COURCELLES, SPICHEREN, AND GRAVELOTTE.

If one lingered long in Saarbrück, it became apparent, so rapid was the advance, that he might find himself out of the hunt altogether. Indeed, when I quitted Saarbrück on the afternoon of Tuesday, the 9th of August, I was already in the rear of most of the army of Steinmetz, and behind, likewise, no small proportion of the vast host of Prince Frederick Charles. Instead of tramping to Forbach by the road, I took a final walk over the scene of the battle-field of the Saturday.

By Monday at mid-day all the wounded had been removed and most of the dead buried. The whole of the ground was thickly dotted over with graves. The burial-parties had been pious in those their ministrations to the dead. Few of the mounds but were surmounted with a rude cross, made of a couple of sticks lashed together with a buckle strap. Others were more elaborate, the cross board being flat and having inscribed upon it the number interred, their rank and regiment. Already the townspeople had decorated some of the graves with shrubs and flowers, but most of the decorations consisted of bayonets and swords stuck in the soil—tokens that soldiers lay below. Friend and foe slept at peace with each other in one grave. The inscription over one of the largest on the first Spicheren height I thought worth copying:—

“Hier ruhen in Gott 29 Preussen und 69 Franzosen.”

I walked some distance before I came to an unburied body, but in the little clefts and gulleys leading up to the second Spicheren height they still lay quite thick. There was no difficulty in discovering their vicinity. The corpse of a man slain in battle does not lie for three days exposed to the air and sun without lapsing into decomposition, and some of the bodies were horrible sights. Some could hardly have been known for human—so black and turgid were the features. The deaths had chiefly been from rifle bullets. Most of the Germans bore their death-wounds in their faces and heads, received as they stormed the terrible ascent; the Frenchmen—those who had not perished by the bayonet—were for the most part shot through the body, or had their legs shattered. One scene I never can forget. By the foot of a tree lay two dead German soldiers. It seemed as if they had been removed thither either during or after the fight, while as yet only wounded. Beside them were two pannikins half full of water, and a piece of bread. One, quite a lad, lay in a crouching attitude, his head bent downwards toward the tree. He had been shot through the head, and the blood had streamed on to his handkerchief and the open pocket-book in front of him. One hand grasped that of his dead comrade, in the other was an envelope. The letter it contained may have blown away, or the lad, in his last agony, may have thrust it in his breast; but the envelope itself was eloquent enough. It was addressed in a female handwriting, and bore the postmark of a little village away near the shores of the Baltic. The writer—mother or sweetheart, I know not—evidently had been the last thought of the lad. Will she come to weep over his grave among the clay-stone crags of the Spicheren? Will he, indeed, have a grave at all? The place was a lonely one, and the straggling cowherd may, months after, have chanced upon a couple of skeletons with arms and belts on the bones.

What a distance over the height had stretched the battle, I never realised until this night. Three miles away from the first bluff of the Spicheren-berg, I found dead French soldiers lying between the drills of a potato-field. And then in the growing darkness I lost my way, and had to plunge through a dense wood growing on a steep slope. There was no road, but I scrambled downward with tolerable freedom, till I stumbled over something and fell at full length. As I stretched forth my hand to raise myself it touched the face of a corpse, cold and clammy with the death-sweat. In the dark solitude of the wood such a contact, unpleasant at any time, was horrible, and made my blood run cold. It seemed as if everywhere I turned my feet met prostrate corpses. I struck a light, and by its dim rays found myself in the centre of a knot of some half-dozen dead French soldiers. Whether they had been slain simultaneously by the bursting of a shell, or had scrambled into the wood wounded, and died here in each other’s company, I know not; I only know that I shuddered at the situation in which I found myself, and then it struck me that one of them moved. Could he be still alive? No, it was but imagination on my part. They were all dead, and sadly wanted burial. Very daintily did I pick my steps down the rest of the wooded slope, but, getting on a rough footpath, I chanced on no more corpses. But I slept very little that night, and when I did I continually dreamed of the group of dead Frenchmen. The indescribable taint of the unburied dead lingered in my nostrils for hours after.

Forbach consists mainly of one chief street, which is rather narrow. A horse falling, in a carriage, would block it up. Somehow German horses do not fall. I watched the constant stream pouring through this narrow street for half a day, and never observed a block, not even a check, for more than five minutes at a time. I do not know what sort of a place Forbach may be in ordinary times—probably a prosperous commercial town; with me it will ever be associated with semi-starvation and a narrow escape from sleeping in the gutter. In the house of a man who had been named to me in Saarbrück I had secured, as it seemed, quarters of a sort. From these a “Graf” somebody turned me out in order to let in twelve soldiers. I could not in decency object, seeing that the men had not been inside a house for eight days, and if I had it would not have mattered. My aliment for the succeeding twenty-four hours was a glass of liqueur and half a cigar. I spent the night among straw in an outhouse, and was thankful that I had not to take a pitch in the gutter. The soldiers had eaten up everything, drunken up everything, smoked up everything. The people were half starving; but as they starved they rejoiced, for they had charged the soldiers war prices. The commissariat arrangements had hardly yet got into order, but it was plain that even when that should have been the case, the consumption of everything available on the part of the troops would continue. Soldiers on the march are always hungry and thirsty. I wish they had left a little tobacco for an outsider though; it is easier to starve when one’s pipe is full.

I was the witness of a little incident in Forbach which tends to illustrate the Prussian thoroughness that is so great a key to success. Strolling down to the railway station to inquire as to the probabilities of a _Militärzug_, I found a divisional general sitting placidly outside the station entrance, a table by his side and a bottle of wine on it, which he and the Mayor of Forbach were leisurely drinking as they smoked their cigars. Now the divisional general of an English army in the field would have been surrounded by a cordon of orderlies, and have formed the centre of a glittering staff. It would not have been permitted to a mortal of common clay to look upon his glory. This old gentleman—his name I have forgotten—sat drinking his wine without a solitary orderly in waiting, much less a staff officer. The privates and corporals of working parties were passing out and in, clearing the station of French _débris_, and the jolly old fellow now and again exchanged a word with them as they came within hail. Presently there was brought unto him a deputation of the bakers of Forbach, whose attendance he had ordered. Quoth the general to the bakers—“My men are temporarily short of bread; you must each by to-morrow morning turn out so many loaves. You will be paid thirty francs for one hundred loaves, and I shall take no excuse.”

You should have heard the Forbach bakers jabber! The great “lord-general” was robbing them outright. They would rather give the bread for nothing. They had wives and children, and rents to pay. Would his Excellency ruin them? And so on. As they stood in the rain gesticulating, they presented a curious contrast to the grizzly German, in his waterproof, calmly smoking and sipping his wine as if he heard not the din of the terribly fluent bakers. At last they chattered themselves fairly out of breath, and then the old man turned to them with a smile, as if he just remembered their presence. “Go away, my good fellows,” said he, “and hold your tongues. I can get good loaves in Deutsch-land, three for a franc, and I give no Frenchman any more.” And the bakers went away in a perfect torrent of “_sacres_,” but for all that to get their ovens in order to do the behests of the laconic old chief. There was no trusting to bungling commissaries here—fellows whom the Duke of Wellington was wont to couple with correspondents in his anxiety to hang. The general knew that an army must be fed, if it is to march and to fight, and he personally saw to the purveyance.

The good folks of Forbach had for the most part remained at home to receive the Prussian troops, but they did not seem any the more for this to love Prussia. They were French to the backbone, but not French of the Napoleonic pattern. They made no secret of their readiness to cry “_Vive la République_” when the time should come; and I may note that the great majority of the French prisoners to whom I spoke, while staunch for France, had no fondness for the Emperor of the French, but openly avowed their preference for a Republic. The Forbach people gave out as the reason why the French army had without resistance been retired on Metz, that the troops had manifested a discontent which made the Emperor fear to trust them in action.

An allusion to French prisoners of war calls to mind one of the basest calumnies against German humanity that ever malignity invented. It was stated in French journals that both German soldiers and German civilians were cruel and abusive to French prisoners. Never was there a grosser lie. Indeed Germany might be well content to rest her reputation on the testimony of the prisoners themselves. I have seen the people at the railway stations tender the wine-can to the prisoners before the escort. If the escort were served first, I have seen the soldiers composing it pass the pannikin to their charge before drinking themselves. I have seen French wounded carried off the field in regular routine with Germans, and getting their turn of the doctor with religious exactitude. The people of Saarbrück, when they threw open their homes, did not care whether they admitted the wearer of a spiked helmet or of a pair of red breeches. And once I saw a German escort march a French sergeant by a circuitous route round a village, that he might not form an object of attention on the part of the village boys. This was an act of delicate consideration which of itself would refute the calumnious and unfounded statements to which I have referred, and which did not a little wound the feelings of German chivalry.

From Forbach the next stage was St. Avold, to reach which on the afternoon of Thursday the 11th of August involved a walk of some ten miles in the rain, commenced without breakfast and concluded in the most utterly blank prospect of anything to eat, or of any place wherein to sleep. Forbach seemed as full as any town could possibly be, but Forbach was not a patch on St. Avold. All the staff were there, and there, too, was half the army. I had casually heard of a dish of liver down a bye-street, and fondly hoped it would be mine. It was taken by stouthrief and hamesucken from under my nose by a masterful German sergeant of Uhlans, who swore by all the deities of the Saxon Switzerland, from which locality he derived his existence, that he would send a “kugel” through the man that interfered between him and the liver. Empty as I was, I was not eager to have the vacuum filled up by “kugels,” and I let him have it with a reluctant sigh. The food and locomotion question, by the way, demands a word or two. In those early days of the war I nourished a pet theory that the best way to do the work on which I was engaged was to be “at large” in the army in preference to being attached to any head-quarters, to carry one’s belongings on his back, and do one’s locomotion on one’s own feet. Beyond question there is a great charm to a strong healthy man in pursuing this system. If you get a bed in a house, good and well; if not, steer for the nearest camp fire, and you are generally sure of a dip into the kettle and a hunk, savoury if tough, of the mature cow which you saw sedately walking behind a baggage-cart in the morning. If you tire, you can jump on the first waggon that passes; if you see an eminence whence you think there is a view, you can climb it—and you will not count the toil wasted among such scenery as one may see among the vine slopes;—if it rains you get wet; but then when it fairs, and the sun comes out, you get dry again. If there is fighting in the wind, you need not be farther behind than the troops that come up at the double; in short, you are your own master, free to come and to go, without the everlasting incubus of impedimenta and belongings on your mind. But the plan has disadvantages which experience teaches more than outweigh the pleasures. The information which reaches an unattached man is scanty and often inaccurate; a day comes when a gallop is worth anything, and then you miss a horse, and swear to forego gipsying.

Just at dusk on the 11th I strolled up the market-place of St. Avoid, opposite to the Post. At an open window, looking down on the busy throng of his soldiers, sat King Wilhelm. The old man was alone; his chin was in his hand, and one could read in the abstraction of his glance that his thoughts were far away. Next morning I saw him under a different guise. For two hours and more he stood in the market-place, close to the road that bisects in its midst. By his side was Von Moltke—gaunt, thin, shaggy, wiry. Close behind stood Bismarck, seemingly as ready to fight as to make a fool of Benedetti in diplomacy. A few general officers stood around, but there was no semblance of a staff, nor anything like a guard or escort. The Father of his people is a homely man. Interspersed among the generals were the gamins of St. Avold, staring up with eyes of wonder at “_le Roi Prussien_.” A private soldier, in his shirt-sleeves, carrying a loaf in his hand, all but floured his Majesty’s elbow, and others stood around, forming a close circle behind the generals. But if King William was homely in his immediate surroundings, those who stood by him were spectators with him of a sight that well might make his cheek flush with pride and emotion. For during the two hours that the King stood on this market place there ceased not to stream past him the army of which he is the chief. Now it was a regiment of white-coated, steel-breasted cuirassiers that came on stately, the ground shaking under the tramp of the great horses as the air vibrated to the sound of the mighty cheer from the deep-chested men. Then a regiment of infantry, three battalions strong, each with its band playing at its head, the men marching eight abreast, and already seasoned by the march and the bivouac, looking fit to do anything and go anywhere. The cheering of the passing troops was always hearty, but it rose to a shout of proud joy as the regiments came by with ranks already thinned by the desperate storm of Spicheren, and when the King with a wave of his hand saluted them with the cheery, “Morgen, Knappe Jungens!” Hussars, Uhlans, horse artillery, diversified the dense masses of infantry, and so thoroughly serviceable did all appear in every respect, that it would be invidious to comment in particular on the appearance of any. With all the field-officers the King shook hands and exchanged a few words, but he seemed best pleased to look into the enthusiastic faces of the men—his “Kinder”—as they passed. King as he is, he is none the less the soldier. It amused me greatly to hear him reprove a man for being out of step, and another for having his zund-nadelgewehr on the wrong shoulder. No one would have imagined that the upright form and square shoulders carried the load of seventy-three winters.

It is impossible to imagine an army travelling with greater swiftness, and leaving fewer traces behind it, than the Prussian army invading France. The reserve was in Forbach; the army in St. Avold and beyond. For miles between the two places the road I traversed was as clear as in the quiet days of peace. The wave of war had passed, and hardly left a trace behind. The crops were unharmed in the fields on either side of the road, save in the spots where there had been bivouacs on the previous night; not a soldier or a mark of warfare was visible. Between Saarbrück and St. Avold I saw only two dead horses by the wayside, notwithstanding that some of the waggons had journeyed from near Berlin. If any men had fallen out footsore they must have been brought on somehow, for there were no stragglers. The stores were all close up, and the commissariat now in full working. It was a great catch for the Prussians to have captured at the Forbach station some two million thalers worth of French stores, of which a depot had been formed there.

Our tramp of the 12th was to Marange, a squalid village to the northern front of Falquemont, near which the King had his head-quarters for several days. We were pushing on after Steinmetz, knowing something of the dash and daring of that seasoned old warrior. Everybody was asking what could have become of the French army, thirty thousand men of which passed through Marange in headlong retreat the day but one after the battle of Spicheren. It was noted that there was hardly a foot of ground between St. Avold and Marange that might not have been held to advantage against an invader. St. Avold itself stands in the throat of a gullet. On the Metz side of it the valley opens out into a fine plain with a large château on a mamelon in its centre, a noble key to a splendid position, and behind, shutting in the valley from the French side, swells a great sloping ridge from the summit of which artillery might have operated with overwhelming advantage. Between Marange and Bionville another great hog-backed swell, the _beau ideal_ of a battle position for the resistance of invasion; but it was crowned by Prussian bivouacs, and the French,—well, when you asked anybody in authority where they were, he would give a laugh and a little nod, and ask you for a light for his cigar.

