldier would lose one of his boots. The pots and saucepans were simmering merrily and emitting a fragrant odour—whence it was derived I could not guess. The rations had been meat and biscuit; nothing else save salt. The men had dug up again the already thrice turned over potato fields and might have got a few tubers. But potatoes, and meat, and biscuits were impotent to create the pleasant odour, one of the recondite mysteries of French cookery.

The atmosphere after the capitulation was full of stories of the prices paid in Metz during the siege for articles of food. Most of these were to be taken _cum grano_, since the beleaguered, now that it was all over, not unnaturally took a pleasure in piling on the agony. But the one which I am going to narrate I had from an undeniable source, and I give it as illustrative of the profligate frivolity among the wealthier and more aristocratic officers, which has been one of the chief causes of the ruin of the French army. There had been in Metz during the siege a certain lady of the Parisian demi-monde, who had come to Metz when the Emperor came, and could not get away when he retired _viâ_ Verdun to Châlons. Two officers of the Garde Impériale had been rivals for this lady’s affections. The lady, it seemed, had a fanciful and delicate appetite, and one day in the early part of the last month of the siege she expressed a fervent wish to be regaled on turkey and truffles. “Ah, you know that is an impossibility,” was the rejoinder of one of the swains. “I don’t know that,” said the other, eager for an opening; “I shall try what I can do.” The other, in his jealousy, offered to bet 500 francs that he would not succeed, and the wager was accepted. The officer came to the landlord of one of the hotels and gave him the commission, adding that money was no object. The head waiter went on a foraging expedition, and after two days’ search brought the officer a turkey and truffles, with a little bill for a thousand francs; so the gay guardsman won his bet and lost 500 francs.

As I was driving out to Courcelles my coachman quietly told me that his wife and three children were starving. When we returned at night I went with him to ascertain the circumstances for myself. He guided me into a part of the town close to the middle branch of the Moselle, inhabited only by the poorest of the poor. I had before then only been on the top of the crust which overlay the misery caused by this siege. I had dined and eaten dessert, I had called for wine, and lo it was forthcoming. So far as concerned the hotels, the world seemed to wag very much as its wont. I saw no ghastly faces in the streets pallid with want, as were the faces of those citizens of Antwerp, who cheered the lean Stadtholder when he swore to eat his boots before he would surrender. But it was not because there were no pale faces and attenuated forms in Metz that I did not see them in the streets, but because the miserable ones cared not to make a parade of their misery. It was a sorry sight the squalid room of the coachman presented. Of bread the family had not had a morsel for three days; then they had received as ration two pounds for six. One of the six—an infant two years old—wants rations no more. The little body lay on two planks under the window, the victim of bodily exhaustion, from deficient and improper food. How could a child of two years survive on sinewy horseflesh, in scanty quantity, and on a casual morsel of bread, the meal of which was mixed with sawdust and chopped straw to make it eke out? All up and down the poverty-stricken street the wretchedness was much the same. Horseflesh and want of salt had killed off the children like flies. The mortality among the little ones had been frightful. The elder children were covered with blotches and scorbutic sores, caused by want of salt and of variety in their food.

As regards the inhabitants of Metz itself, it seemed likely that the misery would soon come to an end. There was no want of wealth in Metz, and the rich citizens were reported to be public spirited. Now that food could be bought, it was sure to be bought and distributed freely. But no such amelioration was to be expected for the wretchedness—a wretchedness almost without hope—of the villagers inhabiting the country around Metz. They had nothing—not even a roof above them, in the pittiless rain. Of their cottages nought was standing but the bare walls, often pounded with shells. Their gardens were waste, their cattle were gone, their furniture was wrecked, their straw was dung, their fields lay fallow and studded with graves. A day spent in the misery around Metz must have made as water a heart hard as the nether millstone. But help came to the helpless. It will be long ere “the Friends” will cease to be remembered by the simple peasant people whom they helped through the ghastly slough of despond.

The railway into Metz having been opened on the 30th, a convoy of 300 generals and superior officers went off at five o’clock in the afternoon. On the 31st, at 10.30, a train left for Mayence, _viâ_ Nancy, for the accommodation of generals and chief staff officers. A regular series of trains was organised on the 1st of November for regimental officers. The first, leaving at 9.30, accommodated the officers of the garrison; the second, at 1.30, for the officers of the Imperial Guard, cavalry of the reserve, and engineers. At 1.30, the officers of Canrobert’s corps (the 6th), and division of Forton. At 4.15 a train took off the officers of the 2nd Corps (Frossard’s), and the brigade Lapasset; and at 6.15, the 3rd Corps (Lebœuf’s). Great consideration was invariably shown by the German authorities for the officers, and careful arrangements were made for the wounded and sick French, chiefly under the supervision of German doctors.

I spent the afternoon of the 31st in inspecting, so far as time would permit, the fortifications of the town of Metz, and those constituting its exterior defences. What I had already gathered concerning the natural and artificial strength of the forts of St. Quentin, St. Julien, Plappeville, St. Eloy, and Queleu I found more than borne out by personal investigation. Whoever holds Metz holds an impregnable fortress. Nothing can so much as get at the fortress of Metz proper while the outworks hold out, and there is no reason that, properly garrisoned and provisioned, they should not hold out for ever. It might be possible to batter down St. Eloy or Queleu, the others cannot be got at advantageously in any way on account of the strength of their natural position. The weak point of the fortress is towards the east, between Queleu and St. Julien; but the complement of the defence on that side is made up by the “provisional” earthwork of les Bottes. From what I heard I think it probable that the day after the 14th of August, the Germans, if they had made a dash, and had been prepared for severe losses, might have effected a lodgment in front of Fort Belle Croix in this direction, and, indeed, if all tales were true, might have pushed their way into the town itself. We all know how easy it is to be wise after the event. The English army in the Crimea was abused for not going straight into Sebastopol two days after the Alma, instead of sitting down on the bleak plateau over against the fortress. Had its leaders known the state of the fortifications, no doubt the weary winter and the heaps of dead might have been spared to Britain. So with the Germans before Metz. I was assured that so confident were the French of success—so ridiculous did they think the idea that it was possible to invest Metz—that it was not till after the battle of Forbach that serious efforts had been made to place the fortress in an efficient state of defence. The guns were not mounted till then behind the embrasures. Les Bottes was unfinished—a mere heap of shapeless earth. Even now it was not properly finished, and looked as slovenly a piece of fortification work as I ever saw put out of hand by troops who asserted they had engineers in their ranks. Nevertheless, it had a front, and guns mounted on that front. The Germans, ever masterful and prompt, would not, I was satisfied, delay long to alter les Bottes from a “provisional” into a permanent fort. Subsequent events bore out this anticipation; and, with their efficient and thorough system of administration, Metz, if impregnable hitherto, will be henceforth, if such a thing can be, doubly impregnable.

