XXXVIII
The watch was set at nine o'clock. Then the "Lie Down" sounded far and near, and the moon stared down on rows of prone men wrapped in their greatcoats and pillowed on their knapsacks, stretching away under the pansy-dark canopy of heaven for miles.
The officers sat for some time longer, drinking their Rhine wine and playing cards by moonshine and lantern-light, or strolling, cigar in mouth, upon the outskirts of the bivouac. Several Artillery-officers, who had supped with them, went back to their own bivouac after voluble leave-takings. Infantry-officers, who had shared the hospitality of the gunners, returned, enlivening the night with, scraps of gossip, and more or less melodious song.
A couple of these late-comers halted on the outskirts of the cordon of sentries to finish a confidential conversation. The moon was obscured by clouds, the bivouac was swathed in shadow. Of the lumpy boulder by which the Adjutant stood, only its shape could be discerned against the dusty-pale grass by the dust-white road.
Said the Adjutant to the senior Captain, and the excellent cigar he was smoking smelt pleasantly in the dark:
"One can't call yesterday's a big battle, but at the same time it was a tolerably serious engagement."
The senior Captain snorted.
"Donnerwetter! one would think so. Nearly fifteen hundred prisoners, and Douay's Division obliged to abandon its camp and baggage. The Crown Prince has begun well—one expected no less!"
Said the Adjutant:
"I shall advise the Herr Colonel to announce the news to the regiment at roll-call to-morrow. It will make a good moral impression upon those who are new to Active Service, when they realize that the French have been trounced."
Then they were silent a moment, but one felt that both were crowing.
We know what had happened. Before midday the Crown Prince had pounded Douay's Division into brickbats, the brave General himself was dead, the town of Wissembourg had fallen; by two o'clock the mitrailleuse-batteries on the Geisburg had been silenced, and the Chateau stormed and won.
The men of the Imperial Army in Alsace had fought magnificently. Red-capped, swarthy Turcos in baggy white breeches, Zouaves and French infantrymen, light blue Bavarian and dark blue Prussian uniforms, with what had been brave men inside them, lay scattered among the hop-gardens and vineyards on the mountain-side.
Of these no doubt the Adjutant was thinking when he threw away his cigar-butt and said, with a sigh and an oath together:
"Kreuzdonnerwetter! one does not win victories for nothing. It must have been a bloody fight, and especially in the streets; you understand me? The French fired from the windows, and from the roofs of the houses.... There was a terrible struggle at the point of the bayonet, and both sides used the butt—liberally!"
"The butt may be brutal," commented the senior Captain, clearing his throat and expectorating copiously; "but all the same it is a hellishly useful thing!"
"Why leave your enemy brains when he may live to plan your defeat by the use of them?" agreed the Adjutant. The scabbard of his sword clinked, as he moved, against the boulder, and the sound made an eavesdropper go goose-fleshy all over, as he lay prone among dry bents and bracken in the blackness on the farther side. Then he heard the Captain ask:
"Did the Crown Prince continue the advance to-day?" and strained his ears for the Staff officer's reply.
"Undoubtedly! Moltke's telegram from the King's Headquarters at Mainz ran: 'Seek out and fight the enemy wherever you may find him,' and Marshal MacMahon is said to be concentrating all his force on a high plateau between Froeschwiller and Eberbach, west of the Sauer and the Sulz. The bridges have been broken—his position is an exceptionally strong one.... Of course you know the kind of ground!"
"Open ground," snorted the Captain, "over which an assailant must pass to get at him. Sapperlot! don't I wish I'd had the chance to-day!"
"You are too greedy, Scheren," joked the Adjutant. "Ts't! What was that?"
Both men were silent, intently listening. For the eavesdropper, titillated to madness by a spear of seed-grass that had thrust up a nostril, had given a smothered sneeze. Now on the point of discovery, he found presence of mind sufficient to repeat the sneeze, panting doggishly, whining and scratching among the fern....
The ruse was successful. The Adjutant said, laughingly:
"It's a dog, nosing at a rat or rabbit-hole. Under-Lieutenant Brand's terrier 'Nagler,' perhaps."