From a hut in Marange to a château in Bazoncourt, a village a little behind Courcelles, and on the northern side of the little river Nied, was our experience of the 13th. Here Bazaine had had his head-quarters for a day or two, when he was sent forward with the 3rd French corps to attempt the rallying of the fugitives from Spicheren. By this time, the 13th, we had gained one of the central divisions of Steinmetz’s army, and that commander himself was expected to occupy rooms for the night in the château of Bazoncourt, where meanwhile the officers of a dragoon regiment had located themselves. This château, the property of a certain Baron de Courtier, was a fine specimen of a French country house. The reception rooms were fitted up with great splendour in the Louis Quatorze style. They had been left just as they were occupied by the family, and the half-finished sketches and dainty needle-work of the young ladies were lying about just as they had been dropped when the route came for the retreat to Metz. Upstairs were long corridors, off which opened any quantity of bed rooms, all left in trim order, and between the snowy sheets of which dragoon officers, weary from frequent bivouacs, had stretched their weary frames the previous night. Bric-à-brac clocks, bijouterie, and all manner of tasteful nick-nacks adorned the pretty chambers; in one hung a watch, which its owner had left behind in his or her hurry. The corridors were hung with old family pictures, portraits of men in armour, gaunt and sinewy with the training that won them renown in the tournament—with chevaliers with elaborately curled hair hanging over their shoulders, ruffles and frills of Valenciennes lace, court swords, and jewelled snuff-boxes. And the gallery of female portraits was equally rich, from the straight-robed lady of the old regime to the luscious dame, all powder and patches, of Louis the Great, and the sprightly damsel of the Regency. The library door stood open, and a volume of Thomas Carlyle’s “Life of Cromwell” lay open side by side with a French translation of one of James’s novels. I wrote a letter at a desk at a window in the corridor, in the interior of which I found a family album, a bundle of maps and guide-books—the relics of a family tour through Switzerland,—and a quantity of exercises in English, presumably by the young ladies, corrected by the pencil of the governess. At the rear of the château was a beautiful garden, adorned with flowering annuals, trailing sprays of fuchsias, and greener grass than I had hitherto ever seen in France; and in pretty retreats were rustic seats and fantastic tables.

When the Baron and his family ran away—a very foolish thing for them to do by the way, for they would have received no annoyance—they had the civility to leave behind them a neat assortment of the ugliest old cook-women it has ever been my lot to see, who did their best to provide for the wants of all comers. The Baron owned all the fertile and warm vineyards that slope upward from the village, and he housed the vintages underneath his château and the esplanade behind it. I found that the quartermaster of the dragoons had administered to the keys of the cellars, from the stores of which he doled forth bottles on properly vouched application. To my solicitation he replied by a bottle of white wine and a bottle of red wine, along with which my companion and myself retired to a shady arbour, and cordially drank the health of the Baron and all his house. He could not have been a bad man, his wine was so good.

At Bazoncourt were within twelve miles of Metz. The 12th Regiment of Dragoons had scouted the same morning to within sight of Forts St. Julien and Queleu, and had left videttes to observe the doings in the vicinity. The universal belief was that the French were in position to defend the passage of the Moselle between Metz and Pont-à-Mousson. The centre of their position was set down as being somewhere about Noveant, nearly midway between Pont-à-Mousson and Metz. Steinmetz on the right, Prince Frederick Charles was in the centre, and his head-quarters on the 13th were at Nomeny, considerably to the south of us. The Crown Prince, pushing on from Wörth, was on the extreme left, and rather in the rear, heading right on Nancy. It was expected that there would be a gradual concentration of the widely opened-out front, consequent upon exact knowledge of the French dispositions, and of the locality in which they might have made up their mind to offer battle. The soldiers of Steinmetz were thoroughly confident of victory. They had respected—and perhaps half feared—the French till they tested their calibre on the heights of Spicheren. Since then they made somewhat light of them; and as they penetrated farther and farther into the French territory, asked each other with raised eyebrows, whether a French host could have penetrated thus far into Rhineland without fertilizing the vineyards with its blood.

We missed seeing the battle of Courcelles, baulked by that over-eagerness which so often defeats itself. In the absence of good staff information, and judging solely, therefore, from regimental gossip, which it may be taken as an axiom is never reliable, we came to the conclusion that the impending battle must be fought more to the south. Early on the morning of the 14th—oh, that we had been less impatient!—my companion and myself, having determined to make towards the centre of the army of advance, quitted Bazoncourt in a south-westerly direction, and walked across the front, keeping at first as close as possible in the track of a party of dragoons, which the day before had marched from Bazoncourt toward Nomeny. Guided only by a rough chart, and destitute of a compass, we found ourselves in what may be called the debateable land between the German advance and the Moselle, to the south of Metz. So long as we were in the track of the dragoons we passed through the frequent villages without molestation, and, indeed, experienced a certain grumpy civility; but when we got into the terra incognita beyond, black looks everywhere met us from the French villagers. Towards midday, getting hungry, we asked a patriarch in a village through which we passed if he could put us in the way of getting any food. Rather sulkily he asked us in, and gave us some sour bread and hard-boiled eggs. As we were consuming this fare he left us, and only returned in order to obtain payment. When we recrossed his threshold we found waiting for us what I suppose was the able-bodied adult population of the village, consisting of about half-a-dozen young men and two hobbedehoys. One of them, acting as spokesman, inquired our business, muttering charges of our being Prussians and spies. I tried hard to explain to them that we were in the extremest sense of the word non-combatants, showing them a tiny penknife as the most lethal weapon I carried; but they continued to crowd around us threateningly, and I thought for sure every minute they would close. We edged towards a wall, so as to have them only on one side, and then my companion giving the word suddenly altered his tone, and peremptorily ordered them to clear the road. One hulking fellow would not give back, whereupon my friend let fly a straight right-hander from the shoulder that knocked the Frenchman backward into his patrimonial dunghill. The thoroughness and rapidity of the act seemed to dumbfounder his comrades, and we were out of the village before they recovered themselves.

Reaching the village of St. Jure we once more fell in with the spiked helmets, and remained there for the night. In the still night watches we heard the distant din of the artillery fire with which the battle of Courcelles was concluded, and in the morning came scrappy tidings of the bloody victory.

Although I was not a spectator of the battle of Courcelles (or Borny, as the French and indeed some of the Germans call it), I may give a brief sketch of the character of the operations. The German leaders had reason for believing, what we afterwards know was the case, that Bazaine, who had got the command of the French “Army of the Rhine,” was proceeding to attempt the withdrawal of his army from Metz, with intent to retire upon Châlons and form a defensive junction with MacMahon. Weighing him in their own scales, it seemed clear that if he were to put this design into practice with energy and promptitude, he must gain such a start as would frustrate the intended strategetical movement on the part of Prince Frederick of swinging round by the south on the ground beyond the Moselle, and blocking Bazaine’s paths of retreat. This was to be baulked at any cost, and the sluggishness of the French general gave Steinmetz an opportunity of which he was not slow to avail himself. There seems no reason to doubt that Bazaine might have marched clean away, if he had but realised the urgency of the necessity, without troubling himself about a strong rear-guard, when he had such a fortress as Metz to cover his retreat. In truth, Bazaine does not seem to have left the corps of Decaën, Ladmirault, and Frossard in the camps where Steinmetz found them, out of any solicitude for the safety of his rear, but simply because he had let his front get clogged in the passage of the Moselle, and was not impressed with the necessity of clearing his feet and getting away quickly from what afterwards proved his prison-house. The fact that on the 14th he fought when he need not, and indeed ought not, is strong proof that he did not realise his position. Had he done so, it would appear that his policy was, instead of trying to hold the line by Nouilly, Montoy, Colombey, and Mercy le Haut, to get his three corps back under the shelter of the forts of Metz, bustle them over the river and set them to keep the passage of the stream on the south of Metz. Steinmetz could have taken nothing by boring that bullet-head of his against Fort St. Julien or Fort Queleu. His direct march would have been arrested by the stone and iron in his path, and he must have diverged either north or south. The northern route would have been too circuitous, and have disconnected him too far from Prince Frederick Charles; if he had chosen the southward, he would have had to fight for the crossing with Bazaine’s rear-guard, while the mass of the army of the latter, escaping the too tardy grapple of Prince Frederick Charles, would have been far on the road toward Macmahon. But everything seemed to work together for the advantage of the German arms. The three rearward French corps Steinmetz found in their camps; he asked them to give them battle that so he might gain time for Prince Frederick Charles, and with chivalrously blind simplicity they complied. They occupied the line of villages I have named, covering Metz to the eastward, when Steinmetz’s reconnaissance beat up their quarters. The position, with which I had occasion afterwards to become familiar, presents many advantageous features, but is faulty in a military sense by reason of the abundance of cover for an approaching enemy, and of the number of excellent roads at his service for bringing up his forces in parallel columns. The French front and flanks were studiedly covered with numerous rifle-pits and trenches. Steinmetz’s attack did not begin till shortly before four o’clock in the afternoon. It was initiated by the 1st division (Bentheim) belonging to the 1st Army Corps, which had joined Steinmetz since Spicheren; and by the 26th brigade (von der Goltz) of Glümer’s division (the 13th) belonging to the 7th Army Corps. There were strong supports belonging to the 1st and 7th corps behind, about Pange, Domangeville, and Frontigny. The 26th brigade began the attack on Colombey, while Bentheim’s men farther to the north pressed up the Saarbrück-Metz chaussée, deploying when at the hamlet of St. Agnan on the vineyards toward Flanville against Montoy and the ravine of La Planchette. The French were so strong on the slopes and in the woods about their position that the German infantry could make no headway, and lost heavily, experiencing, too, now for the first time a foretaste of the idiosyncracies of French fortress guns. Infantry supports came up, but the Colombey-Montoy position was defended with great obstinacy and could not be forced. After the infantry had been engaged without effect for some hours, the horse artillery were galloped up and came into action on the plateau near Noisseville, close to the brewery, with which the siege of Metz made us so familiar, and looking down upon Montoy from the north-east. There were no fewer than fourteen batteries in position between Noisseville and Flanville, and before the fire from eighty-four cannon the French began to break and give ground. Then the infantry of Bentheim and von der Goltz took advantage of the opportunity, but encountered a warm resistance, and had to fight for every fragment of ground they gained, losing, of course, very heavily. At seven o’clock further supports came up; Pritzelwitz with his fresh 2nd division eager to back up his countrymen of Bentheim’s division, and Kamecke with his 14th division, weakened already by the fight of Spicheren, but ready as it had been then to be in the thick of it. Thus the 1st and 7th corps were complete, and drove the French in toward Borny, Vantoux, and Mey. The French right at Mercy le Haut was crushed through an instrumentality that owed its presence to the fact that artillery fire makes a noise. Had air-guns been in use instead or fulminating powder, von Wrangel, marching his 18th division leisurely toward the Moselle, in the southern rear of the battle-field, would not have heard the cannon thunder. His division, forming part of the 9th Army Corps (Manstein), had only crossed the frontier a day or two before, and it belonged to the army of Prince Frederick Charles. But the cannon thunder intuitively turned Wrangel to the right, and about seven o’clock he turned up at Mercy le Haut, and set about throwing back the French right wing. Just before dark the French of Ladmirault’s corps made a strong rally, attacking Wrangel vigorously by Grigy, while they staggered Bentheim on the north and even made him temporarily give ground in the direction of Noisseville and Servigny. But the attempt only caused further bloodshed. The Germans braced themselves up, fresh supports came, and after a fight which lasted long after dark, the proximity of the forts alone compelled the Germans to desist from driving the French farther. As it was, perhaps they came too close to the inanimate defences. There are German graves of the 14th August nearer to Queleu and les Bottes than prudence would seem to warrant; but men flushed with victory are not always wise. The German loss was between 2000 and 3000, and over 4000 wounded French prisoners were taken.

Soon after leaving St. Jure in the morning, we encountered a large body of German troops in full advance toward the Moselle. Accompanying it was the head-quarter staff of General von Alvensleben, from some members of which we learned that the Moselle bank was undefended by the French, and that the Third Army Corps, of which von Alvensleben had the command, was marching straight on Pagny to pontoon the stream near that point, and, crossing, strive to catch up with the left flank of Bazaine, who had that day quitted Metz on his march towards Verdun. Receiving permission to accompany the advance, we therefore went on to a village called Seligny, where the staff located itself in a handsome château with charming grounds surrounding it, and the troops bivouacked in the neighbourhood. At first it seemed as if the halt was but for a few hours during the heat of the day, and that the march would be resumed in the afternoon; but other troops continued to arrive, and then we were given to understand that there was to be a halt in Seligny for the night. We knew that troops had already crossed the Moselle at Pont-à-Mousson, which is about midway between Metz and Nancy, and the idea of being kept pottering behind was very disagreeable. So we parted company from General von Alvensleben and his staff, and made rapid tracks for Pont-à-Mousson. In an intermediate valley we passed through a large bivouac, chiefly of artillery and medical staff. Then we climbed a long vineclad ascent, and on reaching its summit there lay stretched at our feet the beautiful valley of the Moselle, with the broad stream in its bosom, and the white chateaux on the farther slope, glancing brightly from the rich green ground of the vineyards. On the left the grim old ruin of the Castle of Mousson frowned from the top of its precipitous rock—a gaunt skeleton of ancient war, looking down upon modern war. Under its shelter lay the town of Pont-à-Mousson, developing itself from the distance where we stood chiefly in church spires and barrack roofs, and along the valley directly below us ran the broad chaussée from Metz to Nancy. We found Pont-à-Mousson crammed with German soldiers. It occupies both sides of the river, connected by the quaint old bridge, which in ancient times was one of the keys by which France was wont to unlock the door that opened up the passage through Lorraine into Germany. Over the river and we were in France proper—no longer in German Lorraine, which every true Frenchman considers but a bastard Frankland. The triangular Place we found packed full of troops of all arms. There runs round it a piazza, such as we may see in Covent Garden, and this piazza was bedded with straw, and formed one vast couch for I cannot tell how many soldiers. Prince Frederick Carl had been in Pont-à-Mousson the night before, but had already gone forward. The Pont-à-Mousson people were very sombre, yet they kept their shops open and did their best to reap a good harvest, accepting German money as if it had been their currency from time immemorial. The first intimation they had that things were not prospering with France had been in the shape of a vast train of hospital-carts laden with wounded, which passed through the town on the 11th. The poor wounded were in a fearful state, many of them were weeping, and all utterly despondent and prostrated. Next day a detachment of about forty Prussian Uhlans had galloped into the valley and begun to tear up the railway between Metz and Nancy, and to cut the telegraph. An official wired their presence to Metz, and brought a squadron of the Chasseurs d’Afrique on their grey Arab stallions down from Metz at the gallop. They did the distance—about fifteen miles—at hunting pace, surrounded the Uhlans while engrossed at their work, and potted the lot with neatness and dexterity, being on their way back to Metz with their prisoners in less than half an hour. This was a very clever little exploit. Next day the Prussians had come in force and occupied the bridge, encountering no opposition. Since then the stream of arrivals had been constant. The little specimen which we experienced of the malevolence of the French civilians had, it appeared, been by no means isolated. We heard of a patrol, consisting of three men and a sergeant, who had been set upon by the inhabitants of a village on the French side of the Moselle, armed with pitchforks, and headed by the _curé_. They were all killed. The murderers were taken by another patrol, brought into Pont-à-Mousson, tried by a drum-head court-martial, and were lying under sentence of death. Another case was reported where two dragoons were poisoned in the quarters which they occupied in an outlying village.