From what I learned, there had been a good deal more of huckstering than patriotism among the civilian population of Metz. There was a reason for the _émeute_ on the evening of the 28th. The wily burghers had been keeping back their stores for a market, while their poorer fellows hungered because of the high prices, and the army starved. Horses were dying daily for want of forage; yet the Germans found stores of hay and corn quietly stowed away in unlikely places. It was the same with other articles of consumption, and the administration seemed to have been either not strong enough or not cunning enough to make everything forthcoming for the common good. Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers, but I take leave to doubt whether our shopkeepering idiosyncrasy would have developed itself in such a manner. I could not help having a quiet chuckle at the douce burghers, whose market Bazaine had spoiled. How they hated him for it! And they spoke their minds right venomously after the French manner.

If one listened to all he heard, he was bound to accept the conclusion that Bazaine was a renegade and traitor of the largest possible calibre. It seemed, according to the gossip of the natives, savage that their canny little scheme for putting money in their purses had failed, that Bazaine nourished the design of having himself declared Regent of France, and that he only relinquished this ambitious project for the consideration of a fabulous subsidy, contributed I could not exactly learn by whom. It was useless to point out to the angry and disappointed cits that on the face of it this was rubbish, and that Bazaine kept his upper lip straight and his face to the foe so long as, and indeed longer than, he had an army capable of fighting, marching, or standing up to be shot down. If he had had subordinates honest and capable of co-operating with him, had he been unfettered at the outset, and had the discipline and _moral_ of his army not been deteriorated before he took the command of it, it might have been that the chroniclers of this war would have had a different tale to tell.

It was with a deep interest that I listened at the table d’hôte the same evening to the despondent remarks of a venerable French gentleman, who had been a colonel at Waterloo. The old man had the water in his eyes as he spoke of the depreciation in the character of the forces of his country. The cause that had wrought the curse of deteriorated discipline was, according to him, the pernicious itch for popularity with which all the French superior officers were bitten. Canrobert, he told me, had been the great initiator of this popularity-hunting fever. In his rough, bluff way he used familiarly to appeal to the private soldiers as “his children” whether their rations were what they liked, and if an ill-conditioned fellow, thus encouraged, vented a grumble, he would turn on the colonel and blow him up sky-high. One very pregnant observation he made, a remark which I had thought of all the evening, and doubly significant as coming from a Frenchman and an officer. “Surely,” said I, “this will bring the French to their senses, and we must have peace in a very short time. And just as surely that peace,” I continued, “must be a permanent one, for the French army, with all its craving for _la gloire_, must realise the fact that there is not much in the way of _la gloire_ to be got by being greedy for the Rhine.”

“I don’t know,” said the old man, mournfully. “Logically you are right, no doubt; but severe as the lesson has been, I question of its effect. It is the officers of the French army who chiefly are the clamourers—senseless and frothy clamourers—after _la gloire_. They shrieked for war, enervated with lust and absinthe as they were, ignorant of their duties, their minds uncultivated, and debilitated with luxury. I fear they are too far gone, too utterly vitiated and emasculated mentally, to be able to draw the conclusion from the premises; and I should not be surprised if, a year hence, you may hear the parole loafers who are swinging about the streets to-day, yelling for war again, as unprepared to pursue it to success as they were when this one was entered into, and as reckless and regardless of consequences as they were then and are now.”

Just conceive what France must have come to when one of her _anciens militaires_ could speak thus! That the officers of his army were, in his opinion, so utterly spineless as to be unable to recognise the fact that they had been beaten, the causes which had led to their defeat, and the utter impossibility that unless they purged and lived cleanly they could make even a fair fight of it against the cool-headed and heavy-handed German! The whirligig of time brings round many curious changes, but it is utterly outside the nature of things that Frenchmen as they are, as I saw them in this war from day to day, can ever, given what advantages they may, be a match in warfare for a people so constituted as those which dwell in the Vaterland. The hot iron of adversity brands deep, and has a wonderful power to cure ailments, but if the surface is so calloused that the iron will not mark, how can the beneficial result be achieved?

The old gentleman was specially severe on the Zouaves. When these regiments were first constituted, he said the ranks were really full of fighting men. But as their fame grew they became fashionable, and then their ruin set in. The ranks were crowded by young sprigs who had no other thought than a picturesque uniform, waxed moustaches, the demi-monde, and absinthe; and the once stout and capable regiments had lost their prowess and become enervated and flaccid. This view may be exaggerated—the _ancien militaire_ of the table d’hôte was not the first man that ever put forth the opinion that “the service is going to the dogs, by Gad;” but it is in a measure confirmed by the events of this war, in which the French infantry of the line displayed far greater valour and patient endurance than the pet regiments.