"Hie, then, boy!"
"Here, Nagler!"
The Captain whistled, the other man advised indifferently:
"Let the brute alone—perhaps the rabbit's a French one!" He added, "It would be amusing to read a dog's Impressions of the campaign. What time is it? 'Ten!' Very well, I shall go and turn in. You'll do the same thing if you'll take my advice."
The Captain grunted assent, and the two officers clanked away together, while P. C. Breagh noiselessly collected his venerable waterproof, his water-bottle, and knapsack, and departed in search of a more distant sleeping-place.
But when he found it in a dry ditch a quarter-of-a-mile below the Mounted Artillery bivouac, and stretched himself out to sleep, he could not.... His head rang with the news that would presently thrill the civilized world.
First blood to Germany.... Did the Doctor know? ...
That genial little gentleman had prophesied accurately. The "meaty bone" of early and accurate information had fallen to the "tyke at the tail of the Army Corps." While the prophet, delayed by pumped-out horses and recalcitrant grooms, at the Lion Inn of Neustadt, knew no more than that the heir to the Prussian Crown was over the frontier, and was reported to have taken Wissembourg from the French.
That dry ditch accommodated a complacent lodger. His misgivings banished by one stroke of fortune, P. C. Breagh brooded sleeplessly over the Koh-i-noor that had fallen to him.... Though, to hold such a jewel and know oneself impotent to use it, that was the verjuice mingled in the cup of bliss.
Without funds for telegraphing—an Editor to print one's letters—and a public ready to read, what was the use of information? Stop! What was that the more authoritative of the two officers had said?—the one who had given the news to the other man? "It would be amusing to read a dog's impressions of the campaign! ..."
Would it? Such a dog, perhaps, as the mongrel that had joined the green-jacketed Saxon infantry regiment at Bingen. The cur the compassionate soldier had christened "Bang." Lying on his back, pillowed on his knapsack, staring at the waning moon, the boy pondered. Suppose one wrote one's letters to Knewbit in the assumed character of Bang?
The idea grew, and he sat up to review its possibilities. Something soft and feathery brushed past his ear as he stirred. An owlet, most likely, yet I prefer to believe that it may have been the wing of Inspiration, touching the head destined to be crowned by Fame.
"Pages from the Diary of 'Bang,' the Battalion Dog." That should be the title, or simply, "The Story of 'Bang.'" "Short and to the point," he heard Mr. Knewbit saying. And Knewbit ...
Here was day! ...
Reveille after reveille sounded, shattering his train of thought, waking the hilly echoes. Under how strange a sky the bugles clamored, the bivouac stopped snoring; men sat up on dew-wet cloaks and rubbed their eyes.
The cup of heaven was red as though brimmed with blood new-drained from the veins of heroes. In the leftward hemisphere looking East, Ursa Major swam in blood, blazing with white-hot fierceness. On the ensanguined South the Dog cowered as though in terror. And like a skeleton arm, the Milky Way pointed over the blood-dabbled hill-crests and the blood-tipped pine-groves from the south-east, West....
Men's faces and hands were crimsoned by reflections cast from that portentous sunrise, the dew-wet grasses were dyed the same hue.
They broke their fast on their black bread washed down with bitter black coffee. In the pause that followed the roll-call, a voice spoke. And amid deafening cheers the news sprang from bearded lip to lip.
"Lucky is the standard that flies over the first-fought field!" says the proverb.
How those Teutons marched, that day of rain-pelts and thunderstorms, upheld by their first draft of the strong wine of Success!
At Mayence, Moltke had commented to his Sovereign, with his keen old eyes twinkling with joy:
"Douay's troops were preparing their evening coffee when the Prince with his four Divisions appeared on the heights above Schweigen. The Red Breeches thought it was a promenade militaire in the Second Empire style, until the shells began to plop into their cooking-pots!"
"Thanks be to Heaven!" returned King William piously, "our artillery-fire has improved since the Bohemian campaign."