Late the same afternoon, the 15th, my companion and myself quitted Pont-à-Mousson, and took the line of advance so well marked by a continuous stream of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and military train. We had been unable to obtain definite information as to the proposed scheme of action. But Frederick Charles himself, that hot-blooded man of war, had hours ago galloped out of the market-place of Pont-à-Mousson; and his was always a good line to follow; for sure as where the carcass is there the vultures are gathered together, so wherever there is the smell of powder burnt in wrath the Red Prince is not far off. When we reached the top of the heights fringing the western side of the valley of the Moselle, we found that the line of advance taken was not by the straight road that leads by Commercy to Bar-le-Duc, at which point the Marne comes nearest to the Moselle, but that it slanted away in a north-westerly direction in the direction, as it seemed, of Verdun, traversing a country consisting of alternate abrupt but inconsiderable elevations and narrow but not very deep valleys. As to the reason for this seeming detour from the straight clutch at the throat of Paris, it became obvious by-and-by. We passed several small villages, around which were great bivouacs; and about nine o’clock in the evening we reached the moderate-sized but very poverty-stricken town of Thiaucourt. It was teeming with troops. Entering a wine-shop close to a bridge at the end of the town nearest Pont-à-Mousson, we made some inquiries of the officers we found there as to the distance which the advance was ahead, and as to what was known of the French movements. They were fresh arrivals, and could tell us nothing except that they believed we must be close to the limit of the advance, for that the head-quarters of the leading division of the 10th Corps were in the town. As we were both fair walkers and the night was beautiful, and as Thiaucourt did not seem to offer many inducements in the way of accommodation, we determined to cover another five miles to the front, if we could get so far, before seeking the neighbourhood of a friendly camp-fire. So we started merrily up the crowded, narrow, and steep street of Thiaucourt. Not far from the top we came upon a few hand ambulances on which wounded men lay stretched. This indicated fighting no great distance off, for the blood on their bandages was still moist and fresh. Although we heard no firing, we made sure a night attack was in progress somewhere, and, by pressing on, that we should be able to see something of it. Just as we got to the top we passed a group of officers in earnest conversation, several of whom wore the provost-marshal or field-gendarmerie uniform. One of these abruptly and loudly challenged us, and demanded to know who we were. In reply to our explanations he only waxed wroth.

“Correspondents!” roared the angry man, “donner wetter, correspondents indeed! We want no correspondents here. Not a step farther do you go, and if I can do anything you will be sent back at once.”

The man was too angry to be remonstrated with. Something before our rencontre with him had evidently disturbed his equanimity, and we were getting the benefit of his being out of temper. He confiscated our papers remorselessly, and as good as told us to go to the devil—at all events till the morning. Considerably chap-fallen, we were slowly retracing our steps, with the intention of finding quarters somewhere, when we were again abruptly challenged by a still angrier man than the first. I fancy he had been sent after us by challenger No. 1. Anyhow, he did not wait for any explanation. We were coming from the direction of the French, and so—the sentence was concluded by a word of command to a party which was following, and we heard the nasty click of the bayonets as they were fixed and sent home in the socket. Our escort brought us to a large house which was the mairie of the town, and taking us upstairs left us in the dark in a huge room, with a sentry standing over us. It seemed as if our apprehension had excited some interest, for officers often came to the door and peered in upon us through the gloom, but not one brought us tidings of release. Presently there came a trampling of feet on the staircase, officers rushed into the room with lights in advance of some stretchers, on which were wounded men, and we were informed that we were to be removed. We had hoped in our simplicity that we were pretty nearly in as bad case as might be, but we were to find out how rash was this conclusion. We were hurried across a passage, a door was opened, and we were thrust into a dark room, the floor of which was littered by prostrate Frenchmen. They were all civilians, who had been arrested on suspicion of being spies. The French idiosyncrasy does not develop itself in the direction of free ventilation, and our companions were singularly odoriferous, even for Frenchmen of the lower orders; it may be imagined, therefore, how abominably the place stank. We remonstrated energetically against being herded with spies, but the only indulgence we could obtain was in the shape of two chairs, whereas our companions had to sit on the floor,—at least I judged so, for it was too dark to see them. The room we were in was the Salle de Justice, and the table of the right worshipful mayor, and another one, which, I presume, was used by the Mr. Oke of Thiaucourt, stood on a dais inside a low railing. We took possession of this little platform, got a window open, sat down opposite to each other in our chairs, and simultaneously burst into a roar of laughter at the whimsicality of our position. But laughing, although pleasant exercise for the facial muscles, is not filling, viewed as a supper dish, and we had not eaten since midday. There was no prospect of release, and as little of anything to eat, so the next best thing was to sleep. My companion took the two chairs. I threw my knapsack on the boards as a pillow, pulled the baize covers off the tables, spread one of them below me, dragged the other over me, and we went to sleep. About midnight we were awakened and brought forth from our den. For my part I wished they had left us alone till morning, for the bitterness of death was past, and I was very comfortable between the mayor’s table-covers. We were liberated, told to find quarters for the night if we could—the gendarme grinned a saturnine grin as he told us this—and instructed to call for our papers in the morning, when we should learn what had been determined anent us. At this untoward crisis an ancient Frenchman presented himself, and in reply to our question said he could accommodate us with a bed. I am bound to say that he fulfilled his promise. He did more. He gave us a bottle of vinegar which he called wine. His habitation was a single large room, with three or four mattresses strewed about the floor miscellaneously. On one of them I threw myself, my companion took another, and the old Frenchman set up a melodious snore on a third. In about an hour I awoke. Two cats were on my chest. I was positively overrun with vermin. On occasion I can manage to retain composure under the assaults of the small, lively, and saltatory species of animalculæ, but when it comes to an army of miscreants bearing the conventional name in England of a great ducal family, I am compelled to draw the line; so I got up and strolled out into the bright fresh dawn. Troops had been streaming through Thiaucourt all night, and they still came as if there were no end to them.

Early in the morning our friend the chief of the gendarmes returned us our “legitimations,” explaining that they were good only for Stülpnagel’s division, not for the whole army of Prince Frederick Charles, and enjoining us strictly to return with all speed to Pont-à-Mousson, adding the cheerful observation that if he came across us again he would have us sent over the frontier under escort. We did indeed return to Pont-à-Mousson but having procured more comprehensive “legitimations” started off with all speed for Gorze.

In Gorze on Tuesday night nobody thought of bed. The hale were hurrying to the front; the doctors, the medical volunteers, and the sisters of mercy were tending the wounded everywhere. Every room was full, straw was shaken down in the streets by the sides of the houses, and wounded laid upon it. A huge convent, like one of those mills you see in Lancashire and Yorkshire, was packed full to its uttermost recess; from every window streamed a blaze of light. The whole town had a weird, lurid aspect. Candles were being burnt on the window-sills to light the troops on to the battle-field and the wounded off it; a babel of tongues raged in its narrow streets; it was impossible to avoid the feeling of nervousness such as one experiences when the air is charged with electricity just before a thunder-storm.

My companion and myself devoted ourselves to tend the wounded in one wing of a large hotel. They lay much as they had been brought in; their wounds had been bandaged in the field, and their time had not yet come for a second visit from the doctor. Three lay stretched on a billiard-table; the blood accumulated in the bed of the table till it began to ooze through the boards and drip on to the floor. Of nine in one small room, to whom we last gave water at midnight, three were dead by five in the morning. We left the poor fellows at six; two sisters of mercy had undertaken them by that time.

A great battle had been fought, perhaps the most stubborn fight of all this bloody campaign. Of 80,000 Germans engaged 18,000 were _hors de combat_, a proportion unequalled in modern European warfare. And it had been scarcely a victory for the German armies; it had been only not a defeat and a contribution toward the victory which it was hoped would follow. Vionville was no battle the plan of which was sedulously devised beforehand; there was no making of skilful dispositions with a keen eye to contingencies. It was simply a furious fight into which regiments, brigades, and divisions precipitated themselves as they came up, sure that they could not do wrong if they could but find an enemy and fasten upon him. Nor was an enemy hard to find or easy to cope with. You will not find a German who fought at Vionville but will frankly acknowledge that. He owns to you, with a shudder of recollection, how even was the balance for hours, and how his countrymen thought not of turning it in their favour, but would have been glad of the assurance that the beam would not kick the other way. In so far as Vionville was decided at all, it decided the relative staying power of French and German soldiers. There was no question about the fighting, there was not a hair’s breadth to choose between them there; but who could fight the longer, that was what Vionville tested. And Vionville, like Waterloo, gave men the belief that the side which did not lose could fight for ever if need were. If further proof were wanting that Bazaine had no comprehension how gravely his situation was compromised, it is to be found in the fact that he could not have scouted the ravine of Gorze or the region to the south of it. If he had done so on the 15th he would have found it swarming with the ever-vigilant cavalry of Rheinbaben’s division, which actually on the night of the 15th had indeed as good as turned his front, for it bivouacked at Xonville, some distance on the south-west of Mars la Tour. In utter blindness Bazaine blundered out of Metz in the course of the 15th, and composedly halted for the night when he had got about nine miles on his road. It becomes necessary to give a brief topographical sketch of the locality to aid in the understanding of the events of the next three days. The terrain to the west of Metz is rolling, broken in places with ravines, studded with forests, interspersed with open fields, numerous villages, and frequent farm-houses. It is intersected by three roads leading westward. Of these the most northerly quits Metz by Woippy, and strikes away by St. Privat la Montagne and St. Marie au Chênes to Brie and the valley of the Meuse. The central and southern roads are one as far as the village of Gravelotte, where the former one goes away in a north-westerly direction to Conflans and Estain. The most southerly of the three goes on due west toward Verdun, threading on it successively the villages of Rezonville, Vionville, and Mars la Tour. This is the most direct road to Verdun, but there is no want of cross-roads to facilitate access thereto by the others, and the way by the central road is little less direct than that by the southern. Before reaching Gravelotte the conjunct chaussée, after coming out of the valley of the Moselle by Longeau and Roserieulles, crosses the table-land surface of a rounded ridge, known as the plateau of St. Hubert, and turning sharp at the Point du Jour, plunges down into an abrupt and narrow ravine with closely-wooded banks, and in whose bed runs the little stream of the Mance. This ravine is prolonged less markedly further north, and may be said to partition off the plateau of St. Hubert from that of Gravelotte. The latter is a model battle-plain of the old pattern, when it was a large army that had a frontage of a mile and a half. From the brink of the ravine it rolls backward in undulating downs at least as far as Mars-la-Tour, bare of trees or obstructions right and left of the chaussée, which runs along its centre, for a breadth varying from two miles to a mile and a half. It is flanked on the north by scattered patches of forest, on the south by a continuous forest under various names, which clothes the rugged slopes of the ravine of Gorze, and crops up upon the plain, in places encroaching not a little distance on the plateau. Reckoning from Metz, the first forest bears the name of the Bois de Vaux. It clothes the Moselle-ward slopes of the plateau of St. Hubert, and terminates in the ravine of Gravelotte. On the opposite side of this ravine begins the Bois des Ognons, which intrudes on to the plateau to the south and south-west of Gravelotte, and stretches westerly to a little stream that comes down into the ravine of Gorze nearly south of Rezonville. Farther westward on the slope is the Bois de Vionville, and north of it, in the direction of Rezonville, the Bois de St. Arnould. On the plain to the south of the chaussée, between Rezonville and Vionville, is the hamlet of Flavigny; farther west, and also south of the chaussée, are the villages of Tronville and Puxieux. Northward of Vionville, in the triangle between the central and southern chaussées, are the villages of Bruville and St. Marcel. Farther north still, on the central chaussée, is the village of Doncourt.

Bazaine on the 15th had marched by both the central and the southern chaussées. For the night the corps of Le Bœuf, of Ladmirault, and of the Imperial Guards had their camps, the first on the central chaussée about Jarny, the second in Doncourt, and the third in St. Marcel. The corps of Canrobert and of Frossard, taking the southern road, had halted in Rezonville, Vionville, Flavigny, and Tronville, with advanced guards westward as far as Mars-la-Tour.

After all his efforts, as it seems, the French had the heels of Prince Frederick Charles. It appears certain that the German leaders had made their calculations on the basis of a battle to take place on the 17th, and there were indications that such was expected to be joined farther to the westward than the terrain on which the battles of Vionville and Gravelotte were fought. Why, else, had the 19th Division, the first over the Moselle been sent on the 15th so far away due west as Thiaucourt, seeing that, in the actual event, they had to sweep round on the enemy with a circuit surely unnecessarily large? Of the rest of the army nothing had crossed the Moselle on the night of the 15th save the 3rd Army Corps. Had I but been patient, and not mistaken Alvensleben’s halt at Seligny for a night bivouac, I should have been in the front of the fray. For at nightfall Stülpnagel had put his division (the 6th) in motion, had crossed the Moselle, and by three in the morning stacked arms again with his advance guard at Onville on the south of Gorze. Note, that he also was heading due west, as if to march farther in that direction before the time should come for him to swing round on the enemy. Buddenbrock’s 5th Division, with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin’s 6th Cavalry Division, the force destined to open the ball on the 16th, had not crossed the Moselle till the early morning of that day.

The German cavalry never sleep. Probing about the front and flanks of the advance, the horsemen, under cover of the night, had discovered where Bazaine’s left flank lay in fancied security about the terrain villages, and the information went to the rear, we may depend, with all the speed that zealous men and stout horses could compass. Alvensleben got the tidings first, and by 5 o’clock Buddenbrock was over the Moselle and hurrying toward Vionville by the Gorze road. Stülpnagel, too, had his bearings given him, and he also was heading now northward. But they were not to draw the first blood. “Boots and saddles” had sounded early that morning in Rheinbaben’s cavalry bivouac in Xonville, and his squadrons riding northward had found the French outposts in Mars-la-Tour, and had engaged in a skirmish with them. What he saw there sufficed to convince him that time was precious. He sent word to Alvensleben of the urgency, and taking up his position to block the road while he could, held himself at Alvensleben’s orders. There were other cavalry men already on the field by 8 o’clock. The Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin had trotted his division forward, and was already driving in the French foreposts from the wooded alleys of the Bois de Vionville when Buddenbrock climbed on to the plateau at nine and saw Flavigny and the enemy before him. But he was yet on the French left, even when he reached Tronville, and his place was on the chaussée to block the French from utilising it. His artillery came into action on the brow of a swell at Tronville, while the infantry got into formation with their faces now looking toward Metz. Then Alvensleben bade them go at the villages, and they went. What sort of fighting had been done before Flavigny and Vionville were carried, was only to be realised by those who saw the vicinity before the corpses were buried. One uses weak words when he writes that the potato gardens of Flanville were strewed with French and German dead. There were places where the corpses were piled one upon another till the earth could not be discerned for the number of her children that cumbered her bosom there in death. But carried at length were the villages, and now for the moment there was the strange spectacle of a single weakened division of Germans standing up alone on the plain against the whole French array. But not for long. The reserve artillery of the 3rd Corps rattled up from the Gorze ravine, and taking ground on the south-east of Flavigny, began pounding into Rezonville. Then trusty Stülpnagel made his proximity known, as his men, breasting the steep leading up from Gorze into the wood of Vionville, found enemies in there, and essayed to drive them out by the fire of the needle-guns. It was the wood of Spicheren over again. The French in Rezonville had awoke, and sent southward in the Bois a strong body of infantry, who occupied a position both commanding and important; commanding in that it was one of the chief keys to the plateau out of the ravine of Gorze, specially important in so far as that while it was held Buddenbrock was isolated and cut off from all supports, unless by a circuitous route. Stülpnagel had to leave right many a good man on the slope on the narrow forest road and in the scrub before he had tumbled the Frenchmen first out of the wood of Vionville, and then out of the wood of St. Arnould, and was free to place himself with his right flank with its back on the latter, his left touching and aligning with Buddenbrock’s right in Flavigny. Stülpnagel had picked up by the way and brought on with him two errant battalions of the 10th Corps, under the command of Colonel Lyncker, which at a later period of the fight made themselves not a little useful.