One might have been surprised on entering Metz for the first time since the capitulation how little sickness was apparently existing in the town. One strolled on to the Place Royale, and there saw the streets of railway waggons, which in the early days had been brought into the town from the station—300 of them—and diverted from the carriage of luggage or merchandise to be hospitals for the reception of the sick and wounded. Here and there a convalescent limped about on crutches, or a pallid-faced man glided past, from whom you instinctively shrank with a curious feeling that the taint of the fever must be hanging about him still. But of sweeping pestilence there seemed no traces. One had to look for the deadly sickness in quiet corners in the little improvised hospitals, where there were only a few cases, or in the neglected villages around the town where hygiene had been comparatively neglected. There it was and there alone, where you could find forms which you were told were those of men, but passed out of all recognition as such, discoloured and bloated in the last stages of the foul black small-pox. It might be that you chanced on a lazarette into which the terrible demon of hospital gangrene had entered and fixed his relentless fang, never to be withdrawn till the earth should have been heaped on his victim. A few cases of this terrible disorder, and only a few, I saw. Not alone was the sense of sight called into requisition; no cordial in Metz seemed to have the virtue of washing the horribly fœtid odour out of my throat, where it stuck as if it were something solid. I trust no reader will ever be called to look upon the corpse of one who has died of pyæmia. One took his life in his hand going among such spectacles. Here is a house in the Isle de Saulcy in which there are five sick men and two corpses. There is a doctor with them—a lone man, for the very women, with their tender hearts hardened by the terror of the dread infection, have run away. The doctor is a mere youth in years, but there is grey already in his hair, and he tells me that the last six weeks have made him feel as an old man. With every breath he inhales he risks his life nearly as much as if he held his fist into the cage of a cobra capella. What words can describe the colour of these semicomatose forms which he handles so tenderly? Have they been blown up in an explosion, and had their skins dusted over to ease the smart of the burn, and to hide the swarthy brand of the powder? No, they are the victims of a far worse misfortune. They lie smitten to the marrow with the terrible _Typhus exanthematicus_, the floury typhus, which is happily so rare that many a respectable and capable general practitioner in Britain has never heard of it. The flour which the exanthematicus powders on the skin of its victim, seldom washes off. Almost invariably face and flour dust are alike hidden in the grave.

The railway station outside the Porte Serpenoise of Metz was a curious sight. It was the depôt of all the vast train of that Corps-Francs organized by the Chemin de fer de l’Est, with a military constitution, and having a material that had cost fifteen millions of francs. The corps numbered 1200 men, and they, with all their material, their bridges, their stalls, their waggons, their pontoons, and their vast timber blocks, were destined to act as the pioneers of the French army on its march “à Berlin,” and to repair the damage to the communications wrought by the Germans, falling back beaten and demoralised across the Rhine on their capital. There was a bridge here in pieces, specially constructed to be thrown across the Rhine. The bridge had never quitted the locality where it was constructed. It was the prize of the army that had not only kept the watch fast and true on the German Rhine, but that was standing sentry on the Moselle, the Marne, the Seine, and the Loire. And to-day in the drizzle of the small rain, the bold Corps-Francs were slowly jogging it on the prisoner-train towards the Rhine which they had thought to approach in array so different.

Many a day it will take Metz to recover from the handiwork of the men who undertook to defend it. The tourist who in the early summer came to this virgin queen of the Moselle might have noticed outside the fortifications a belt of buildings about half an English mile in breadth. The trim villas of the wealthy citizens had stood here in the dainty gardens; the pretentious house of the mayor had been here behind its red-brick walls. There had been snug little cottages _ornées_, where dwelt ladies, about whose antecedents few knew anything, but who had fair faces and who dressed magnificently. Not one stone now remained upon another of all the villas, the mansions, the cottages. All was blank desolation. Here and there the stump of a fountain, erstwhile standing in a pretty garden, asserted itself disconsolately, its once superincumbent Cupid or Neptune half battered into the mud. The ground was churned into slush by the tread of many footsteps, and fetid odours blew over it from the dead horses that were rotting on its surface. This belt of desolation was the _zone militaire_ of Metz—the space outside the fortifications, where buildings were allowed to be erected solely on the condition that if it should be necessary at any time for military exigencies to destroy them, the owners should not be entitled to claim compensation. The military exigency came in July last, and now the portly mayor might bite his thumb, and the owners of the villas and the cottages grope about the ruins for salvage, for no consolation was forthcoming for them in the shape of compensation.

