XLI
Three hours after the Emperor had driven out of Gravelotte the Red Prince had blocked the direct road to Verdun. The First Army had crossed the Moselle. Moltke and the Royal Headquarter Staff were already at Pont à Mousson, the Crown Prince was marching toward Châlons.
At this stage of the game, the Warlock gave the signal. Von Redern's guns opened suddenly on the French cavalry camp near Vionville. You remember the squadrons were watering: Murat's Dragoons stampeded with their baggage-trains, De Gramont's troopers sent in a volley of carbine-fire, mounted and retired in less haste. This was the opening figure of the three days of bloody conflict waged in the rural tract between the northern edges of the Bois de Vaux and the Forest of Jaumont. The French call it the "Battle of St. Privat," the Germans the battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat.
The Great Headquarters of the Prussian Commander-in-Chief were at the riverside town of Pont à Mousson, some ten miles distant from the war-theater—whose stage occupied some six square miles of undulating, wooded, ravine-gashed country-side.
And here, his possessing genius, or demon, prompting him, the tactics of Moltke abruptly changed.
I have fancied the Warlock getting up at cockcrow on the day of Vionville,—he had a little folding camp-bed he always slept upon. Undressed to shirt and drawers, he would roll himself in a gray-striped blanket which did not reveal the fact when it needed washing, and cover himself on chilly nights with a big, shabby, military cloak.
Beside the bed, with the extinguished candle-lantern, standing on a corner of it, was the little portable campaign-table, covered with faded green baize. His maps were spread on this, and an Army revolver of large caliber lay atop of them, well within reach of its owner's practiced hand.
He sponged his old face and sinewy neck economically in a basin of cold water, carefully washed his hands, rinsed his mouth and put on a clean white shirt. A white drill waistcoat went on under the old red-faced uniform frock, with the distinctive shoulder-cords of Chieftaincy of the Great General Staff and the Order of Merit dangling from the silver-gilt swivel at the collar. Then he polished his bald head with his silk handkerchief, reached his wig from the chest of drawers and assumed it, read a text in his Lutheran Bible, prayed a twenty-second prayer standing: lighted a thin, dry, ginger-colored cigar, such as his soul loved, and sat down to work at his maps.
Bismarck might well have likened him to some bird of the predatory species. With the rising furrows of his bald brow hitching up his wig, and his clear eyes, lashless with old age, crimson-rimmed by dint of fatigue and overstrain, his fierce hooked beak following the journey of his withered claw over the tough cartridge-paper—one can imagine him, very like an eagle, or a member of the vulture-tribe.
It grew lighter as he worked with his old chronometer and well-used compasses and stumpy pencils; and the little thumbed table of distance-measures to which he sometimes referred. He finished and rang his handbell for his orderly-servant; chatted with his Adjutant and secretary as he broke his fast on bread and black coffee. Then at a great jingling of cavalry bridles and stamping of iron hoofs upon the cobblestones below, he went down, carrying his rolled map-case, mounted, and rode away with his following.
The sun rising had found him, lean, inscrutable and silent, on the ridge above Flavigny, where he had told Prince Charles and Steinmetz, Moltke would be found that day....
He had met and primed them with the result of his calculations, had seen a fierce engagement from his coign of observation. By three noon, he was back at Pont à Mousson, had interviewed the King, dined frugally, and now stood chatting with the Iron Chancellor upon the steps of the Mairie.
Guns were muttering in the distance as they had done all day at intervals. There had been fighting, he answered mildly when questioned. Quite a considerable battle one might call it. The villages of Flavigny and Vionville were burning as he spoke.
The potato-gardens of Flauville were thick-strewn with corpses of French and German foot-soldiers. In a little, layer upon layer of dead and dying men and horses had been piled upon these. Necessity knows no law; and it had been found necessary to interpose Prussian cavalry between the French Artillery and exhausted masses of German infantry. Which accounted for a considerable thinning in the ranks of Rauch's Hussars.
The sacrifice had been necessary. He told himself so as he stood there smoking. His high forehead was quite unclouded as he returned in answer to some reference to MacMahon's losses at Wörth:
"It is one of the traditions handed down from the days of Murat and Kellerman and Lassalle—the French belief in the virtue of the massed cavalry charge...."
The Minister to whom he spoke replied:
"The English exploded the theory at Balaklava sixteen years ago, by their magnificent but useless sacrifice of Cardigan's Light Brigade. They learned then, and we have profited by the lesson that MacMahon has just been spanked for forgetting—and that Your Excellency will presently teach Bazaine...."