It was neither a very brilliant position nor a very brilliant prospect. Here stood a single Army Corps, slantingly athwart the plain, its right clinging to the wood of St. Arnould, its left away in a north-easterly direction, grappled upon Vionville as on a sheet anchor; for was not Vionville the foothold it had achieved on the great Verdun chaussée? Against this left, clung to so limpetlike, and against the whole attenuated line aslant of the plain, the French projected themselves with excessive fury over and over again. The hours passed, and still there came no assistance. Vionville had been carried before eleven, and now it was past one. It had been found necessary to interpose the cavalry as a buffer between the French and the exhausted infantry men. Rheinbaben, if there were terrible odds before him, saw also before him the sight so dear to a cavalry soldier, a noble stretch of charging ground. He was not slow to make the most of it. Again and again his horsemen dashed themselves against the French masses. Once they galloped so far that men said afterwards they had got to sabring the mitrailleuse gunners that plied their work on the chaussée before Rezonville. It was the sight of the war to have seen those cavalry charges on the day of Vionville—work of which this I now write of was but a mere episode, gallant and useful as it was. Necessity has no law, but the general must be in sore case indeed who is forced to dash cavalry again and again into the faces of serried files of infantry men handling a weapon like the chassepot. Who shall wonder that when the drafts were sent for to fill up the gaps in Rheinbaben’s squadrons, a thrill ran through the _landleute_ of the districts whence it is recruited, when the footing up of the requisition came to be known. But minutes were precious, and the devoted horsemen threw their lives away to gain them.

The most sustained and furious French attack that had yet been made, had been withstood with growing difficulty shortly before two o’clock, when Alvensleben became cognisant of a new and fearfully ominous complication. There were symptoms that he was about to be outflanked on his left. Hitherto he had been fighting only the corps of Canrobert and Frossard. But now came intelligence that the Imperial Guards were stirring in their bivouac in St. Marcel, and that the corps of Le Bœuf and Ladmirault were already on the heights of Druville, having marched southward from their encampments on the central chaussée about Jarny and Doncourt. Had they come thundering down on his left Alvensleben must have felt that all was over. The greater danger had to be met at the risk of the less. Hard as the struggle had been to maintain the continuity of the original line, it was necessary now to attenuate it still more. Buddenbrock was ordered to take ground farther to the north, and whereas till now his left flank had been on Vionville, it was now to hold his left flank, while with his right he did what he might to stay the avalanche threatening from the northward. It was well for him that at this pinch supports, fresh if scanty, came to his hand. The mass of the leading division of the 10th Corps, the 19th (Schwarzkoppen), marching from Thiaucourt in the early morning, had its direction given it on St. Hilaire, far away to the west of Mars-la-Tour. But one brigade of it, the 37th (Leymann), diminished to four battalions by the abstraction of Lyncker’s two battalions which Stülpnagel had already whipped up as he came to the battle-field, had fortunately a less circuitous route chalked out for it. Its point was Chambley, to act in support of Rheinbaben, and it came very opportunely to Buddenbrock’s hand in the emergency in which he now found himself. Into the forest north of Vionville he had already plunged the 24th Regiment, and now he was able to strengthen this slender force with Leymann’s battalions. The forest fighting was desperate and long, but the Germans managed to hold their ground till more assistance came in the shape, first of the reserve artillery of the 10th Corps which went into action at once, followed about four o’clock by the bulk of Schwarzkoffen’s division. Soon after came hurrying up the 20th Division (Kraatz-Koschlau) which had followed the 19th from Pont-à-Mousson to Thiaucourt, but instead of making the circuit by St. Hilaire had struck straight from Thiaucourt to the battle-field by Chambley. These reinforcements enabled head to be made against the attacks from the north, and baulked for the time Le Bœuf’s flanking movement. Kraatz-Koschlau could even spare some three battalions to strengthen Stülpnagel, who was staunchly holding his own on the right flank.

But to follow the incidents of the northern attack I have somewhat anticipated the events about what was now the German centre, the vicinity of the great southern chaussée. Of its weakness in infantry the French took ready advantage. An old Roman road runs nearly parallel to the chaussée some distance northward of it, and utilising it the French had got into position near it about midway between St. Marcel and Vionville, a large force of artillery. These batteries were doubly hurtful. They enfiladed the struggling infantrymen in the wood to the west, trying to stay the progress of Le Bœuf, and they fired southwards upon the German batteries by Vionville, which were embarrassed in replying to them because of the urgency of the requirement for their firing eastward toward Rezonville to keep in check the French infantry which was threatening the German centre. Becoming audacious in discernment of the double advantage of their position, the French got up more guns to the southward of those near the Roman road, till at length there was a convex formation of batteries stretching down on to the grassy swell on the north-west of Rezonville. By what agency soever, it behoved Alvensleben to interfere with the ruinous practice these were making on his centre, and at least to check their progress, for in very truth, backed and flanked by infantry, they were echeloning an advance right into his centre, making as if to cut him in two. He had no infantry wherewith to arrest this movement, so ominous of evil: his artillery was overmatched. There was nothing for it but to save his continuity at the cost of his cavalry. While the horsemen were sacrificing themselves, supports might come up to strengthen the centre; at all events time would be gained, and time in such a strait was everything. His Nolan galloped to Bredow, the commander of the 12th Cavalry Brigade, and bade that officer to charge the batteries in his front. Our own Light Brigade accepted not more cheerfully a kindred task than did Bredow’s dashing horsemen. Surely it is beseeming to name the regiments to whom fell this forlorn hope of cavalry service. They were the 7th Cuirassiers, the 16th Uhlans, the 13th Dragoons. Up the gentle slope galloped gaily on Bredow’s devoted kinder, the French batteries belching death into their faces, the French infantry, from the intervals between the guns and the batteries, pouring into them a hail-storm of chassepot bullets. Full many were the graves that had to be dug on that grassy slope afterwards; but the brigade, what of it was left, was among the guns and sabring the artillerymen before the latter, standing up to their work to the last, had time to seek safety in flight. Aye, and they were not content with carrying the battery, but, riding through them, went straight at the infantry beyond. On a house in Le Bourget, when retaken by the Guards, there was noticed the inscription,—“Prussians, you shall never see your wives more.” The legend might have been borne on the banners of those French columns against which Bredow’s brigade was dauntlessly charging. “Nobly they rode and well,” but the bullet-storm in their teeth was too strong for them. They had to turn their backs upon it and ride back whence they had come, such of them as had stood up against it. It was the smaller half of the brigade that formed line again in the old position by Vionville.

This sacrifice, however, gave at least a temporary check to the pressure on Alvensleben’s centre; but still a fresh access of danger had developed itself on his left. Pressed by the French Guards from St. Marcel, the soldiers of Kraatz-Koschlau, Schwarzkoffen, and Lyncker, who were prolonging the German left flank to the northward of Buddenbrock, had to turn their faces eastward, and fight as best they might against the repeated attacks made from that point of the compass. Meanwhile Le Bœuf, on the slopes of Bruville and extending farther west, was positioned right athwart their extreme left flank, and although he had been checked for a time, was now taking advantage of the engrossment caused to the Germans by the attacks from the east, not only to renew his from the north, but to deploy in a westerly direction, so as practically to sweep the German rear. To have suffered this evolution would have been destruction. Kraatz-Koschlau and Schwarzkoffen were up to the hilt already: to no man is it given, physically, to face two ways at once, and their faces were already set fast to the east. Cavalry, yet again cavalry, had to be resorted to. Who shall say, after Vionville, that more cavalry than is needed for outpost and despatch duties is a needless adjunct to a modern army? But for its strength in this arm, the night of the 16th of August would have closed upon the German army hurled back defeated into the ravine of Gorze. True, the cavalry was mercilessly used, if indeed abused is not the more appropriate word; but the crucial urgency of the exigency gave cavalry an opportunity to vindicate the perpetuation of its higher attributes as an arm of war in the face of the altered conditions of modern warfare. The general would be a reckless maniac who should teach himself to lean on his cavalry as an everyday and matter-of-course appliance for such purposes as those to which cavalry was put at Vionville; but the knowledge, based on what happened at Vionville, cannot harm him, that if he has a good and strong cavalry force, he has a reserve-buckler on which he may rely in the hour of need to postpone or avert an otherwise inevitable reverse.

Wedell’s cavalry brigade from the 10th Corps was sent against Le Bœuf to charge the heights of Bruville, and case the pressure on the left flank. It had a foretaste of what was in store for it when, as they passed Mars-la-Tour, the village shot up into lurid flames kindled by the French shells. French shells tore through its ranks as they rode up the open; French shells crashed into it when the inevitable halt and dislocation took place as the broken ground was reached. The brigade was the focus of a converging fire from the north and from the east. The chassepots and the mitrailleuses opened upon it as the horsemen struggled through the rocky underbrush that kept them at a walking pace, and made a mockery of formation. Can an infantry regiment, in full marching order, swim out to an iron-clad in the offing and carry her by boarding? The task is hardly less impossible than was that which the Wedells failed to accomplish. They came back “aus bruchstücken” (in fragments), to quote the graphic words of an actor, and retrieved their formation behind the reserve artillery of the 10th Corps, which had come into action a little to the east of Mars-la-Tour. Flushed by the repulse of the cavalry, Le Bœuf’s infantry assumed the offensive with greater audacity. Coming down due south with an extended front on Mars-la-Tour, the infantry stretched as far west as the farm of Greyères, while still farther west, near to Ville-sur-Iron, there rode five regiments of the cavalry of the Imperial Guard, the pick and pride of the French army, in whose long, straight rapiers was vested the guardianship of its right flank. This advance made untenable the position of Schwarzkoffen’s regiments on the German left wing north of the chaussée. Already they had been assailed in front and on the flank; now there were troops actually in their rear marching along their backs. Voights-Rechts sent orders to Schwarzkoffen to extricate himself from a position so impracticable, and the manœuvre had to be effected by the co-operation yet again of cavalry. With Schwarzkoffen’s 19th Division had come from Thiaucourt the Dragoon brigade of the Prussian Guards, consisting of the 1st and 2nd Dragoon Guards. They formed close columns of squadrons due north of the burning Mars-la-Tour, their faces northward toward Le Bœuf’s infantry. Aligning with them on their left, and facing the cavalry of the French Imperial Guard, was Warby’s brigade of the Division Rheinbaben; the 4th Cuirassiers, the 13th Uhlans, and the 19th Dragoons, strengthened by the 10th Hussars from Rheinbaben’s other brigade, and by such of Bredow’s 13th Hussars as the French shells and chassepot bullets had left fit for another charge. The Guards, whose charging ground was farther west than the broken country which had brought Wedell’s brigade to grief, had a good stretch of fair swelling downs before them. Warby could not have wished a happier land whereon to test the question of superiority between German line cavalry and the picked horsemen of the French Imperial Guard. The Guards rode straight at Le Bœuf: one may be right sure there was no swerve in the gallop that brought Warby’s men sword-point to sword-point with the French cavalry. Methodists are fond of propounding it as an axiom that a single charge is all that can be got out of cavalry in one day. Why, here were these troopers of the Prussian Guards dashing themselves again and again on the bayonets of Le Bœuf’s masses, now recoiling before the gusts of chassepot firing, now rallying and charging in again as if each man had as many lives as there were pistol cartridges in his pouch, and he was determined to expend the ammunition of vitality. So long as martialism lives in the Fatherland, so long will this deed of _derring-do_ on the part of the Prussian Dragoon Guards be cherished as one of the proudest memories of a campaign very fertile in such memories. As for Warby’s brigade, it had work to its liking. Men can project from rapier blades no pale death in the shape of chassepot bullets. A cavalry fight is horse to horse, man to man, sword to sword; weight, valour, and skill give their owners something to show for their gifts. Long, confusing, and stubborn was the _mêlée_. One who looked on it from Mars-la-Tour told me that the simile which occurred to him as he watched was chaos in a state of fermentation. The fermenting chaos in time resolved itself into its constituent elements. One constituent element was galloping to the rear, the other was chasing it furiously; and the process of fermentation had precipitated an abundance of lees, which cumbered the ground whereon the chemical phenomenon had developed itself.

The diversion caused by these efforts of the cavalry enabled Schwarzkoffen to extricate himself from his critical position, and he retired till he had his back on the chaussée between Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, with strong artillery in his rear. Penetration further northward on the part of the German left wing was abandoned for the time, and the defensive strictly adhered to. To conclude the narrative as regards the left wing it may be stated, that soon after six o’clock Le Bœuf and Canrobert’s corps, who had been comparatively quiescent since the retrograde movement of the Germans, reassumed the offensive in strong force. After some tough fighting this attack was repulsed, and then Kraatz-Koschlaw and Buddenbrock, keen to utilise their opportunities, followed up the retreating Frenchmen and gained some new ground in the direction of St. Marcel and Bruville.

Stülpnagel’s less eventful experiences on the German right must now be briefly alluded to. Owing to the French having chiefly concentrated themselves on the effort to break the centre and turn the left of their opponents, he was not exposed to very fierce assaults, and those which came against him he sturdily repulsed. But toward five o’clock it appeared to have struck Bazaine that he was permitting too great quietude to the German right. He sent out to the south a large portion of his reserve, consisting of the Infantry of the Guard, who, occupying the Bois des Ognons, came through the Bois de St. Arnould, and made a demonstration against Stülpnagel’s right flank, which rested on that wood. But the cannon had not been thundering all day for nothing. Barneckow, with his 8th Division, had been at Frontigny, on the other side of the Moselle, at midday. By five o’clock his leading infantry brigade, and some batteries of his cavalry, were already in action. The latter came to strengthen Stülpnagel. By the orders of Prince Frederick Charles, who had reached the field at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the Brigade Rex, which was Barneckow’s foremost contingent, came up the steep and plunged northward through the woods of Vionville and St. Arnould, with intent to take in flank the French Guard infantry, who were troubling Stülpnagel, and having thrown them back, make a demonstration against Vionville. This manœuvre was supported by the 49th Brigade, from the Hessian Division, under the command of Prince Louis of Hesse, the husband of our Princess Alice. It belonged to the 9th Corps, and had been sent on by General Manstein from Pont-à-Mousson at midday, in accordance with instructions from Prince Frederick Charles. The Hessians struck up from Gorze through the Bois des Chevaux into the Bois des Ognons, co-operating on the right with the Brigade Rex. Neither brigade was able to do much in the dense woods, now still further obscured by the growing darkness. The Brigade Rex did succeed in clearing the wood of St. Arnould, but could effect no demonstration in the open against Rezonville; the Hessians did not succeed in driving the French out of the Bois des Ognons on the right. While they were fagging and fighting in the twilight, a furious French cannonade broke out on the north, directed against the German right wing, under cover of which it was apparent that the French were falling back over St. Marcel and Druville, as was conjectured, to place themselves on the central chaussée, in final abandonment of the design of cutting their way through the obstacle on the southern. So far as was consistent with prudence, Rheinbaben’s ever-handy cavalry strove to hamper their movement, and succeeded in cutting off some French prisoners in Rezonville. By nine o’clock the bloody battle-field was no longer vexed by shot or shell. The fighting men bivouacked in the tracks in which they had fought; the Krankenträger and ambulance people saw before them a task so stupendous that they might well stand aghast. It was with the wounded of Vionville that Gorze was ghastly on the night of the 16th of August.