On the 1st of November I continued my investigations as to the condition of the French sick who had been left by the capitulation as a legacy to the Germans. In those inquiries I derived great assistance from the courteous kindness of Dr. Leithold, of the division of General Kummer, on whom devolved the supervision of all the medical and sanitary arrangements. Dr. Leithold had in all inherited about 19,000 sick men, among whom were included only sixty German prisoners—all the rest were Frenchmen. This included the sick in the field hospitals and the various forts. The diseases chiefly raging were typhus and dysentery, the latter with a strong tendency to assume the phase of the former. There were not many cases, however, of spotted or floury typhus. Small-pox was far from rare, and in not a few cases it was of the most virulent form. A good deal of scurvy was also existing. I fancy that a great quantity of scurvy cases of a mild type had not been allowed to enter the hospitals, for of the prisoners in the lager by Retonfay I saw a considerable number bearing the evidences of suffering from this disease. With the good and varied rations now being distributed, a disease which had been superinduced by their absence was sure soon to disappear. In order at once to clear for the occupation of troops the barracks in Metz, hitherto used as hospitals, and to provide a change into higher and purer air, all the sick able to move were being sent out into the highlying forts surrounding the town. This step, it was hoped, would stimulate healthy action in systems which had become low, degenerate, and stagnant, and good nourishment, which was being provided with a lavish hand, would naturally co-operate greatly in the setting up of this healthy action. His Excellency von Kummer deserves to be held in honour by all humanity for the prompt and solicitous arrangements which he caused to be instituted for relieving the pressure on the sick of the pre-capitulation condition of things. A great bakery of white bread was at once set up in the Caserne des Chasseurs, and orders were circulated that all medical officers in charge of lazarettes should have carte blanche to make requisitions for bread. Stores were hurried in of coffee, chocolate, soup extract, and other comforts, and by Sunday morning there were very few sick who were not the better of the advent of the Germans. Prior to the establishment of the regular system of supply, the Berliner Hülfsverein, represented by Herren Adolph Schwabe and E. Minlos, was, with the English Ambulance, among the first to commence a distribution of comforts. Britons may be glad to know that they too helped towards the Liebesgaben with which were packed the fourgons of the Berliner Hülfsverein, since the British National Society helped its funds with a donation of 1000_l._, the administration of which was confided to Mr. Schwabe. As General von Senden and his staff entered the town a scene occurred, pathetic enough in one aspect to move the deepest sympathies of those who love the Fatherland and its children, and yet not without a certain grotesqueness that only affords another illustration of the narrow gap which exists between tears and laughter. As the General rode down the Rue de la Prison Militaire, he passed the prison of the Maison d’Arrêt, where the German prisoners taken on the 7th at Maizières were confined. As the Landwehrmen on that day had met the foe with shouts of “Hurrah Preussen!” and “Immer vorwärts!” so now, gaunt, hollow-eyed, and squalid, the great gallant fellows cheered their countrymen as they came on. The cheer was hardly so full-volumed as when it had echoed through the gables of Ladonchamps; scanty rations exclusively of horseflesh were not quite the class of feeding off which to cheer lustily. But von Senden, not unfamiliar with the cheers of his Landwehr men, heard the “Hurrah Preussen!” from behind the bars, and, halting, called out to his Kinder to know how they fared. The hungry men told their plight, and the general turning to the Intendant who rode behind him, asked when he could have food up for the wants of the prisoned Landwehrmen. “Not for an hour at least,” was the reply. Then von Senden turned to Mr. Schwabe, the bearer of the Liebesgaben, and asked whether he could do nothing till the Intendant got up his column. The fourgons of the Berliner Hülfsverein were not a furlong behind, and they came up at the trot. The bread tumbled out of the waggons, and in at the prison windows. But the waggons contained other provender than bread, and the question was asked of the prisoners as they munched their bread, what relish they would have to it. Who that knows the German palate but can anticipate the reply. “Haben Sie Wurst?” was the response, as if from one man, and then from behind came a piping voice, it must have been an epicurean boy who spoke—“Oder Schinken?” Wurst is the German sausage, suggestive to the British mind of trichinæ, and other nameless horrors, but dearer to the German heart than any other edible. Then they got cigars—the prisoners—and von Senden and the Berliner Hülfsverein passed on, the former to take up his head-quarters, the latter to distribute their arrowroot, tea, woollen garments, winter beds, biscuits, and what not of Liebesgaben to the wretched French sick.

On returning to the Hôtel de l’Europe, after a round of the hospitals, I found in the _salle_ an officer from Retonfay who had ridden in to tell me that the General in command of the brigade had sent to desire me to call upon him. It was very well calling on generals if one went of his own accord, but a summons to attend was calculated to make one nervous. Had I been writing of the positions without sufficient discretion, I anxiously asked of myself, or had any order been issued to forbid correspondents from frequenting the foreposts? Speculation was useless, and I went straight out in the moonlight to the big château inhabited by the General, in the outskirts of Retonfay. There was no frown on the features of the gallant old Pole; my portion was a warm grip of the hand, and a cordial salutation. The General, instead of having a wigging for me, wished to ask a favour of the journal I represented. The General’s children are half English, his wife is an English lady, and his mother-in-law, who, to judge from the enthusiastic manner in which the General spoke of her, is utterly unlike mothers-in-law in general, had thoughtfully sent her fighting son-in-law a box of concentrated soups all the way from a western suburb of London. The gift had moved the General to tender thanks, if he might, through the columns of an English journal, and to make of the box of soups a peg on which to hang a compliment to the British nation. The General pondered, as he ate his soup, on the form which this communication should take, apologising to me for his silence from the circumstance that he desired “to make a little wit.” When he had got to the salad, he found the spirit move him, and he dictated as follows:—“I thank you, dear grandmamma, for your delicious soups; the vermicelli and the tail ox are delicious. The North German Ambassador has made a mistake when he said that the English nation has only manifested a warm-heartedness towards the French. As I eat my dinner, I am a witness to the contrary.—Your loving son,—Von Zglinitzki, Major-General.” The good General slightly distorted the relation existing between him and the relative he desired to address; but I supposed he had taken the word from his children.

On the 2nd of November the whole of the 10th Army Corps defiled through Metz on its southward march towards Troyes. Its General, Voight Rhetz, sat in the saddle in the Place Royale, with Kummer beside him, and a background formed of the trucks devoted to hospital purposes. On the other side of the broad thoroughfare stood groups of French officers looking on critically as the men went past with whom they had so often been engaged. To have seen the different regiments pass the saluting point with everything about them as neat as if they had come out of barracks, you would never have thought they could have been doing forepost work and fighting for two months. Fresh, stout, clean, and supple, the great stalwart fellows came past with the German quick step in one long continuous stream for two hours, and long before all had passed the Frenchmen had sunk into a dull silence that seemed to betoken acquiescence in an inevitable fate. There was no cheering or singing; the bands played as they passed the General, but the “Wacht am Rhein” was kept for the country roads. Besides the 10th, the 3rd Army Corps was on the march for Troyes. The 7th for the present was to remain in Metz; the 2nd had started Paris-ward before the capitulation; and the 1st, after seeing off the last of the prisoners, was destined for the northern march toward Lille and Amiens, along with the 8th Corps. General Kummer, leaving the commandership of the town for an active command, was succeeded by General von Löwenfeld. General Kummer, during his brief tenure of a very difficult and delicate office, had earned a well-deserved popularity. His urbanity and consideration to the French officers were appreciated warmly by them all, and not a few of them referred to the subject in my hearing with deep feeling. I have omitted to mention before, that when the report of the capitulation became spread abroad throughout the army on the evening of the 28th Oct., a great number of regimental officers had a sort of caucus meeting, in which they discussed the matter. Universal indignation at the conduct of Bazaine was expressed, and it having been estimated that the officers present were able to rely on the fidelity of a following of some 25,000 men, it was resolved that a desperate effort should be made that same night to cut a way through the German lines. The meeting separated, and one of its members came to the Hôtel de l’Europe, where, over a bottle of champagne, he made his last will and testament, and with a tear in his eye, committed it to his friend my informant, and went forth with set teeth on his desperate emprise. Next morning he came back to breakfast, blythe as a bird, and reclaimed his will. It seemed there had been a miscalculation. Instead of the following of 25,000 men on which the officers had relied, they could not get a man to follow them. The realisation of the misconception prevented the attempt being made.