The great strategist cupped his long chin in his lean hand, and said in his dry, thoughtful way:
"Yes, yes. We will drub this precept into his brain at cost of his breeches. Regiments of mounted men serve admirably for the protection of marching Army Corps—are priceless for reconnaissance, outpost and patrol-work, but when they are thrown against vast bodies of troops armed with the modern breech-loader, their use is unjustifiable, being nil."
"And when in addition, the unlucky horsemen are charged as at Wörth, over hop-poles and tree-stumps, open field-drains and shattered garden walls," said the Minister, "then they are worse than useless, I should add."
The Warlock's thin-lipped mouth opened in a silent laugh that creased his lean cheeks and displayed the gums that were all but toothless. He rubbed his hairless chin and said:
"Ay, unless from the point of view of that farmer of Schleswig-Holstein who said as our troops marched by his barn-yard: 'Let us look on them as manure for next year's wheat!'"
The Iron Chancellor's blue eyes hardened with sudden anger. Imagine him in his great muddy jack-boots, with cord breeches not innocent of clay and soil, the black double-breasted frock with pewter buttons and yellow collar and cuff-facings, the white cap with the yellow band and the long, heavy, steel-hilted cavalry sword, puffing at a giant cigar as he stood on the doorsteps of the Mairie, over whose door drooped the Prussian flag, and the white Hohenzollern pennon with the Black Eagle and the gold blazoning, showing, like the bodyguard of Red Dragoons and White Cuirassiers, the numerous orderlies, and the double cordon of sentries placed about the building, that there lodged the King. While the Red Prince's headquarters were distinguished in similar fashion at the National Bank of France.
"I have not forgotten!" The response came in Bismarck's grimmest vein of humor. "Nor has the rascal either, if he happens to be alive still. Our infantry taught him very thoroughly that there are more uses than one for a bundle of straw."
"Some of our German Princes have mastered that lesson quite recently, Excellency," said Count Paul Hatzfeldt, First Secretary of the ambulatory Foreign Office, turning a handsome, humorous face upon his Chief. "The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg slept in a barn at the last halting-place, and Prince Leopold of Bavaria in a loft over a stable yard, where, as he explained afterward, there were not only mice, but rats!"
"I understand His Excellency to refer," said Moltke, taking a pinch of stuff, "to the Polish method of flogging, which is to tie a man face-downward on a truss and thrash him to a jelly with green birch-rods."
"Precisely. Only not having birch rods 'convenient' as Lever's Irishmen would say," returned the Chancellor, "our fellows used their belts—buckle-end preferably. Then they pitched the farmer on his own dunghill, and left him to rot there for the land in spring."
"Severe, but severe lessons are best remembered," said the Warlock, placidly. "Thus MacMahon will perhaps throw no more regiments of cavalry away! As for ourselves, we have hardly brought that arm of the Service to its present condition of usefulness to handle it wastefully. Military science—true military science—does not allow of undue extravagance in the sentient material of war. Nay,—it will never be said of me that I wasted blood prodigally!" He curved his long thin hand about his large and beautifully shaped ear, and added, as the distant detonations of heavy artillery made the windows rattle in their sashes and the pavement quake underfoot. "They are still fighting south and west of Metz. In half an hour, if the firing has not abated, I am going to ride in that direction with the King."
He glanced at his chronometer, then went down the side steps, and strolled, contentedly smoking, to where his own charger and his master's were waiting in charge of some orderlies near the Royal carriages and fourgons that occupied the center of the Market Place. While Count Hatzfeldt, glancing after the thin figure, shrugged and said to his Chief in an undertone:
"Heaven send that by this time to-morrow we may not be deploring some tremendous holocaust of Prussian cavalry! Do not ask me how the idea suggested itself...."
"Possibly,"—the Minister slightly moved his hand toward a string of country grain-wagons, crowded with wounded, and drawn by farmers' horses, converging from the westward boulevard toward the Market Place—"possibly because so many of those fellows have been brought in here since twelve noon. And in Moltke's very disclaimer of blood-waste, you find cause of suspicion. In that case, our greatest strategist would be like the spider, who agitates her web to conceal herself before she has even been seen. Moreover, they—I refer to our wounded—have been infantry of the Third Corps chiefly, nearly all Prussians from the Mark of Brandenburg. The French prisoners were mostly horsemen; Light Blue Lancers and Cuirassiers of the Guard Imperial. What fellows are these?" Under his heavy brows he scrutinized the approaching train of sufferers, adding: "H'm! Marshal Frossard's chassepotiers have taken toll of Rauch's Hussars with a vengeance! Where are you going, Count, in such haste?"