I have said that there was no sleep for anyone in Gorze on the night of the 16th of August. All who were not otherwise engaged were busy among the wounded. But while the wounded groaned the leaders and the staff had to work, organise, direct; for the victory was not won yet by a great way. There was little access for outsiders to the busy bureau of Prince Frederick Charles; yet I got a glimpse of it through circumstances beyond my own control. While I was striving to soothe into an approximation of coherency the landlady of the hotel, who alternated between hysterics and vituperation of her species generally, a couple of field-policemen took it into their honest heads to regard me as a suspicious person, and forthwith conducted me to the bureau. While justifying myself, a process which was not so difficult as it had been the night before, I saw six orderly dragoons dispatched in as many minutes in as many different directions. There was no staff officer with leisure or inclination to enlighten a vagrant as to the dispositions in progress, but this much I gathered that there was urgent hurry for the bringing forward of every available man. What I learned then must be supplemented by later information.

It seemed a foregone conclusion among the Germans that they were in no case to resume hostilities on the 17th; nor did there seem much apprehension that the French could take the initiative. By the morning of the 17th there was every appearance that they had given up all hope of opening up the southern road, and had indeed drawn back materially from the position on the central road which they had held on the morning of the 16th. It was not, however, blocked to them save by detachments of German cavalry which patrolled it as far as Estain. The German forepost line established after the fight of the day before, extended from Ville-sur-Iron, north-west of Mars-la-Tour, in a slanting south-easterly direction across the plateau till it struck the head of the Bois de St. Arnould due south of Rezonville. The chain crossed the southern chaussée between Vionville and Rezonville, a circumstance showing how little ground the Germans had gained since the previous morning. All through the night and during the early part of the 17th, the several Army Corps were marching up and falling into the places arranged for them in the council of war, and in the bureau over-night. There was wonderfully little fuss and no confusion. Spicheren and Vionville had been battles of occasion, joined without premeditation or indeed expectation, and fought out as best they might, in what manner and with what material was most available in the exigency. The battle of the morrow was to be of another sort—one of the old formal set battles, in which generals were to play with divisions and Army Corps as with chessmen, were to elaborate combinations, to strike preconcerted blows, to put forth their genius, science, experience, and skill to gain the result they wished for. Not that the campaign had not earlier been fertile in evidences of the possession of these attributes by the men who directed the steps of the German armies. A master-mind shone in every detail of the plan, of which the battles of Spicheren and Vionville, occurring when they did, were incidental excrescences, springing out of the pressure of a modification in the circumstances.

Bazaine, crippled as he was by the action of the 16th, could not, even supposing him tardily awakened to the danger of his position, have made an attempt at extricating himself on the 17th. Drawn back into a commanding position, with his right wing on Roncourt and above the precipitous ravines of St. Privat-la-Montagne, his centre on Amanvilliers, La Folie, and Leipsic, and his right on a natural fortress, the plateau of St. Hubert, with Moscow on the right of it, and Point du Jour on the left, and inclining backward over the ridge to the left rear at Rozerieulles and Jussy, he held a position of surpassing strength in itself, and wherein he was not actually debarred from getting on to the central road by Verneville and Doncourt, while with his right he kept open the northern road, emerging as it did from his position at St. Privat. Had he elected he might have marched by it on the 18th, and had a fair start of the Germans, whose nearest point before they moved on that morning was several miles south of the northern chaussée; but had he been ever so nimble he would have run a fearful risk of being taken in flank, and in the best event would inevitably have had his foes thundering on his rear by nightfall. Let those who blame him confine their strictures to his unaccountable sluggishness before the 16th. Let those who in cold blood urge that, _coûte qui coûte_, he should have cut his way through the Germans on that day, remember that in trying to do so he had exhausted all his available reserves, except a portion of Ladmirault’s Corps. It was not in the nature of things that he could have moved before midnight of the 17th, and by that time the track he must have taken was scoured by German patrols quick to send back the tidings of his movement to the plateau of Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, by that time packed with German Army Corps which had not suffered as had he the day before. No, Bazaine was fairly out-generalled and out-manœuvred, and he accepted the inevitable, greatly as it was his own fault, with conduct and skill that to my thinking go some way toward redeeming his earlier mistakes. I have used the word inevitable, but there was one chance open to him, although a hazardous one, if he had been a man of prompt action. The Thionville road leading into the valley of the Meuse at Longuion was yet free from Prince Frederick Charles’s éclaireurs. By leaving one of his corps d’armée in position about Amanvilliers and St. Privat with orders to hold its ground as long as possible, and make a demonstration as if with intent to use the northern road by Brie, falling back under the guns of Plappeville when it could keep up the delusion no longer, he would probably have gained a day’s start before the Germans would have found out that his whole army was not still standing before them. But the risks of such an attempt are apparent when it is noticed that Prince Frederick Charles, had he been beguiled into spending the whole of the 18th fighting with a single French army corps, would on the 19th have still by the Brie road have been equidistant from Longuion with Bazaine on his more circuitous route, supposing that the latter had made all possible use of his start. If we consider that Bazaine, not so much by his own fault as by the rottenness of the French system, or rather want of system, of obtaining intelligence, had no conception of the strength opposed to him, but on the contrary believed that on the 16th he had fought all the German troops that were available for the 18th, an additional reason is found for the line of action on which he determined, nor is there any occasion to inquire into the truth of the allegation that he felt himself not justified in quitting Metz in its then condition of imperfect defence. Abuse him for what we may, we cannot deny him the selection of a fine position on which to stand the impact of an attack in force. Its natural strength was worth to him at least an additional Army Corps. And he had strengthened the fortress with judicious outworks in the shape of strongly-held and carefully-fortified posts at St. Marie-aux-Chênes, Vernéville, Gravelotte, and in the Bois des Vaux. His whole front was studded with rifle-pits.[2]

Von Moltke and Prince Frederick Charles had imperfect knowledge of the dispositions just detailed. They could not assure themselves whether Bazaine had elected to stand and fight upon his ridges, or whether he would not rather dash out upon the northern road, offering battle as he came. It was necessary, therefore, to make dispositions to meet both contingencies; and since the latter contingency was the likelier, and, if it occurred, demanded the prompter dealing with, it behoved the German leaders to commence the game with special reference to that eventuality. The southern road was first of all to be securely blocked. That task was assigned to the 7th and 8th Corps of the 1st Army, the former lying in the western portion of the Bois de Vaux and the eastern portion of the Bois des Ognons, standing in fine due south from Gravelotte; the latter, touching the left of the 7th Corps, occupied the western part of the Bois des Ognons, the Bois de St. Arnould, and the Bois de Vionville. It stood south of Rezonville. Besides caring for the southern road, and occupying a useful position in view of a necessity on the part of the enemy for falling back on Metz, these two corps served as a kind of stationary anchor for the 2nd Army to sway from, or perhaps it would be a better illustration were I to liken them to the fixed pivot on which it was to swing round should events justify the movement. The 2nd Army had its front in a north-easterly direction, parallel with the line of the northern road, which was its first objective point, having relation to the contingency that Bazaine would attempt to march off thereby. This front was composed of, reckoning from right to left, first, the 9th Army Corps, which touched von Göben’s left, and with the direction given it on Caulre farm; second, the Guards, direction Doncourt; third, the 12th Army Corps (Royal Saxons), direction Jarny. The second line was composed of the troops that had been so severely mauled on the 16th, viz., the 3rd and 10th Corps. The 4th Corps was on its way toward Toul; the 2nd Corps was not up, having only quitted Pont-à-Mousson early on the morning of the battle.

King Wilhelm had been on the field on the forenoon of the 17th, and before returning to Pont-à-Mousson, he had issued his formal orders for the morrow. Wellington himself could not have been more laconic or less devout. “The 2nd Army,” so wrote Moltke in his master’s name, “will, early in the morning, at 5 o’clock, commence operations and advance in échelon between Ville-sur-Iron and Rezonville. The 8th Army Corps will co-operate in this movement with the 2nd Army on its right. The 7th Army Corps will at first have the duty of covering the movement of the 2nd Army against any demonstrations on the part of the enemy from the side of Metz. The King’s further orders will depend on the action taken by the enemy. Communications for his Majesty will next find him on the height south of Flavigny.” Prince Frederick Charles, quitting Gorze, quartered himself for the night between the 17th and 18th in Buxières. He was stirring early. What a subject for a painter that morning gathering of the leaders of army corps by the poplar-trees between Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, with the Red Prince in their midst, brusque, curt, and emphatic! Around the group, conning over a new slaughter, lay the ghastly evidences of a past. Mild-eyed, handsome-faced Prince of Saxony; puffy, phlegmatic, _gros_ August of Würtemburg; Alvensleben the aristocrat, with his thin clear-cut features and bright hawk eye; Voights-Rhetz, with the shrewd, keen look of a lowland Scot; Manstein, grim, grey, and determined; Göben, of the massive head and thoughtful brow; these stand, in a roughly defined circle, with their horses’ heads turned inward; and there addresses them in a few short crisp sentences, the tall square man on the powerful bay; he lets his hand drop on his thigh with an audible thud, for he is very heavy-handed in every sense, this stalwart man with the massive hair-clad jaw, the strong wide mouth, cruel in its set resoluteness when the features are at rest, the well-opened piercing eye under the splendid forehead, which, broad, square, and knotted above the eyebrows, soars inexplicably away into calm benevolence. A man this, in the tight red tunic, cast surely by nature in her special mould for a great military leader. You might think with yourself, as you looked at him, that you could not fancy him as a friend; look again, and I dare swear you will fancy him far less as an enemy. Nor is the Red Prince without friends, warm and jealous; if the women in the French villages use his name as the Scotch peasants of old did the name of the Black Douglas, to hush their babes wherewithal into awe-stricken silence, his army would die for him to the last man, and I have seen a pretty picture of bonny children climbing in loving trustfulness about the knees of the heavy-browed and heavy-handed man. He does not detain his generals long under the poplar-trees. One of them afterwards gave me his laconic parting words, “Your duty is to march forward, find the enemy, prevent his escape, and fight him wherever you find him.” And Alvensleben the pious added in his quiet tones, “In the name of God,” as the generals wheeled their horses outwards, and the little council scattered.

Modern battle-fields are not like cockpits. Were that a real battle which is ordinarily fought on Easter Monday on the Brighton Downs, the spectators, who squat and lunch placidly on the Red-hill, would find that commanding elevation very hot quarters. Generals, with the perversity of human nature, do not make the convenience of spectators the primary consideration in their dispositions, nor has any means yet been discovered to enable the spectators to circumvent the inattention to their convenience on the part of the military authorities, by being in more than one place at the same time. The science of expeditious and comprehensive war intelligence is still in its infancy. If the millennium does not intervene through the zealous efforts of the Peace Society, we may anticipate gigantic strides in this department of catering for the avidity of the public, culminating perhaps in opposition-balloons with a war correspondent in each hanging in the air over the centre of the battle-field, and having a “special wire,” per favour of Mr. Scudamore, leading direct into each Foreign Editor’s room. But such appliances are for posterity. In the late war, especially towards its commencement, the civilian spectator who was not fortunate enough to be attached to a head-quarter staff (and there were only three, I believe, to whom this well-deserved favour was accorded) had to be thankful for very small mercies indeed. I thought myself extremely lucky in not being interfered with when I took up what seemed an eligible position at the edge of the wood of St. Arnould, to the south of Rezonville. The forest land here throws itself up into a little elevation, affording some command of the rolling plateau to the north-eastward, with Gravelotte on its bosom, the ridge of St. Hubert and Point du Jour beyond, and away to the north on the horizon the bushy uplands of Vernéville, with the church spire showing above the trees; yet here, as it was not difficult to discern even at the time, and far more easy afterwards from sad _indiciæ_, it was possible to witness only one phase of the battle, and that neither the most critical nor the most decisive. I propose to narrate first the occurrences of which I was the eye-witness here on the southern edge of the field, and, having done so, to give then a short account of the more northern operations, from the official documents and other information I received afterwards from the Saxons and Guards, to whose share fell so much of the heavy fighting on the German left and left centre.

By half-past ten o’clock the 9th Corps was no longer visible on the plateau about Vionville. It had gone off on its northern march, and its place was occupied by the 3rd Corps, which swarmed all over the gentle swells and depressions. On the breast of the higher ground south of Flavigny there was a stationary group with led horses and mounted escort behind, the dead of the 16th flecking the ground all around. Orderlies and aides-de-camp galloped furiously from all points to this stationary group—galloped furiously from it north, east, and south. For here was the King; and here was von Moltke, with all the ends of that seemingly-tangled skein gathered inside that marvellous brain of his, behind the downcast inscrutable eyes. The 8th Corps, on the fringe of which I stood, was showing itself out of the wood, and feeling its way with no great decision apparently on to Rezonville, whence ran the straight chaussée eastward into Gravelotte, the southern outwork of the French front. There was little or no firing. Now and then came a shell from the French batteries about Gravelotte, tentatively as it seemed, to experiment as to the range, but the rare reports only served to accentuate the lurid lull before the breaking of the storm. The clouds presently clashed together, and the thunder rattled out, coming down clear and booming on the wind from the bosky coverts and the church spire of Vernéville. Nothing was to be seen save the bursting of an occasional shell on the slope, but the bickering volleys of musketry, giving the treble to the deep bass of the artillery, told in language that could not be misinterpreted how a hot and close fight must be going on out of our sight to the north. It was about half-past eleven when the air first began to throb with this din. Now it became apparent why the 8th Corps had been cropping out on the plateau toward Rezonville. By mid-day the heads of the columns of Weltzien’s division (the 15th) were pushing on north-easterly towards Malmaison and the Bois de Genivaux, to take up the alignment with the fighting further north. Barneckow’s division (the 16th), on the right of the 15th, was pushing across the plain toward Gravelotte, in dense broad columns, already half-deployed into line. Now we in the south became familiar with artillery fire through another sense than that of hearing. The German batteries went to action from Bagnieux southward to the edge of the Bois des Ognons, pouring their fire into Malmaison, the wood of Genivaux, and the village of Gravelotte. Nor were the French slow to reply. It seemed as if the wood were one huge crater, which incessantly vomited projectiles that tore through the air and burst in the German ranks, strewing the plain with fallen men who were left behind unheeded as the columns pressed ever on. Gravelotte, too, was girt about with its zone of cannon and mitrailleuses, plied with assiduous industry by gunners who must have known what of advantage to the cause of France rested in their successful maintenance of the advanced position. The cannonade for long was a drawn struggle, neither side gaining much material advantage. But the slaughter of it was terrible, and the Germans out in the open must have lost the most heavily. How or when Gravelotte was at length taken I could not tell. There was a gradual collapse in the French artillery fire, a ragged deployment of their infantrymen in front of the village, a rush of Barneckow’s men at the double, and a hellish mêlée of fighting that seemed as if it would last for ever. On the deadly furnace of battle the Germans perpetually piled fresh fuel. The Bois des Ognons emptied itself on to the plain into a fearful plunging fire from the French batteries on the heights of Point du Jour. The regiments struggled on through it to precipitate themselves on Gravelotte; yet so fearful was the shell-storm that beat on the plain to the south of Gravelotte, between it and the woods, that the Germans had to swerve out from under it somewhat, making a circuit so as to fall upon the village from the west instead of the south. These were von Zastrow’s soldiers of the 7th Corps. The Barneckows—whether it was they or the former who carried the village I know not—had slanted away further to the north-east toward the Bois de Genivaux, roughly aligning on its right with Weltzien’s division. The French made a desperate stand in the wood, while by this time their batteries at the Point du Jour were firing furiously into Gravelotte—indication that it was no longer in French hands. I was told afterwards that the hither edge of the Bois des Genivaux was carried by von Göben’s soldiers at the point of the bayonet, and that they had to push the French out of the wood by sheer bodily weight. Thus much was not apparent from my position, although I had improved it by coming up nearer the front; but there was no difficulty in discerning that the fighting was desperate and protracted. All the while the din was to be heard from the north out of the range of vision, but it seemed as if it were now further back, whence the hope became common that the Germans were faring somewhat better in the north than fortune suffered them to do in the south.