I never tired of passing my time in watching the Place Royale and the Esplanade, on which were quartered the wounded. On the former were the railway car hospitals, on the latter are fine roomy tents, holding twelve men each comfortably. What a variety of mutilations you noticed among the convalescents. Men who had lost a leg, others a foot, others an arm; the gamut of mutilation was run up and down till you almost expected to see a man walking about without a head. It was a listless, weary promenade which these unfortunates executed. Some few formed little groups for conversation, and others made belief to play at a kind of outdoor billiards on a wooden frame on the ground, but most patrolled languidly backwards and forwards, with a dejected listlessness that was the more painful to witness because it is so un-Frenchlike. I suppose they must have been tired of the promenade at the top of the Esplanade over against the river, for there were seldom more than a few there. And yet the view from it is one of which I think it must take a long time to get weary. If I could think the inhabitants of the Esplanade possessed of so much depth of feeling, I would fain have imagined that they shun the promenade on the ramparts that the sight of so much of beauty lost to France might not wound them too poignantly. Behind, among the tents, are the statues, and the still bright flower-beds. In front, at one’s feet, are the outworks, and then the broad stream of the river, with the fertile meadows of Simphorien beyond. On the right, across the stream, is the Isle de Sauley, the island of the weeping willows, with its powder-magazines all but hidden among the graceful willows and the tall poplars. On the left is the citadel, with its green earthworks and glacis, and beyond the beautiful suburb of Montigny, with the bend of the stream farther on ending in the railway bridge, the horizon to the south, bounded by the range of heights, of which the highest is Mont St. Blaise, with its ruined château and the Observatory, from which I had looked down on the plain and city. Over St. Simphorien is the other branch of the Moselle, fringed by the nestling villages of Moulin, St. Ruffine, Ban St. Martin, and Devant-les-Ponts, wearing a very peaceful aspect but for the absence of smoke from the chimneys. Over them towers abruptly the rugged Mont St. Quentin, with the vineyards on its shoulders, lovingly hugging the white villages, then the bare interval of red scarp, and then the summit, crowned by the great spreading fortress, its warm grey tint brought out in the slanting sunbeams. Well may St. Quentin be called “the eagle of Metz,” soaring over the valley, as it does, up in the very sky. Alas! for France and Metz, the wings of the eagle were shorn. On its ramparts there was an eagle still, it is true, but it was the eagle on the helmet of the Prussian sentry, who as he paused in his beat, and looked down on what a week before deserved the name its inhabitants so fondly gave it, “La Pucelle,” may be trying how he can adapt the German song, “Oh Strassburg, oh Strassburg, Du wunderschön stadt,” to the new conquest. Verily, it is a wonderful city, a city for the possession of which to stake everything and to fight to the last man and the last ditch. Now that the German army had seen it—few who have not studied him know what an instinctive eye the German soldier has for the beauties of nature—he would not be a discreet man who should have suggested that the prize should be let slip. Nothing so much strengthened Bismarck’s hand in his demand for Lorraine, as the opportunity the German army had for seeing and admiring Metz.

The very heavens seemed to smile on the capture of la Pucelle. For days before Bazaine had sent in his capitulation it had seemed as if a repetition of the deluge of Noah was in progress. All the low country was inundated; where the waters had not yet reached, the ground was a thin, spongy, quagmire of mud. On the day that the Germans marched in and the French marched out, the heavens still wept copiously, as if in lamentation over a spectacle so full of woe for France. But when the German sentry had taken his post on the gates, and when the black and white flag floated out over the huge brown works of Plappeville, out came the sun in a joyous radiance. As if by magic, the waters abated. On St. Simphorien, where but the day before the dove could have found no rest for the sole of her foot, an army might now have manœuvred. The mud dried up, and the roads become hard again—those wonderful roads that stubbornly resisted deterioration by the grinding wheels of the cannon and proviant columns, and which ought of themselves to prevent the name of the Third Napoleon, their constructor, from being held in execration by the French. Under the bracing influence of the bright sun and the frosty wind, everybody and everything seemed to regain cheerfulness. The French prisoners yet remaining in Retonfay had somehow got the mud off their clothes, and with the mud had gone the moodiness. The German troops had heel-balled the eagle on their helmets, and polished after a fashion the long boots that for days before had been caked with successive layers of mud. The townspeople, in all their sullenness, felt and yielded to the influence of the fine weather. The ladies of the place, of whom hitherto we had only caught glimpses as a pretty face peered out from behind a window-blind, came out into the streets, and tripped along, daintily booted and delicately gloved, among the dashing German subalterns, who might have been excused for glances of undisguised admiration, and among the throng of common soldiers, who seemed unimpressible, but were as courteously civil as if they had served an apprenticeship as masters of the ceremonies. Metz seemed to have no objection to any amount of what it no doubt considered the mammon of unrighteousness in the shape of Prussian thalers. All the shops were open, and had got stocked with a rapidity that might have been accounted for either by concealed stores or by wonderful enterprise in getting supplies speedily from Saarbrück or Nancy. The cafés swarmed with German officers, with French officers, with French civilians. It was already two days since the departure of the last train had been notified for the conveyance of French officers to Germany, but there must still have been close on 1800 of them left in Metz. I suppose the greater proportion of them must have been on the sick or convalescent list, but I saw comparatively few who appeared seriously ailing. The diverse propensities of the two armies in the matter of drinking could be seen at a glance by a visit to a café. The German officer, trim, neat, buttoned up to the throat, dressed as regimentally as if on parade, and with a carriage that might suggest his having swallowed a ramrod, entered, saluted the room all round with a stiff-necked bow and a chink together of his spurred heels; then stalked to a seat, and called for a “Glas Bier.” The French officer, his frogged and furred undress pilot coat open at the throat, and showing a slice of shirt-collar and of front—a dickey, for aught I know—and with the invariably white or brightly-coloured cravat, thrown loosely round his neck, lounged in with his hands in his pockets, nodded to a friend, tumbled in a heap on to a settee—if he ever swallowed a ramrod the gastric juice must have made pulp of it long ago—and called for a _petit verre_ of cognac or absinthe. He took his tipple neat, fiery as it is. As the German plunged his moustache into the froth of his beer flagon, he gave one the idea that he was drinking because he had thirst and wanted to quench it. It was impossible to think the same of the Frenchman as he took a sip out of the little glass, and rolled the spirit round his mouth and under his tongue with as much gusto as if it had been a sin.