Halfway down the steps Hatzfeldt halted, dropping his eyeglass and turning round an astonished face.
"Going, Excellency? Why, naturally, to speak to these wounded cavalry men. My wife has a cousin, a captain in the Hussars of Rauch."
The Chancellor said, bending his powerful gaze on the handsome face of the diplomatic dandy:
"Let me counsel you to quench your desire for information. The King's windows are overhead. And the inquiries natural for you to make in your own character will be suspected, should His Majesty observe them—to have been prompted by me." He showed a corner of the sealed dispatch he had thrust into his pocket. "You recognize the Queen's handwriting upon this envelope? Augusta will have written another such Jeremiad to her spouse. Mercy and moderation, piety and philanthropy will be the headings of the sermon penned on my own sheets of letter-paper. The test of the King's will be, 'Bismarck is alone to blame!' Fortunately my back is broad, and I have his entire confidence.... But if he once suspected me of getting what the Yankees call 'cold feet!'..."
The hand that held the cigar indicated a stoppage of the foremost wagon. "See! Moltke is speaking to the officer in charge of the convoy. I will wager you a case of champagne that his mouth is being corked up. A wise proceeding too! For, remember, the story of a wounded man is painted from his own wounds—always a red tale of disaster. How can it be otherwise? In the heat of battle, or perhaps without having fired one shot, or ridden one charge—he has been struck down, poor wretch! and carried, bleeding, from the field.... Has it occurred to Your Excellency that those guns are drawing nearer?"
The query was addressed to Moltke, who had returned, leaving the wagon-train to jolt with its doleful load in the direction where the Flag of the Geneva Cross, hanging from doors and windows, announced the location of temporary hospitals.
The expert listened as distant crashes of volley-firing were answered by the hyena-yapping of mitrailleuses, and answered, pointing to the weather-vane on the tower of the Market Hall:
"Your Excellency is wrong. The breeze has altered its direction. It was northerly, and is now blowing directly from the west. Yet if the action should assume grave proportions, it may prove necessary to shift Headquarters to some village further afield."
"Heaven forbid!" murmured Count Hatzfeldt, expressively raising his fine eyebrows, "when one is able to get a decent dinner, and a daily bath at one's hotel!..."
"Heaven generally ordains, through the mouth of Your Excellency, an exodus," said the Chancellor, laughing, "when a comfortable bed falls to my lot. At Herny my couch had to be lengthened with chairs and carriage-cushions, and these kept parting company all the night long. My feet were on the floor when I awakened in the morning,—literally at cockcrow—for my window opened upon the dunghill where the lord of the poultry-yard sounded his reveillé. Now here I am accommodated in quite respectable fashion; in a little red creeper-covered house at the corner of the Rue Raugraf, and three of the Councillors are stowed under the same roof with me."
"While I," said the Warlock, "have my quarters at a cleanly bakery, where there is quite an excellent piano, by the way. So that, to-night, unless Fate order otherwise, I shall hear my nephew Henry von Burt sing some of my favorite songs. He is in voice for the first time since his attack of sore throat. The King has been much pleased with his rendering of Herder's 'Volkslieder' and 'Die Blumen of Heine, which doubtless Your Excellency knows."
"I am acquainted with the song you mention. Or I was," returned the Chancellor, "in my salad days. They are over for me, unluckily! ... Only Your Excellency possesses the secret of perpetual youth."
And he turned aside to receive a bulky sealed packet of dispatches from a green-jacketed Royal Courier, who had just driven into the Market Place in a farmer's gig, and now got down, tossing a fee to the scowling driver of the muddy, panting roadster. While Moltke stood smiling and humming with characteristic untunefulness a stave of the tender, sentimental ballad:
"If they knew it, the little flowers,
How she wounded this bleeding heart,
They would weep with me in bright dew-showers,
Healing, healing its anguished smart!"
Said the Minister in an undertone to Hatzfeldt, as he transferred to his keeping the bulky sealed envelope received from the courier:
"Let his Excellency sing only loud enough, and neither Steinmetz nor the Red Prince will be able to prevent the music-loving Frenchmen from retiring upon Verdun."