Yet in the south there were gleams presaging a victory to achieve which much had yet to be done. Von Göben had seemingly gained the wood, gaining thereby no respite from the persistent firing of the batteries at St. Hubert and Point du Jour. Von Zastrow, with intent as it appeared to give his friends of the 8th Corps some relief from this, had clothed the neighbourhood of Gravelotte, as soon as it was in German hands, with four batteries from Kamecke’s Division, but the reply to them was so strenuous that it seemed surprising how they were able to keep their ground, while the continuous explosion of shells in and about the Bois des Genivaux gave evidence that the 8th were still in purgatory. As it seemed in bitter chafing at their sufferings, ever and anon fierce attempts were made to crush the causes of them. Dimly and vaguely only could the movements be discerned from where I stood, but large detachments must have burst out of the wood, and pushing down into the dip where was the bed of the Mance, breasted the opposite slope, and debouched against Moscow and St. Hubert. Through the glass I could see the broken battalions as they clambered piecemeal out of the hollow, and tumbling together into approximate formation strove to push on up the gentler slope. Then there came heavier smoke banks on their right flank above the batteries at Point du Jour; the batteries of mitrailleuses at St. Hubert raged like wild cats right in their faces; the French infantry men, in position between St. Hubert and Moscow, fringed their ranks with spurting white smoke from their chassepots. It seemed as if, while a portion of the German attack fell back, the other moiety had lain down to get some cover and to bide the spending of the storm. True they had lain down, those soldiers who did not retreat; but it was not for them more to rear themselves into dressed ranks. It was for them to lie deeper yet, when the time should come, under the sod on which they were now prostrate. Effort after effort met with a similar fate, and at length the bootless and costly efforts were suspended. Von Zastrow had strengthened his artillery by Gravelotte, till, as I afterwards learned, he had fifty-four guns in position there, under whose pounding the French fire at Point du Jour somewhat slackened, giving at length some relief to the 8th Corps in the wood to the northward. Zastrow boldly pushed infantry forward in support of his artillery, which to say the truth seemed to have rather incautiously worked themselves out to the front, so as to be in danger should the French essay a rapid and energetic push from Point du Jour across the ravine. Not content with this, it was clear that he had determined on beginning the offensive on his own account. This act of Zastrow’s is the war incident of Gravelotte which has been most canvassed and controverted. It unquestionably resulted in disaster. As unquestionably it was done in the face of his positive orders to hold his own, and act as the stationary pivot for the corps to north of him. And it is certain, too, that Zastrow acted on his own responsibility in what he did, and in virtue of a certain far from narrow discretion which the German military policy allows to officers of any rank when placed in a position of self-reliance. Zastrow, it appears, had little to guide him as to the state of matters in the north. The wind had shifted as some say, and blew away from him the sound of the cannonade by Amanvilliers, Montigny, and Champenoise. As others have it, there was an actual lull in the firing soon after three o’clock, about the positions named. It is urged in favour of Zastrow that this inaudibility of the northern cannonade, from whatever cause, gave him some right to conclude that the French centre and right had been thrown back, and that the strenuous defence on the left was all that was between them and complete defeat. If these his premises had been sound, there is no doubt that Zastrow’s conclusion, and the action he based upon it, were eminently creditable to his generalship. Had the French right and centre really been pushed back while the left maintained its ground, it is plain that Bazaine would have proceeded at once to strengthen the latter with the troops driven back on the former, since he could afford to disregard the progress of the German left and centre, sure ultimately to be brought up all standing on the great rear-buttress before which the French fought—the fortress of Metz. This in fact was what Bazaine did some hours afterwards when the Saxons had turned his right and the Guards had smashed his centre. Zastrow, arguing accordingly, as it seems, judged that it would be good strategy to anticipate any such strengthening for the French left by attacking it at once, and forcing it to participate in the retrograde movement to which he had concluded the centre and right were abandoned. Nay more; a decisive move on his part on the extreme French left might let him get through to their rear communications, and once in possession of the throat of the great chaussée about Jussy, he blocked the chief line of French retreat, while the 8th Corps, relieved from terrible torment by St. Hubert and the Point du Jour, might debouch from the wood on to the plateau, and take its position in the final crushing of the French front.

How Von Zastrow reasoned I do not know; but he acted as if he had reasoned in the groove I have indicated. A sanguine man, he had not counted the cost of success, even if he should gain it; he had not, indeed, sufficiently studied the question whether success at all were possible. He shot his bolt, a self-reliant and over-confident archer, and he failed even to get the distance of the target. It was close on four o’clock when the offensive movement became perceptible. From beside Gravelotte one brigade (the 25th, of Glümer’s corps) streamed down into the ravine inclining south-easterly, and the slackened French fire at Point du Jour kindling up upon them as they moved. Kamecke’s division, which was already astride of the ravine where it penetrates the Bois de Vaux, contributed the 28th brigade, which could be seen pressing up to debouch on to the plateau of St. Hubert, where the skirting wood ceases nearly due south of Point du Jour. The French seemed to catch at the significance of the movement instantaneously as it was begun: their infantry, rushing to the left through the poplar trees on the chaussée, formed across the southern plateau, so as to flank as well as front the Germans when they should come staggering up on to this new battle-field. More batteries were dashed hurriedly into position and got into fire. Those previously there swung their trails round to the north somewhat, and their muzzles thus looked the way the German brigades were toiling upwards. High up as were the French, the depth of the ravine afforded the Germans miserably little cover from their fire. For the French gunners could almost see into its bed; and although the inverse rise could not be reached by a direct fire, they yet let fall upon it a plunging fire which, from the steepness of the slope, was much more destructive than plunging fires for the most part are. The loss must have been terrible in those ranks while they were struggling on to the debouchment. At length the edge of the wood and the lip of the ravine was gained. You could see groups and isolated men straggling out into the open and falling into formation in that momentary confusion which always attends such a reorganisation. Just then cannon, mitrailleuse, infantry fire, as if by signal, burst into one fell combination of outpour. Had the formation been an inanimate structure, it must have been battered down by sheer weight of metal; how much less then could it stand, made as it was of sentient men! There were efforts to make head against it nevertheless; detached rushes of rash men who were not to be convinced of the impossible till overtaken by arguments which crushed conviction in, while they crushed motion and life out. It was piteous to watch the efforts. I have seen sheep swept away in a spate swirling down a Highland glen—watched their struggles as they caught foothold on a scaur, where the rushing water shallowed, to get out of the vortex on to the firm land on the bank that seemed so absurdly close; how the water kelpie seized them again as they strove, whipped them remorselessly off their legs, and sent them down stream again battling impotently, as they span in the eddies, or were hurried down the rapids. The sight recurred to my recollection as I watched those soldiers struggling grimly for foothold on the edge of that deadly plateau. They would not give it up. Ever as one attempt was beaten back and crushed down, there were men pushing staunchly on to make another. It seemed such a little way, such a very little way, up to the poplar trees there and to victory; surely, with the goal so nigh, it was not to be thought of that it should be pronounced inaccessible. A thief might as well have tried to steal the Koh-i-Noor from its case in the Exhibition, as these men have persisted in their struggles to get to those poplar trees through the storm of iron and lead, the serried ranks, the densely lined rifle-pits, which were its protecting show-case. “_Mörderisch_” was how one that had looked into the eye of the fire till it beat him down, described that fire to me the same night—a quiet, unemotional, blood-depleted Feldwebel, who had been brought into Rezonville that the _Stabsarzt_ might judge whether it was worth while tinkering at a man who had six bullet-holes in him. Von Zastrow’s heart must have bled as he watched his Kinder going down by sections. I know not whether an order came that the brigades should give up the useless persistence in courting annihilation, or whether they drew back in realisation of the insanity of such persistence. They did abandon it, and shrunk back off the plateau, lying down on the inverse bank of the ravine, screened from the enemy’s direct fire, but exposed to the plunging fire, and raked by French infantry detachments that had pushed forward to the brink of the ravine, further northward, opposite St. Hubert. The batteries whose duty it was to support the two infantry brigades had to seek the plateau by the only route practicable for wheels—the chaussée crossing the ravine by deep cuttings and steep fall and rise. They got down, as it appeared, into the ravine. We saw them wheel off into the road and clatter down the Gravelotte slope at a trot. Behind them, at a swinging canter to overtake the guns, dashed a noble regiment of Uhlans. How gallantly the horsemen rode on their way to death! Artillery and cavalry disappeared into the ravine. Was it bottomless, then, that they never came out? The French infantry fire spurted out of the rifle-pits on the further brink; several batteries of mitrailleuses, in regularly constructed emplacements, took to grinding sedulously their cursed output; the cannon further back on the Point du Jour made practice over the heads of the mitrailleuse men and the sharpshooters, down into the bosom of the gorge. The German artillerymen did, as it appeared, get into action, with the muzzles of their pieces sticking up into the air, but guns were dismounted, and the gun detachments had to be reinforced over and over again, from the reserves in the rear by Gravelotte. As for the Uhlans, the morrow furnished a chart of their doings—a chart on which the courses were traced in by dead men and horses. They had striven to charge up the inverse slope of the chaussée on to the plateau of St. Hubert, and they had failed. Men and horses, not many,—it must have been a mad forlorn hope of reckless men,—lay on the roadway in the gutters, just on the brink of the plateau; there were none further, but very many all the way behind. If ever horsemen were wantonly butchered by being sent where it was staringly impossible they could have been of service unless their horses had been winged, those Uhlans were. I believe that, after losing nearly half their number, they were got down the narrow bed of the Mance, somewhere behind the position where the two infantry brigades were lying. They might as well have been in the moon.

Except an effort to cover with infantry-fire in some measure the batteries in the ravine, by the sending forward a couple of battalions of the infantry brigade that had been kept in reserve, an interim paralysis was forced upon the 1st Army. The firing still continued, both artillery and musketry, quickening now without apparent cause, now falling away for a little into a dropping fire; but of offensive movements on either side there were none. The game had seemingly ended in a stale-mate. Von Zastrow had little or nothing in hand, for, as it appeared, he had sent a brigade away on a fanciful excursion through the Bois de Vaux with a wide circuit to come in from the south upon Jussy and outflank the extreme French left; a rash project, which, the direct attack having failed, whose success must surely have been assumed in devising the flank march, ought to have resulted in the annihilation of the detached brigade, if the French had been as enterprising as they were stubborn. Von Göben was jammed in the Bois des Genivaux so long as the French fire from Moscow, St. Hubert, and the Point du Jour could sweep him off the onward path. The 1st Army was clubbed. Von Zastrow’s intended _coup de grâce_ was arrested; in his haste not to be too late he had raised his arm too soon, and had spent himself prematurely.

The Germans invaded France with armies whose numbers it is easy enough to utter glibly off the tongue, but whose magnitude it is very difficult adequately to realise. How many Britons have ever seen 30,000 armed men in a mass? We go to an Easter Monday review, and see some 26,000 men march past a saluting point, and come home in the notion that we have been looking at an uncommonly large body of troops. Let our Easter Monday Volunteer Army stand as an equivalent to a German army corps. The former takes about an hour and a half to defile past the commander. The Germans had fourteen of the latter in France to make war wherewithal, besides Landwehr divisions, a Würtemburger contingent, and fortress artillerymen, equal, on a moderate estimate, to two army corps more. At our Brighton pace a whole day, just twenty-four hours, would be consumed in the marching past of this half-million of men. There are obvious advantages in war-making when your numbers are so large that you do not require to stand particular about the absence or presence of an odd army corps or two, when you can comfortably leave one as a force of observation, dispatch another on a distinct measure of precaution, and reckon with tolerable confidence on yet a third dropping in to help you finish off your work with the greater thoroughness. This was the happy condition of the Germans at Gravelotte. If you care to join in the French cry, “Over-matched by two to one!” the Germans grimly meet you with the rejoinder, “Why be overmatched then? or, if you cannot help yourselves, why fly in the face of all experience of war, and roar ‘À Berlin!’ at the head of your scantier levies?” War is not a game like a school-boy boxing-match, where the spirit of fair play insists that there shall be some approximation to an even match between the two combatants. And even the school-green instinct of fair play does not stand in the way of allowing the stronger boy to put forth his whole strength when the weaker boy denies his weakness and is the challenger. The opportunely arriving German army corps on the 18th of August was the 2nd, whom Fransecki had marched without a halt from Pont-à-Mousson to Buxières on the southern rear of Mars-la-Tour. There, as it seems, the Pomeranians had cooked and eaten, and, as giants refreshed, had come on to Rezonville, eager to have a share in the day’s amusement. Thence the King sent them into Gravelotte, to help Zastrow to a solution of the problem in which he had got mystified. It was a strange, grand sight to watch these fresh and splendid soldiers marching on in a stream that seemed endless. Nobody knew, within such ken as we had, whence the wonderful windfall had come. Some swore it was the 5th Corps from the Crown Prince of Prussia’s army, that there was General von Kirschbach himself on the grey horse, and that the Crown Prince was in colloquy with his father at Rezonville. Others had it that it was the 4th Corps which had thus turned up promiscuously. But be it what it might, sure it was it did not dally by the way. The leading regiments formed in front of Gravelotte, others went north-easterly, so as to touch von Göben’s flank in the Bois des Genivaux. By this time it was seven o’clock, and the setting sun going down in blood,—blood in the sky as on earth,—cast his ruddy rays slantingly on the lurid smoke-banks that overhung the battle-field, and battled with the yet redder-forked tongues of fire which were bursting out of the burning farm-buildings of Malmaison, where the wounded Frenchmen were being roasted alive in miserable helplessness. There was a general advance. The Zastrows straightened themselves up in their layer in the ravine, and once more essayed to get a grip of the ground on its brink. Fransecki’s leading brigade took the chaussée and the easier dells of the ravine towards the Bois des Genivaux. The 8th Corps pressed the branches aside and sprang out of the wood into the open, heading for Moscow. Behind, all along the rear of the grand movement in which some 60,000 men were concerned, the artillery of the three corps shelled incessantly the French positions. The scene in the deepening twilight was inexpressibly splendid—with a splendour, however, that was baleful, and made the flesh creep and the blood turn. Right gallantly did the French stand up against the huge living wave. Their army was fighting not for the feeblest chance of victory: hardly any conceivable freak of the captious goddess could have given it that. But it was fighting for something yet more critical than victory,—for its very life; for if the Point du Jour were carried by the Germans, then von Zastrow’s aspirations would have tardily yet surely been accomplished. The beaten centre and right would have had their line of retreat invaded; the defeat would have become a chaotic slaughter till the broken and bewildered battalions, barred from the chief line of retreat, had huddled somehow close under the guns of Plappeville and St. Quentin. The men who stood at Point du Jour, St. Hubert, and Moscow had it in their keeping to avert this terrible fate—to break the fall, all too dislocating already, of their brethren of the centre and right. Nobly they did their devoir. In numbers they could have been but slender as compared with their assailants; but they had a position, the merits of which were worth many men, and they were worthy of the position. The night fell, and still the bright streaks of flame shot westward from the batteries at the Point du Jour, evidence that French guns and gunners still stood there. Gradually the tongues of flames ceased to shoot forth, gradually a hush, such a contrast to the din of the day that it was almost painful, came over the bloody field. The dogs of war were satiated; they had lapped blood till they might lap no more. And still the Frenchmen stood by the Point du Jour, keeping at bay the foe while their friends defiled into safety behind the screen thus sturdily maintained for them. The 1st Army had fought well and squandered life recklessly; but spite of the late reinforcements it had to submit to the failure of its capital enterprise. The foreposts all but touched each other through the watches of the night. Those of the Germans were made specially strong, for the day’s work had taught the watch-setters respect for those men on the crown of the height above them. And what of them? One knew nothing till the morning broke, and then it was found that the shattered churchyard-wall, and the smashed and half-burnt wayside houses, the rifle-pits and the battery emplacements were silent, save for the groaning of the wounded left behind, and empty, save of those and of the dead who lay beside them. The French, having held the position so long as it was of use, had abandoned it, and by six o’clock Fransecki’s forepost men, creeping cautiously forward to the crown of the ridge, saw before them the brown scarp of Fort St. Quentin, with the beaten French host clinging round its base.