As I was strolling on the Esplanade, on the morning of the 4th, I met a comfortable-looking old gentleman, in gaiters and woollen gloves. A remark as to the scenery served as a mutual introduction, and he told me he was an old officer of artillery who, during the greater part of the siege, had held the position of Commandant of Fort Queleu, and who, when capitulation seemed imminent, had returned to the civil life, out of which the siege had temporarily called him, so as to escape expatriation as a prisoner of war. The good old gentleman spoke very frankly as to the events of the siege, and had no hesitation in speaking his mind as to Marshal Bazaine, and the motives by which, from first to last, he had been actuated. When the Army of the Rhine first fell back around the fortifications of Metz, after the battle of the 18th of August, instead of making efforts which he thought undoubtedly would have been successful, to push onward for a junction with the rest of the French forces, Bazaine’s explanation to his principal officers for his policy was to the effect that the forts of Metz were in a defensive condition so backward that he dared not, consistently with his duty to France and his impression as to the importance of Metz as the premier fortress of the Empire, abandon it in its then inchoate condition to a defence to be carried on solely by its garrison. In this view the commander of Fort Queleu declared that he completely coincided. Comparatively trivial efforts would, he believed, have sufficed to reduce Metz immediately after the 18th of August, had there been no army to support the garrison, and to strengthen the fortifications, and had the Germans taken immediate advantage of the state of weakness. Bazaine, he continued, with a zeal and industry beyond all praise, had put the forts into a state of efficient defence by the end of the month. It was then, according to my informant’s views, that his presence for the first time became _de trop_ in Metz, and then it was that he ought, with all the vigour he could exert, to have burst through the German cordon and got at large. That he could have done this, whether in prosecution of the temporarily energetic sortie which lasted over two days—31st August and 1st September—in the direction of Nosseville, Servigny, and St. Barbe, or in the better line down the valley of the Moselle, my interlocutor had no doubt; and it is fair to him to mention that I found many German officers who could not conscientiously differ from this view. After the middle of September, however, Bazaine’s position, in view of breaking-out tactics, had become hopeless. Sickness was decimating his ranks; his troops had already eaten deep into the means for transporting artillery and train. I asked the old commandant how, in his opinion, it was that Bazaine did not strike a decisive blow for extrication after his presence in Metz for good had ceased. The reply, to my thinking, was very pregnant. Bazaine, a capable general, a gallant man, and a sincere patriot, hung balanced between two stools. Instead of looking with a single eye to his duties as a military commander, he became distracted with political complications. In the early days he was studying the interests of the Emperor, and the means of conserving for Imperialistic uses the army under his command. Later on, the poison of personal ambition had impregnated the system of the hitherto straightforward soldier. He had nourished dreams of seeing himself Regent of France, and made ducks and drakes of his reputation without attaining the personal _quid pro quo_ he hankered after.