He had not meant the pungent jest to reach the ear of the great strategist. But Moltke glanced round and answered mildly, if with a narrowing of his wrinkled eyelids, and a sardonic twist of his thin, dry lips:
"Then all the more surely should we surround and annihilate them. My second plan is usually stronger than my first. And I have already issued instructions to Prince Frederick Charles and General Steinmetz, indicating the course they are to follow should Bazaine pierce our left wing. Meanwhile let us listen to this fellow's singing. It may please Your Excellency better than mine!"
The arrival, a Captain of Dragoons of the Prussian Guard, acting as aide-de-camp upon the staff of Steinmetz, had just galloped into Pont à Mousson, accompanied by an escort of half a dozen troopers on blown horses, and had little breath left even for speech. But when he threw himself from his reeking beast, the dispatch he took from his belt-pouch and handed to the Chief of the Great Staff told of a huge expenditure of "the sentient material of war."
At noon of the day, looking from his point of observation on the high ground between the Bois des Ognons and Gravelotte, short-legged, fiery-tempered Steinmetz had seen what seemed a weak spot in the French position. Under cannon, mitrailleuse and chassepot-fire he had ordered several batteries of the 7th Corps and Von Hartmann's Division of Cavalry to cross the Gravelotte defile and plant themselves on the slopes south of the road. Death had harvested redly from the extravagant movement. The slaughter that ensued had shaken even the men who carried the needle-gun, their huge columns were giving ground. General Steinmetz and his staff were under heavy fire. Only the Prussian field-batteries, served and trained by gunner-sharpshooters, kept the German right wing from caving in.
Heavy news, one would suppose, yet the Warlock read the dispatch to his master with as placid an expression as though he were at that moment seated beside the baker's excellent piano, listening to the tender warblings of the melodious Henry von Burt.
"Steinmetz is over ardent, it may be, yet it is what I should have done, had I been in his place," he said in answer to some perturbed exclamation of King Wilhelm. "Only, perhaps," he fingered his long chin thoughtfully, "I should have done it in a different way. He is supported by now. Stülpnagel will have thrown his Division forward and gripped the woods and heights upon the French left. Your Majesty will see a change in our favor by the time we have reached the ground!"
"Your Excellency should be there now and I with you. Pray order the horses!" urged the agitated King.
"They are waiting, sire!" said the Warlock, cool, calm, and inscrutable as ever. In fact, he hummed another bar or two of the plaintive ballad about the weeping flowers as he followed his Royal master downstairs to the door, and the War Minister, Von Roon, who had been hastily sent for, rode up with his staff as the King mounted his steadiest charger, a powerful black horse.
"The Federal Chancellor, Count von Bismarck Schönhausen, begs permission to accompany your Majesty!" said Hatzfeldt, gracefully approaching as the orderly of the Body-guard resigned the bridle-rein.
He said to himself as he returned with the graciously accorded permission to where the Minister waited by the big brown mare that was held by an orderly of Cuirassiers:
"How perfect is his discretion! How completely he hides the iron grip of power under the velvet glove of diplomacy! Roon is the King's quartermaster-sergeant, Moltke is his calculating machine, Bismarck is his ruler—but he will always seem his slave! Wherever the King goes—on journeys, shooting excursions, visits to watering-places—he is always at his elbow; he rides with him to maneuvers, and reviews and parades. Since the War began—and at cost of what exertion, mental and bodily, no one understands better than I do!—he has never left his master alone for long enough to further the intrigues and influence of other men.... Every battle-field the King looks on will be seen through the Chancellor's eyes. For this War is his War—and he knows it! ... Here come galloping the Royalties and Serene Highnesses, rabid to see some real fighting.... Bismarck calls them the Tinsel Rabble,—if only they knew!"
And Count Paul, smiling in his gently satirical fashion, strode back to his quarters to pen to his young, pretty, and exceedingly coquettish Countess, a marital letter full of tender expressions and requests for lots more cigarettes. While their Highnesses and Mightinesses of the Royal Suite pranced away in the wake of the King and his three great servants, without the slightest idea that the Chancellor who rode on William's left hand held them in such contempt.
The wounded men sitting or lying on hay in the grain-carts at the hospital door looked up as the Great Headquarter Staff rode by and gave a shaky Hoch! of greeting. Heads of dressers, nurses, Knights of St. John, and surgeons appeared at windows from which projected the Flag with the Red Cross. While a long train of haggard French prisoners, halted before the porch of the church that had been converted into a temporary prison, stared with lackluster eyes over the bowls of cabbage-soup and the huge hunches of bread that had been distributed among them by pitying ladies; and a battalion of little black-a-vised, green-coated Saxon soldiers who had marched in dead-beat and were dozing on straw under the Market Hall, lifted their heads from their knapsacks, saying: "There goes Moltke with his King, and the Big Pomeranian. Something is up out yonder!" and rolled over to sleep again....