The wearied and powder-grimed Germans threw themselves down on the field, and slept among the dead who littered it. Bivouac fires were sparse, the men were too spent with hard fighting to care for food or warmth. They were lighted to their slumbers by ghastly chamber candlesticks; by the pillar of fire that yet towered heavenward from the burning Malmaison, and by another fire that showed over the horizon by Verneville. In the darkness between nine and ten, there burst out the din of a furious cannonade to the north, and the tired soldiers who had piled their arms were made to resume them. But soon this in its turn died away, and the battle-field was left in peace.

Having now recounted what I personally saw of the battle of Gravelotte, I proceed to give a brief narrative of the occurrences which were not within the scope of my observation. The position of the several corps of the 2nd Army has already been detailed. By seven the three corps forming the 1st line were already on their north-easterly march in gigantic echelon of army corps. Their advance in this line was directed, as I have stated, to meet the expected contingency that Bazaine would attempt the northernmost of the three westerly routes toward Verdun. The German leaders had as yet no information warranting them in concluding definitely that this design had been abandoned, although indications pointed in that direction. These indications became so marked towards ten o’clock that Prince Frederick Charles judged it wise at least to arrest the march designed to meet a contingency, the occurrence of which was improbable; he therefore halted the Saxons, the flanking corps on the left, at Jarny, and the Guards at Doncourt; the 9th Corps had some time previously reached Caulre, and were halted there, cooking their breakfasts. It was not long before the Prince obtained additional assurance that the French were contemplating no advance move, but had elected to give him battle on ground of their own choosing on the plateau of Amanvilliers, and, as it appears, the King in his southerly position was early in possession of intelligence which led him to form the same conclusion. It would appear, however, that neither von Moltke nor Prince Frederick Charles had any idea that the French right was prolonged so far to the northward as it was; but on the contrary had the idea that their right flank rested on the village of Amanvilliers. It was in the light of this impression that the Saxons got the order to march on Batilly, where they would be close to Bazaine’s path if he should tardily move off by the Brie road, while in the absence of any such endeavour, their course was thought open to make an easterly sweep, and take in flank the supposed French right in Amanvilliers, while an attack was being made on that position in front.

The latter attack was entrusted to the 9th Corps, supported by the Guards. Manstein marched his men off from Caulre about half-past ten, and headed direct on la Folie by Verneville. It was at the latter place where he experienced the first resistance from the French holding it as an outpost position, and as soon as he showed his columns beyond it, began the furious cannonade, which to us in the south had been the token that the battle was begun in earnest. He had to fight his way hard after passing Verneville. To get at the French position he had to march through the interval between the Bois de la Cusse and the north end of the Bois des Genivaux. The end of this gap toward Metz is closed in by Amanvilliers and Montigny-la-Grange; and here the French were posted in great strength, and indeed took the offensive against Manstein as he strove to deploy. He was not strong enough to make much impression on the position. Part of his artillery he got forward nearly as far as the farm of Champenoise, which was terribly mauled by his shell-fire, and with a part of Wrangel’s division he occupied the edge of the Bois de la Cusse fronting toward Amanvilliers, supporting the infantry by several batteries. The Guards, in the meantime, had in part received another direction, the result of Prince Frederick Charles’ appreciation of the fact that the French right extended further than he had at first reckoned upon. Von Pape marched his first division over Jouaville to Habonville, on the north of the Bois de la Cusse, while Budritski, whose first orders were to march his division (the 1st) on Verneville to support Manstein, had his course presently altered also upon Habonville. St. Privat was found strongly held by the French, and as it would have made a gap in the German line had the Guards gone so far north as to attack it, recourse was had to artillery practice to drive the French out of it. From a position between St. Ail and Habonville, Prince Hohenlohe, the General commanding the Guard artillery, converged on St. Privat the steady fire of no fewer than fourteen batteries of artillery, or, in other words, of 84 guns. Under the personal orders of Prince Frederick Charles, who visited that part of the scene of action between one and two, this pitiless fire was persevered in for more than an hour, as a means of marking time till the Saxons should come up on the left; and Prince Hohenlohe was able gradually to improve the positions of his batteries directed against St. Privat. But although the Saxons, pressing on from Jarny, were true to time, it was found that there was other work for them still further on the left. The French were in force also in St. Marie-au-Chênes, and before the Saxons could co-operate with Prince August against St. Privat, it was necessary to sweep this obstacle out of their path, and also to ascertain exactly how far this French right, ever seemingly elongating itself further and further, really did extend. Prince George of Saxony with the 24th Division, supported by a brigade from von Pape’s left, fell upon St. Marie, while Montbe, with the 24th Saxon Division, swept round by Auboué and found that at length he was on the right of the French flank, and had at last got their weather-gauge. It was half-past three already when the Saxons (23rd Division) had carried St. Marie, and were ready with the 24th, looking now straight at Roncourt, to co-operate with the Guards in an attack on the formidable position of St. Privat. Meanwhile Manstein with his 9th Corps was not prospering. He had got a grip of the gap with Amanvilliers in its throat, and of the two woods flanking that gap; but farther he might not come. Amanvilliers was a position of great natural strength, and the French had accumulated about it a force of artillery which fairly coped even with the strong artillery that Manstein had brought into opposition. Fifteen of his guns were dismounted or otherwise rendered unserviceable by the French fire.

It was with difficulty that his infantry, by the Chantrenne Farm and the north-east corner of the Bois des Genivaux, could maintain themselves against the repeated and furious attacks of the French from la Folie, raked as they were also by mitrailleuse and artillery fire from Amanvilliers. On his right, the Hessians in the Bois de la Cusse were lacerated by a persistent infantry and mitrailleuse fire from the hamlet of Jerusalem, while the French artillery at St. Privat, firing over Jerusalem, showered shells upon the wood; and, in short, so far from being able to pursue the offensive, he had quite his work to hold his own. But the advantage of practically unlimited reserves told in his favour. The 3rd Army Corps had been marched on Verneville, and halted there. Its artillery was available to support Manstein, and it was used in this way, as also was a portion of its cavalry. Then the Guards and the Saxons were perfecting their dispositions for storming St. Privat, and that would relieve his pressure from the left. Already before five the Guards were distracting the attention of the French holders of Jerusalem. The Garde Schützen Regiment had spread itself through the sparsely wooded Bois, and were scrambling forward through the underbrush. Soon the whole of the 4th Brigade of the Guards was marching on St. Privat from Habonville, and it was speedily followed by the bulk of von Pape’s division from St. Privat. The Guards got near St. Privat, but they could not get into it. It was held by the French with inveterate stubbornness, and the natural strength of the position backed their defensive efforts. Prince August of Würtemberg had to hold his hand, and betake himself to artillery fire till assured of the co-operation of the Saxons, who were marching southward from Roncourt. The 10th Corps, too, was summoned close up in reserve, and, indeed, a part of Kraatz-Koschlau’s division actually took part in the storm. At half-past six the Guards, standing waiting on the south and west, heard the music of the Saxon guns from the north, and then the von Papes got the word to show of what metal were the Prussian Guards. They stormed furiously into the place; as furiously came Montbe’s Saxons in from the north. The double attack carried St. Privat; but after the Germans were in it, the French refused to go out, and had to be turned out, fighting desperately every step of the way, and causing terrible loss to their assailants before the operation was accomplished. Thus the French had their right flank turned, and were forced from the strong position on which it had rested. They were rolled backward into the woods of Jaumont and Saulny, but not utterly broken or completely disheartened. For it seems unquestionable that Bazaine was able to march toward the maintenance of his left-wing position at Point du Jour not only a portion of the Imperial Guards who constituted his reserve, and of whom he had made some, but hardly a sufficient, use during the day, but also some of the troops who were engaged at St. Privat, and who were moved under cover of the forced attack made on Manstein’s position from Amanvilliers, just at nightfall.

How was it faring with Manstein while Prince August was relieving him of one embarrassment by carrying St. Privat? He, too, had made an offensive attempt on Amanvilliers simultaneously with von Pape’s push at St. Privat, sending forward a brigade of the Hessians and a part of Wrangel’s Division in combination with a detachment of the Guards detailed from the right of that corps, the whole supported by the artillery of the 3rd Corps. But even now Manstein could not get at the heart of the French centre in Amanvilliers, Montigny, La Grange, nor could his artillery get the dominance over that of the French. Alvensleben with his 3rd Corps was close up, and prepared to back up the labouring 9th Corps with the whole of Buddenbrock’s Division. But Buddenbrock’s men were not to be used just then in an offensive movement, for as they were coming the French took the initiative in great force, and hurled large masses of infantry on the Bois des Genivaux. It is a moot point whether the Imperial Guard participated in this attack in any strength. Next day, behind la Folie, I saw several dead Guardsmen, and after the capitulation of Metz an officer of the corps told me that a whole brigade of the Guards had been in action about Amanvilliers late in the day. If this was the case, it must have suffered little in proportion to the line regiments engaged, for the crop of corpses in Guard uniforms was comparatively very scanty. This late effort on the part of the French, made in twilight that had deepened into darkness before it was finally quelled, could scarcely have had any other object than to mask the retirement of the beaten right wing. It answered its purpose then not inefficiently, and there seems no ground for concluding that the Germans succeeded at all that night in carrying the position of Amanvilliers any more than the southerly one at Point du Jour. But it must have been tenable only on sufferance and by the favour of the darkness, and like Point du Jour it was abandoned in the early morning. The Saxon cavalry, with dashing enterprise, penetrated the northern forests the night of the battle and cut the railway and telegraphic communications between Metz and Thionville. By the following night the ring of Germans around Metz was well defined.

The battle of Gravelotte was both positively and relatively less bloody than that of Vionville. With more than double the number of troops engaged on the former day as compared with the latter, the Germans lost about 14,000 men; the French probably about the same number. What force Bazaine had in the field is difficult to estimate. When he surrendered, his strength, 173,000 men, was as surprising as it was inexplicable on the estimates to which the Germans had access. It seems impossible that he could have had fewer than 150,000 men at his disposal on the 18th of August; and it seems equally impossible that a man in possession of his senses, even without a scintilla of military capacity, should not on such an occasion have mustered out to the last man.

About noon on the 19th, I crossed over the ravine of Gravelotte, where in the gutters of the chaussée the blood of the Uhlans stood in red puddles, and pushed on past the ruins of the Auberge of St. Hubert and up to Point du Jour. The burying parties had hardly begun their work, the wounded were still lying on the slopes in great numbers. From the sharp angle formed by the chaussée, where it turns sharp to the south above St. Hubert, I went forward on the old Roman road over the flat. The Germans had not lost a minute. Already they were reversing the front of what the day before had been French battery emplacements and rifle pits. The replis lay behind entrenchments shaded by boughs of trees which the French had cut. And the French looked so strangely near—seemingly just over the way. They were encamped in peace on the slopes and the summit of Mont St. Quentin, the white _tentes d’abris_ clustering round the fortress, and the smiling villages on the slopes. The scene was like a gigantic pic-nic or a gipsy camp, with the French tents beyond, and the Germans lolling in their bowers. There was no formal truce, but the peace was unbroken. Fort St. Quentin might have shelled the plateau where lay the Germans—in the morning, indeed, it had sent two shells into a group of mounted men standing before the detached house at the sharp turn of the road; but it seemed as if this had been merely a kind of formal protest against any supposition that it was not solely of its own will and pleasure that the fortress was quiet. The assertiveness was too emphatic to have been agreeable to the two dragoons killed by one of the shells; but the Germans were quite content to concede what they could not well have challenged, all the more readily because St. Quentin rested satisfied with the somewhat grim formality.

For a day or two immediately after Gravelotte there was a good deal of confusion as regarded several matters in the army which lay on the battle-field where so many gallant soldiers were yet without graves. The commissariat arrangements were hardly equal to the strain put upon them, while the great dearth of water, and the badness of quality in what was to be found, combined with the already ripe taint of putrefaction, the heat of the weather, and the revulsion from the excitement of the battle, to stimulate disease among the soldiers. Men who had to trust to the field-post for the transmission of letters, had their tempers sorely tried. On the 19th I consigned a letter to a fussy but civil functionary who was in charge of a field-post wagon a little way in front of Rezonville, and who professed his expectancy to start “_gleich_,” which experience had taught me was a very elastic word. I found the field-post wagon was still stationary the following morning, the civil and fussy gentleman cooking at a bivouac fire a diabolical mess, consisting of fat bacon, onions, biscuits, minced something or other (it might have been postage stamps), coffee-grounds, and rice, while his horses placidly slept the sleep of the just as they stood ready harnessed for the start, even as they had done on the previous night. Again the courteous official professed his belief that he was to start _gleich_, although he owned that he had not the remotest idea what was his destination. In reply to my proposal to take my letter away and give it to some other less indefinite field-post, he professed his readiness to give it up, but advised me not to make bad worse. The ultimate result was that the letter miscarried altogether, and it was the case that letters which did arrive took longer time in reaching England from Gravelotte and the vicinity about this period, than they did from before Paris at a later period of the war.

On the morning of the 20th August I revisited the flat in front of the hamlet of St. Hubert, on which were stationed the German outposts, behind the entrenchments which they had been steadily working upon, and from which, the day before, the French army was visible, lying on the face of Mont St. Quentin, and around the villages of Scy, Lessy, and Lorry. To my surprise the French had totally disappeared. On the Friday the ground was white with their tents, around which swarmed the brisk gentlemen in the red trousers. Now, on the Saturday, not a tent or a pair of red trousers was visible. The surly fortification on the top of Mont St. Quentin frowned across in its solitude, the church-spire of Lorry smiled in the sunbeam that slanted across it, but the traces of a great army had as completely disappeared as if the ground had opened and swallowed up the host. I followed the concavity of the German semicircular entrenchments round to the left through the corner of the wood of Chatel, which extends under various names, but in one continuity, as far as Saulny, which is nearly due north from Metz. The Germans held the wood, and were entrenching its verge. Thus, within my own observation, a German belt extended thus early around Metz, from the Moselle at Moulins, in a sweep first to the west and then to the north, till it reaches within a mile and a half of the Thionville road. The troops which lined this belt consisted chiefly of Prince Frederick Charles’s army. The completion of the ring was taken up by the army of General von Steinmetz. His district, so to speak, began at the Thionville road, and swept round the eastern semicircle of environment to the Moselle below Metz. Of course a space of such a magnitude as is here indicated could not in so short a time be invested with that closeness which would have been the case had the siege been simply that of a fortified town and citadel. But the investment was close enough for this,—that the army which was inside could not hope to get outside without fighting a pitched battle. Such a force as that of the French lying in and around Metz was not like the garrison of a detached fort, capable of an effort at cutting its way out by a sudden sortie. It must, as it seemed, break the cordon in form, and with warning sufficient to admit of a German concentration to oppose the endeavour.