What a strange kaleidoscopic scene in those early post-capitulation times did the great room of the Hôtel de l’Europe present from day to day! Yesterday it had been thronged by officers of the 7th Army Corps; to-day it was the 8th; on the morrow it would be the turn of the first to snatch a glass of the “sparkling” before the route is taken for the champagneless villages on the line of march. As I sit in my quiet corner, there comes clinking and clattering in a divisional staff; hussars blue, hussars green, hussars red, hussars brown, and hussars black—the last with the grinning death’s head and the crossed thigh-bones in silver on the busbies. All are speaking at once, most at the top of their voices, and the clamour is for champagne, of which 400 bottles were drunk in one day in the room in which I sit. If I had the portrait edition of the _Almanach de Gotha_, I might identify the bearers of some of the proudest names in the Fatherland; for the wearers of the showy uniforms are many of them princes and poins. Of Grafs and Freiherrs, the crop is too large to take any account of. This young slip of a lad with the pale face and the slight moustache is of the blood royal of Russia, and not many removes off the throne of the Czar. He is studying the art of war, attached to the staff of General Manteuffel. If grim Nicholas—he of the Roman nose and strong jaw—were alive to-day, with what interest would he be watching this contest, and how searching would be his questioning of his young kinsman on his return to the banks of the Neva! Who is this straight, square man, stiff of figure and massive of head, that comes quietly into the room alone? All rise respectfully as the door frames, as in a picture, that powerful figure. The sparse hair on the face is but slightly grizzled; surely the man with the few medals on his broad breast, and the simple General’s star at his button-hole cannot be a personage of great distinction. You may search in vain the roll of the German army to find a name more honoured or more deserving of honour. The big quiet man is General von Göben, the commander of the 8th Army Corps, the youngest commander of an army corps in the Prussian service, the one who has seen the most fighting. So gluttonous is he for fighting, that when there was peace within the borders of the Fatherland this modern Bayard was fighting in the fierce internal strifes of Spain. In this war he has borne the brunt of the hardest fighting. At Spicheren he had relieved Kamecke of the command; on the rugged slope of Gorze, and in the thickets of the Bois des Genivaux, he saw full many of his Rhinelanders go down. Von Göben seats himself beside a burly officer with a bushy beard, clad in the white and green of the Cuirassiers. The pallor of the big officer’s face contrasts markedly with his jetty beard. Well may he be pale. A furrow of that field at the north of Vionville soaked in not a little of his blood as he lay there on the night of the 16th of August, a chassepot ball in his chest and a sword-cut across that hard, bullet head of his. It was he who led the Cuirassiers, diminished from a strong regiment to a weak squadron in that last death-charge against the French battery. He took the cigar out of his mouth to shout the “Vorwärts,” and then sat down in his saddle and spurred the big bay into a charging gallop. It was his luck and his hard head, he tells you, that pulled him through when so many of his brother officers fell to rise no more. And now he is a Rittmeister, no less, and has a good chance of the order _pour merite_. At a side-table there sit together an Oberst of reserve Uhlans, and a quiet little officer in a general’s uniform. The chubby Oberst ought to have an army corps at least, if, indeed, he should not supersede von Moltke, to judge of the energetic and fluent manner in which he is demonstrating how a battle should be won to the quiet little taciturn man beside him, who has a queer half comical look in those grey eyes of his. The Oberst is, to use a vulgar phrase, teaching his grandmother to suck eggs. The little General commands a division, and has before to-day directed the operations of an army. He is the author of a standard work on military strategy; whereas the Oberst for the last dozen years has been tilling his acres away in Pomerania. Nearer to me is a group of subalterns of a Hohenzollern regiment, the youngsters drinking Rhine wine when all others in the room are votaries of champagne. The Hohenzollerns affect “a deep deep draught of the good Rhine wine,” for they are a Rhineland Regiment, and it has always been a regimental tradition to stick to the Rudesheim. In the group is a blithe young face I know right well. Many a hearty clink of glasses has passed between us, not a few mornings have we patrolled together the foreposts in the valley on the French side of Saarbrück. Under the silky moustache you may faintly trace two slight weals. How they came there is a story. The lad was among the foremost up the steep of the Spicheren-berg. So difficult was the climb that he had to take to his hands and knees, and, as you may see a butcher do, he stuck his sword between his teeth. Like a silly fellow, he turned the edge inwards instead of outwards, and when, after his manner, he took to roaring “Vorwärts,” the keen blade enlarged the naturally by no means diminutive orifice of his mouth. At another table sits Kummer, the chief of the Landwehr men, with a certain Landwehr, fatherly look about himself. In the corner opposite me is the sole group out of uniform. Two are the almoners of the Berliner Hülfsverein, the third is Professor Kollmann, of Munich, who has thrown aside the toga and the doctor’s cap to take the charge of a lazarette. The fourth is, what think you?—a lady. In the military history of Europe the name of von Alten is not unknown to fame. It can be unfamiliar to no student of Waterloo literature. The male von Altens of to-day are all soldiers, and the lady at the table with the Professor is their sister, and a sick nurse in an hospital at Chalons. In the salons of Berlin there was no fairer face than that of Agnes von Alten; now the salons know it no more; but when the soldier awakes from out of his delirium, or when the chloroform-influence leaves him after an operation, he finds her bending over him in tender solicitude. There are those, I fancy, in the gay staff coats at the centre table, who would gladly hail a wound if they could only choose their nurse.

The forenoon of the 5th I devoted to a careful examination of the French line of defence which opposed the German environment on the west. A description of its characteristics may, I fear, be but dull reading, but I do not feel myself entitled on that account to refrain from writing it, looking at the fact that the salient points of this line of defence probably disappeared within a few weeks after, and that some details with regard to it may not be useless in a humble way to the Alison or the Kinglake of this stupendous war. Crossing the river and the Thionville Railroad, on which a train of repairing materials was moving forward with a tentative slowness that reminded me of a Highland pony’s movements in a bog, I traversed a flat expanse of considerable size, which had been occupied as the French Guards’ camp, and then passed through Ban St. Martin, noticing on the way the château in which Bazaine had had his head-quarters. The abrupt rise of St. Quentin began two steps after I had cleared the lanes of Ban St. Martin. Looking at this hill from where you will, you cannot question its steepness; but how steep it is on the face looking towards the town is only to be appreciated by whoever essays to climb it on a frosty morning, when the air is rarefied, and when the ground has yielded its hardness caused by the frost into superficial slipperiness caused by the sun’s heat. There was no road but a faint footpath through the vineyards, which soon broke into what may be called a spray of still tinier tracks, and then utterly disappeared. As I toiled slowly and laboriously up the slippery steep, it became apparent to me that a position such as that of Fort St. Quentin, so advantageous because of its isolation and the great area which its height allows it to dominate, may yet have elements of weakness caused by its very isolation and height. Looking upward as I clambered, I could see no grim earthworks on the crest, no cannon mouths depressed so as to sweep this ascent. The hill shoulders up very steeply for three-fourths its height, and then “tumbles home” so rapidly to the summit on which stands the fort, that its base, as well as the lower steeps, are protected from the fire of the fort by the convexity of the more upland configuration. This fire could not be brought to bear upon these spaces directly, no matter by what expedient, and if once, therefore, an enemy’s force could get across the outside area swept by the guns of the fort, it might nestle snugly, if audaciously, right under the lee of the fortress, keeping itself safe much in the same manner as we read of a nigger sticking on the back of a crocodile while the monster snaps his jaws and lashes his tail to no purpose. All that St. Quentin could do in the way of dislodgment must be by an indirect and plunging fire, and the bay of safety is so close, that its artillery essaying any such fire would have to fire at an elevation closely approaching to the perpendicularly upwards. But a glance backward as one climbs forcibly impresses on one the care and skill with which the several parts of the defence of Metz are made to dovetail one into the other. Where the configuration of the ground draws the teeth of St. Quentin, the bare tusks of the citadel of Metz show themselves dangerously. Its guns look across the Simphorien on to the alluvial plateau of Ban St. Martin and the lower steeps of Mont St. Quentin, and change the “bay of safety” into a position utterly untenable, while the batteries of Montigny and Longeville, one face pointing up the river, the other athwart it, opposed at once a direct and enfilading fire to any body of troops rash enough to essay the path leading to this same untenable bay of safety. Nor was this all that has been done to guard this access, and to negative the feasibility of this place of lodgment. Out of the round shoulder of Mont St. Quentin, just where the “tumbling home” begins, there rises an abrupt, isolated peak, a kind of junior Mont St. Quentin in itself. On the summit of this Bazaine’s engineers had knocked up a hasty, but most useful outwork. A strong loopholed palisading enclosed bomb-proof subterranean quarters for about half a battalion, and there were evidences that on the top of this bomb-proof a couple of pieces of artillery had been mounted. From the slits in the palisading the infantry men standing on the tread could have searched with the muzzles of their chassepots the “bay of safety,” while the shells from the depressed pieces of artillery could have torn down through the steeps of the vineyards, or pelted into the pretty châteaux and snug cottages of Ban St. Martin in the level bottom.