The inhabitants and tradespeople of Pont à Mousson were too crushed to make any audible comments. Within a fortnight they had had twice to feed and quarter a French Division. Now here, as it seemed, was the whole Prussian Army poured out upon them.
They were dumb and stupefied in the Babel of foreign dialects. They could make no headway against the flood. Everywhere were loud-voiced Intendants making requisitions and giving orders; officers and quartermaster-sergeants shouting for rooms, provender and stabling; the men, like the officers, insatiable in demands for meat, bread, forage, tobacco, flour and wine, liberal in oaths and blows to those who could not satisfy their needs.
Tradesmen in gutted shops swore in whispers over basketsful of dirty little nickel coins with (to them) indecipherable inscriptions—all they had to show in return for one or two thousand francs' worth of stock. To grumble brought retribution, swift, sharp and merciless, on the head of the grumbler. To resist meant death. Therefore they would be silent until the invader should have passed on.
But when the wearers of the muddy blue uniforms and the riders of the muddy, well-fed horses did pass, fresh hosts came swarming after them. There seemed no end to the brown-faced men in the loathed blue uniform....
"Are there more to come?" those of them who understood French—and many did—were asked timidly, and they answered: "Naturally. We are only the Advance. To keep the roads by which we have passed open, and to guard the telegraph-wires we have left behind us there will be very many more required!"
Germany was being emptied into France's lap, it seemed to the bewildered peasants leaning against the walls of their cottages or peering from the doorways, as had done the peasants of Alsace-Lorraine. They, like them, were ruined, their crops devastated by cataclysms of armed humanity, their cellars emptied, their frugal stores devoured.
"But where are we to find food for all these, we who had fared badly enough before they came? And who will pay us for what they have not paid for, or give cash for this stuff called money that they have left behind? Will it be the King or the Emperor?" some haggard man or woman, reckless with despair and misery, would demand with frantic gestures. "And how shall we feed our children when they leave us nothing? How live at all when they live upon us?"
They asked this less often when the Flag with the Geneva Cross appeared above roofs and thrust out of windows of buildings appropriated as hospitals, and when long trains of German ambulance-wagons and hay-carts full of wounded men in blue uniforms began to pass by, as well as piteous processions of French wounded and French prisoners....
"You see, they die!" they presently began to tell each other. "Frenchmen are being killed like flies out yonder where you hear the cannon, but not Frenchmen only. These too, die.... MacMahon has failed us and the cursed Emperor has run away for fear of Bismarck, and Bazaine may prove a rotten staff for France to lean on. But if our generals have forgotten how to lead, the Army of France has not forgotten how to fight, and thousands upon thousands of Prussians have been killed since the beginning of the War. They dig their great trenches so quickly and bury the slain in such haste that the greatness of their losses will never be really known. When they would hide them more completely, they heap up corpses in farmers' barns, and pile the farmers' straw and hay and faggots about them, and pour on petroleum and tar and set fire to it—and thus their dead are consumed to ashes—and sometimes the yet living with the dead!"
As at Paris, spy-fever raged in cities, towns and villages, while the armies of the invader plowed bleeding furrows in the flank of prostrate France. For the Prussian Secret Intelligence Department had its emissaries everywhere. Hotels, public bureaus, railway stations, shops, offices, even clubs, had harbored them unknowingly. Now they cropped up on all sides, speaking French with the Gallic accent, their German brains full of neatly pigeon-holed and docketed information, ready to place themselves at the disposal of their friends. Hence, patriotic Frenchmen, favored by chance or heredity with blue eyes, fair hair, ruddy complexions and the advantage as to inches over their neighbors, found themselves cold-shouldered by their intimates and subjected to unpleasantly suspicious scrutiny when consuming refreshment in cafés and restaurants, or strolling with their acquaintances on public boulevards.
English artists attached to illustrated newspapers, special correspondents, handicapped by blonde whiskers and an imperfect acquaintance with the French language, found themselves in many a tight place. "Mort aux espions!" is not a cheering cry when some thousands of red-hot throats are uttering it, and half a dozen soldiers or gendarmes form the only barrier between the unlucky suspects and the furious mob.