In view of the long and weary inaction which the soldiers of the 1st and 2nd Armies endured while summer waned into autumn, and autumn had all but chilled into winter, it may not be uninteresting if I quote the _ipsissima verba_ of a passage which I find in the notes which I made on this 20th of August, as calculated to show how, even thus early, circumstances rendered it possible to forecast the policy of the German leaders.

“Hitherto the German army has taken the _rôle_ of aggression, and the French army has stood solely on the defensive. On the part of the Germans the aggressive tactics hitherto have been at once politic and characteristic in a national sense. It was necessary as a feature of the German programme that the French army of Metz should be got “into chancery,” and that there should be some desperate and decisive fighting, in which might be demonstrated the impossibility of resistance to the fury and persistency of the German assaults. Both these ends have been accomplished. The army of Metz is beleaguered under its walls, the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles grimly standing sentry over it. The steep of Gorze, the plains of Vionville, of Rezonville, and of Gravelotte, the ravine beyond it, and the plateau of St. Hubert, strewn as they are with German dead, but left, nevertheless, in the rear of the unrelenting advance of the German host, bear bloody but unquestionable testimony to the fury and obstinacy of their attack. Thus the double purpose is attained. Now, therefore, the German tactics undergo an alteration. The children of the Fatherland will no longer spill their blood in attacks which would be purposeless, and therefore wanton; they await in their turn the assaults of the beleaguered French army. Sooner or later that assault must come. Want of supplies must precipitate the assumption of the offensive on the part of the French. But if they can manage to live till Christmas on the traditional French wealth of resources in the way of edible matter, it will not accord with German policy to attack them. So long as they are surrounded as they are now, they are harmless; if they would break the environment, and become again dangerous, they must fight for the freedom. The German leaders will not court the affray. Why should they, since their great object is the maintenance of the blockade? But since this is their object, it may well be imagined how they will resist any attempts to raise that blockade.” It afterwards fell to my lot to be an eye-witness of the manner in which at least one of those attempts was resisted.

And was this investment of Metz, then, with its result, to all appearance, postponed indefinitely and uncertain, to be the end of all the German forced marching after Spicheren; of the rapid push across Lorraine; of the double battle above Gorze; of the German dead whose corpses are fertilising the plains of Vionville and Gravelotte; of the thousands of wounded who cumbered the towns and the villages all the way in the rear to Cologne and Mannheim? No. While there was another French army still in the field it was not for the Germans to linger about the scenes of their victories, and take to Lord Russell’s policy of “Rest and be thankful.” Prince Frederick Charles and General Steinmetz were reckoned, together, capable of sitting on the brink of the French well at Metz, and looking down on the French army in its depths. The Crown Prince, his army rested and refreshed in la belle Nancy, was already pushing westward, giving the contemptuous go-by to the obdurate little Toul. Already we heard rumours that his cavalry scouts were swarming in the valley of the Marne. About St. Marie, Amanvilliers, the blood-stained St. Privat and the battered Jerusalem, the picked soldiers of Germany—the army corps of the Guards, the Royal Saxons with their lissome dash, and the slower-pulsed Saxon Province men of the 4th Corps, were making haste to bury their dead, and were girding up their lines, to form a new—a 4th—army under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, and march westward and northward along the river from which the army took the name under which it made itself famous.

In a day or two the hotels of Pont-à-Mousson were to lose the custom of the princes and counts who were on the royal staff, for the King was to strike southward _viâ_ Commercy, and joining his son at Ligny, accompany the 3rd Army in what seemed then was to be the straight, if not the bloodless road to Paris. What had occurred before Metz was but the first act of the tragedy, what should occur thenceforth in its vicinity was in this Titanic drama only “secondary business;” the piece was to be played on and out nearer and yet nearer to the torn heart of France.

But enough of what then was the future. On Saturday the 20th I traversed the whole of the battle-fields of Tuesday and Thursday, and the outward and visible signs of slaughter more and more convinced me that the fight of the former day had been unquestionably the fiercer and the more hotly contested. Let me attempt to give some idea of what may be termed the area of slaughter in the two days’ fight. Within a space of about six miles in length by four in depth there was not a space so large as Piccadilly Circus that did not bear some token that one or more men had fallen upon it. Now the tokens were dead bodies, sometimes straggling so that several yards intervened, sometimes so close that you could hardly step without treading on the dead; again they consisted of bloody coats, pieces of linen, helmets, cuirasses with the tell-tale holes in them, knapsacks riddled by bullets, dead horses all but blown into fragments by the bursting of shells. The lines of demarcation between the German and the French dead were in places drawn with almost mathematical accuracy. On one of the roads leading up the steep slope out of Gorze I came on an outlying part of the table-land where the Germans lay very thickly. It looked as if they had advanced in a column along the road, for its margin was quite bordered with the dead. Here it was where the column had come up which an American of genius and fancy likened to a great anaconda, pushing forward with long tortuous folds till a battery opened on its hinder parts and amputated and all but destroyed its tail. Then I came to the place where the column had struggled into deployment and had got within the fatal 200 yards’ distance of the Frenchmen. The latter lay far thicker then than the Germans had lain in the first space. Burial parties were at work at this place, but seemed bewildered to decide where to make a beginning. I advised one of the officers to double-trench the ground all over, laying the dead along the hollow of each successive trench, something like a celery bed; so many were they that this market-gardening style of grave would have been, I am convinced, the best plan for getting them out of sight; saving transport to isolated grave-pits, and lessening the temptation to bury too near to the surface, which is always strong with burial parties who have excavated with labour a large pit, into which they are anxious to crowd all the corpses in the neighbourhood, regardless of the fact that the uppermost are so near the surface that the plough of the next spring must uncover their remains. The surface of the little churchyard of Gravelotte had been raised three feet all over in one day. The church had been crowded with the most severely wounded in the Thursday’s battle, and as the poor fellows died they had been carried out into the churchyard. This with its loopholed wall had been the scene of a desperate stand on the part of the French, and already had more than its own share of corpses: so that, when I had seen it on the Friday, the bodies, chiefly of Frenchmen, were lying two deep all over its edge. The interior of the church was a sight I never can forget. Most know the ornamental character of these Catholic churches on the Continent, the meretriciously decorated altar, with the pictures, the candles, and what not. The white altar-cloth was splashed with blood, the floor was bedded all over with the wounded, and the atmosphere had become tainted and malaria-laden. In the churchyard I had noticed the little wooden memorials over the village dead, with the wreaths of immortelles around them, sticking up through the stacks of dead. To-day they were out of sight, covered with the earth that had been thrown over all as the easiest and quickest method of a wholesale interment.

I have referred to the “fatal 200 yards” of the Germans. Always the attacking force, as they had hitherto been, their fire was confessedly, and in the nature of things, wilder than that of a body waiting in a stationary position for them to come; and it was ever at the long-range distances that the French did so great execution among them with the chassepot. As to the question of the comparative accuracy of the zund-nadelgewehr and the chassepot as weapons of precision at long range, the Germans did not as yet appear inclined to express an opinion, yet one might gather even thus early what a terrible respect they had already learned for the weapon which they afterwards confessed to be “pale death” itself. But when they got within the 200 yards, and brought their needle-guns down to the point-blank range, then it was that their fire was of the “fatal” character I allude to. French prisoners with whom I spoke told with a shudder of the shower of bullets from the needle-gun at and within this range, that fell upon a column about the breasts and faces of the men, and against which nothing could stand. It is only on such vantage grounds as the top of the Spicheren or the edge of the ravine above the Gravelotte ravine that the French stood up for any time against this fire of the Germans.

Before quitting the position before Metz, on Monday, the 22nd August, I took a final walk along the foreposts on the Gravelotte side. The entrenchments of the Germans were now nearly complete, and although rough and ready, were very artistic in their formation. Sentries were stationed on the brink of the valley lying between Mont St. Quentin and the Chatel plateau, with strong piquets lying concealed in their rear. From their position I could see with the glass into the mouths of the heavy cannon of Fort St. Quentin, which looked strangely close. Going along a little to the right, in the direction of the Moselle, I was able to turn, so far as eyesight was concerned, the shoulder of Mont St. Quentin, and lo! stretched out before me lay the beautiful plain of Metz, with the river gleaming in the sunshine, the spires and roofs of the town sparkling brightly, and the gloomy mass of Fort Bellecroix—the finest work of Cormontaigne—grimly covering the right. The German cordon, I was assured by a staff officer, was now completely drawn round Metz, and Thionville was also invested. There was every appearance that the armies of Prince Frederick Charles and Steinmetz had quietly settled themselves down in their position. Crimean men have been wont to assert that the French were the best constructors of huts in the world, but I question whether the Germans do not excel them. All along these tablelands they had built themselves dainty little leafy habitations out of the branches and bark of the poplar trees that line the roads, and seemed as comfortable as if they were at home in their cottages in the Fatherland. As I passed one of the regiments its band, standing in a circle, was practising one of Mendelssohn’s masterpieces, the men enjoying the strains _sub tegmine fagi_, while all around the burying parties were engaged in burying not only their own but their enemy’s dead out of their sight.

On returning to Pont-à-Mousson, from my first start to Thiaucourt, I had determined to walk no longer, but at once to invest in a horse, if one was to be procured in the town. This at first seemed doubtful, for the Germans had made a very exhaustive levy, but ultimately I chanced on a horse-dealer whose stud had not quite been swept away. He was one of the most marvellously stolid men I have ever seen, half German, half French; the blended blood seemed wholly to have stagnated in his veins. Almost the only sign of animation he evinced was a wink, but then that wink was remarkably expressive. I was fortunate. He had an admirable horse in his stable, sure-footed, fast, easily kept, and in fact a compendium of equine virtues. But—bother the buts, they always crop up in such cases—this paragon of animals had one little drawback, he was stone-blind. Now there sometimes are advantages connected with a blind horse—that is, if he is a reasonable animal otherwise. He trusts his rider and will go straightforward courageously, till the rein gives a hint to turn to the right or the left. There is no fear of his shying, because to him there are no objects of alarm. He commonly has good action and a light mouth. In view of all this I directed the blind horse to be saddled and brought forth. I mounted and set him a-going.

It is cruel to be hard on the misfortunes of a fellow-creature, but this horse must have had a mental organisation as opaque as the pupils of his eyeballs. Three steps in any one direction were enough for him, then he tried another, and so continued this process, totally insensible to any suggestions on the part of his rider. He ran his nose against a house, and then he all but fell over a plough; finally, in one of his tacks, he broke the glass of a general’s carriage, and brought down a “Donner wetter” or two upon my head. Tired as I was of walking, I became fully impressed with the fact that it would be cheaper to walk ten miles than to ride the blind horse one, even if such a feat were possible, and, dismounting, I led him back somewhat ignobly to the stable. The horse-dealer winked solemnly, bestowed a caress on the abominable brute, and expressed his astonishment that I should not have found him all that could be desired. The excuse was, that he had always been driven alongside of another beast, and the deprivation of his companion had demoralised him. But I was bidden be of good cheer, the horse-dealer was still assured that he would be able to accommodate me. After a little delay another steed was brought forth. He was “long and low”—the true Leicestershire desiderata. The length was principally in the neck, which resembled that of an ostrich; the lowness was in the back, which curved downward so that his withers and rump stood up like two sharply-pronounced hills. His colour was a dirty-white; he had capped hocks, a pair of most villanous recently-broken knees, and a wicked backward cast in his eye that said very little for his temper. His appearance was certainly not in his favour, but remembering the adage never to trust to appearances, and being assured he was a remarkable performer, I mounted and got him under way. He went decently enough to the end of the street; but when a battery of artillery came along the cross street at a trot he soon gave me a sample of his remarkable performances. He declined to go forward at any price, but instead he was open to kicking as freely as the heart of man could desire. He kicked the battery into the direst confusion, wriggling about here, there, and everywhere, continually elevating that prominent rump of his, and struggling furiously to get his head down. I thought I should have had to choose a favourable moment and dismount, leaving him and the battery to settle it between themselves, but at length I got his head homewards, and then he suddenly subsided, and walked to his stable as if he had done something to be proud of.

The horse-dealer winked again as I returned a second time, and said he had still another beast. The past experience was not of a character to tempt further experiments, but I wanted a horse badly, and I knew this was my last chance; so I told them to bring him out. He was a very conscientious-looking quadruped, slightly monumental as to his legs, but then he had a bold Roman nose, and a tail possessed of what may be styled the Grecian bend of horsetails. My heart warmed to him at once, for, like myself, he was an old dragoon. He had been cast from a French cavalry regiment in some remote age, and had since been engaged, judging by the collar marks, as a beast of burden. Well, I started with this animal for a third trial, and to do him justice, his conduct did not belie his conscientious aspect. He plodded forward steadily at a kind of compound of a walk, a trot, and a canter; he seemed to be walking with his fore legs, trotting with one of his hind legs, and cantering with the other. The effect was novel, if not wholly agreeable, and then he really got over the ground very fairly. On the day of Gravelotte he carried me uncommonly well, his ancient military training making him stand fire like an adjutant’s horse, which is generally too depressed in spirits to manifest emotion at anything short of an earthquake. I began to get very sweet on him, although the scarcity of keep was a considerable inconvenience. There was but little bother with him on the Thursday night. When I joined the bivouac I fastened him to the end of a row of cuirassier horses that were picketed close by, and the men gave him of their oats and hay. But they went away next morning, the bivouac broke up, and fresh quarters had to be sought. In one of the houses of the deserted village of Gravelotte I found a room which was tenanted only by two sorely wounded men and an hospital attendant. All the other houses were packed full of wounded, and one was in luck in getting the use of a chair, and of the common frying-pan in which to cook a piece of bacon bought from a marketender. But there was no room for the horse, and if there had been, he would not have been the best company for the wounded men. I tied him up outside while I ate, wrote, and slept, and then late in the afternoon it struck me that he must be thirsty. I rode the brute a circuit of some five miles in search of water, and when I got back it was all but dark. On entering the room I found one of the wounded men lying dead, and the other removed along with the hospital man. It was not pleasant to occupy the same room with the poor dead fellow, and luckily an empty stable turned up next door with plenty of hay in the loft. Having fed the horse copiously, I adjourned among the hay to sleep, and in the morning I found my noble steed was gone! Perhaps he had broken the fastening, and walked away of his own accord; perhaps a passing suttler had stolen him. Anyhow he was clear away, leaving me as a memento the saddle and bridle. These, which were of the nature of a white elephant, I was glad to get rid of for a box of cigars, and fortunately my comrade turned up from Pont-à-Mousson with a carriage horse, and driver that by some inscrutable means he had discovered there unrequisitioned.