Traversing the interval between this useful outwork, and the almost upright substructure of granite blocks which forms the eastern foundation of Fort St. Quentin, I came upon a deep cutting, crossed by a foot-bridge. At the bottom of the cutting was a railway worked by wire ropes. At the summit of the incline, a little to my right, was the house of the stationary engine that had puffed so assiduously during the siege, but that was now silent and deserted. On the left the track seemed to tumble over a precipice into the valley of the Moselle, near to Longeville—the declivity must in truth be very steep. This line, used for the transport of building materials and munitions of war for Fort St. Quentin, and a continuation of which had performed the same function for Fort Plappeville, was constructed, it may be interesting for railway readers to know, on the same gauge as the well-known Festiniog line. It must have been of extraordinary importance during the building and siege operations. Crossing the flying bridge of the railway, I climbed up on to the plateau on which stands the fort, through a perfect litter of chassepot guns and chassepot ammunitions, which had been strewed there by the French troops to whom the order had been given to lay down their arms within the fortification. I skirted its left, making for the brow of the mount, looking out over against the plateau of St. Hubert and Châtel St. Germain, anxious, as on the morning of the 19th of August I had seen the French army lying on this brow, to see how from it the Prussian position must have appeared.

Fort St. Quentin by no means occupies the whole of the summit of the hill of the same name. It stands on an almost imperceptibly raised space on the extreme verge of the eastern extremity. To the westward extends a rugged flat of about a mile in length, by half as much in breadth. The appearance the hill presents was as if some Titan of old had shaved off flat its pointed top, and then strewed boulders over the surface. These boulders, as well as the space between them, are now covered with a short, half-heathy sward. It was then on this flat that the French had sought refuge when at daylight on the 19th of August we looked out from the miserable bivouac on the blood-stained field of Gravelotte, and saw their white tents between us and the dull heavy mass of Fort St. Quentin, as if for safety they were throwing their bare arms around the protecting fortress. On the flat were yet visible the traces of the trenches they had dug around the tents, and their _al fresco_ kitchen fires had left their marks on the sward. I was not a little surprised on pressing forward to the edge of this flat to find its margin bordered by a substantial and systematically constructed entrenchment. This line of entrenchment sprang up the steep side of the hill between the top and the village of Scy, which is just outside its cordon. If constructed at all during the siege, it must have been made in the early days. The face was banked up with an earthen slope now grass grown; inside was the inner face of an upright wall of stones uncemented by mortar. This entrenchment was regularly constructed with salient and re-entering angles, and with bastion-like projections at intervals, for sweeping the face laterally. Close behind were, at intervals, bomb-proof half-underground constructions for the protection of troops not actually lining the entrenchment, and that it was not meant as a place of occasional resort, but was habitually held by defenders, was evidenced by the durable construction of the kitchens, as well as by other less savoury tokens of the continuous presence of troops. In the rear of the bomb-proofs, at frequent intervals, were the earthworks thrown up for batteries. Encircling, as this entrenchment did, the extreme edge of the plateau, its defenders could look right down into the valley below, as well as across at the lower and less abrupt heights opposite which constitute the fringe of the plateau of St. Hubert; and with proper appliances and moderate determination, could, to all appearance, have prevented anything from living in, much less successfully traversing, that valley, to make an assault. This defence work of the summit of Mont St. Quentin, which may be called the key of Metz, presented an appearance so formidable as to seem almost to reduce into a superfluity the great fort in its rear; although of course the utility of the latter became obvious for all round firing at long ranges in co-operation with the other forts for the protection of Metz. This line ran away, still as strong as ever, down into the dip between the summit of Mont St. Quentin and the longer hog-backed ridge of Plappeville. As it came on upon the latter, instead of climbing directly up the face and so passing close under the greater fortification, it took a sweep westward, skirting the eminence near its base, and was continued right round to the northern front of Plappeville, putting an effectual check upon any sudden surprise from the Bois de Châtel or the Bois de Saulny.

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

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

END OF VOL. I.

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

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Gustave von Alvensleben who commanded the 4th Corps is a full general.

[2] I observe it has been asserted that the French in those earlier battles did not resort to rifle-pits. Anybody asserting this who was in sight of the operations must have been stone-blind. I have been in dozens of them. The story of 800 and odd corpses having been found in one after the battle of the 14th of August must have been a “goak” perpetrated by some youngster on the staff eager to feed Germany with sensationalism. There were two varieties of what the Germans call schützen-graben. Of one the churchyard at Point du Jour is a good example—a triangle surrounded with a low wall, which had been loopholed, and with a trench inside for additional cover. The other pattern consisted of a small half-moon excavation—the convexity toward the enemy—the earth from the hole breasted up in front, over which the marksmen fired in a kneeling position. The maximum garrison of one of these rifle-pits must have been about twelve men, half of them firing while the other half rested behind the shelter. To have packed throngs of men into large rifle-pits would simply have been to provide so many charnel-houses. Doubtless numbers of the little half-moons are still to the fore on the battle-fields. It is easy to tell the French works from the German by the objective of their convexity. The Germans, however, converted many of them.

[3] I give no heed to the balderdash written about Bazaine’s abandonment to sensual indulgence, of which I have been unable to find a scintilla of unprejudiced and impartial confirmation.

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