"All the same," returned the Warlock, shaking the wise old head cased in the auburn scratch-wig, "their musketry should do much for the French. For the chassepot is quicker in loading than our needle-gun, and spits less, which is better for the aim.... Then our needle-gun has A poor trajectory at 500 yards, and wounds rather than kills outright. While the chassepot bullet,—driven by its huge charge of powder—has a splendidly flat trajectory, And flattening out,—makes a magnificent wound! In at the chest—out at the shoulder-blades! ... The man has a hole in him you can see the landscape through!"
And he nibbed his withered hands, the old specialist in slaughter. While Bismarck said, laughing, to his cousin and military attaché:
"The enthusiast forgets that the perforated examples will be German.... Look at him! Already he begins to resemble a bird of prey. Have you read these French newspapers? The King has laughed heartily over them, but they must horribly irritate the Emperor. Listen to this, from the Constitutionnel: 'Prussia continues to insult us with impunity, when the Armies of the Empire, at a word from their Chief, might descend like three crashing avalanches upon the hosts of Germany. Why is the word not uttered? Why is the massacre—with the rout that must inevitably follow, delayed for a single hour?'" ...
The Emperor had perused the leaders, in his headquarters at the Prefecture at Metz. His eyes seemed opaque as clouded glass, his face was a puffy mask, devoid of expression, as he replied to the hinted condolences of a sycophant upon his staff.
"The opinions of these gentlemen of the Press were not solicited. They are free to criticize me, let them do so. I am not bound to divulge to them my plans."
Alas! vacillation, hesitation, and delay on the part of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief fatally clogged the movements of his magnificent Army. He did not put in an appearance with his staff at headquarters until a fortnight subsequent to the Declaration of War. A week later—and no Plan of Campaign had been issued to his generals. True, he had demolished, with field-fire, a beer-shop at Saarbrück. He had paraded on the hills with Frossard's Army Corps. He had witnessed the evacuation of the town by its tiny garrison—had withdrawn his advanced posts and gone home to Metz to dine and telegraph to Paris of the "capture of the heights" and the "short resistance of the Prussians";—to tell of the cannon-balls and bullets which fell at his own feet, and those of the Prince Imperial, "who showed admirable coolness." "Some of the soldiers wept," he adds, "beholding him so calm...."
And indeed, though one takes the soldiers' tears with a grain of salt, the spirited bearing of the boy must have cheered the sick heart of his father, and yet thrust another dagger in it, too.
Had the Imperial Commander-in-Chief any plan, one wonders.... Long after he had ceased to be Emperor, a pamphlet was published at Brussels, which is generally accepted as the work of the pen that signed the Capitulation of Sedan.
"To Marshals MacMahon and Lebœuf alone, the Emperor had entrusted his scheme of warfare. His purpose was—to mass 150,000 troops at Metz, 100,000 at Strasbourg, and 50,000 at the Camp of Châlons. The concentration of the first two armies—one on the Sarre, and the other on the Rhine—did not reveal the purpose of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief, for the enemy would be left in uncertainty as to whether the attack would be made against the Rhenish Provinces or the Duchy of Baden."
Would the Warlock have long remained in uncertainty? But hear the pamphleteer:
"As soon as the troops should have been concentrated at the points indicated, it was the Emperor's purpose to instantly unite the armies of Metz and Strasbourg; and at the head of 250,000 men, to cross the Rhine at Maxau, compel the Southern States of Germany to observe neutrality, and hasten to encounter the Army of Prussia." Later on occurs the pathetic complaint: "If one could only know beforehand exactly where the enemy was, one's plans would be easy to carry out!"
Indeed, the dispositions of Moltke were made with baffling secrecy. Even as the Heathen Chinee accommodated card-packs innumerable in his ample sleeves, so the Warlock hid the twelve Army Corps of the North German Confederation, with the Prussian Guard Corps, the Bavarian Field Army and the Württemberg and Baden Divisions, in the skirts of his military cloak.... When the moment came, the aged conjuror twitched open the garment and showed them: Steinmetz with the First Army at Treves, Prince Frederick Charles with the Second at Mayence, the Crown Prince with the Third at Landau.
When the Three Armies rolled on, the art of the strategist covered their movements with a baffling veil of cavalry. That immense, well-organized and highly mobilized arm was thrown well forward before the Germans crossed the frontier: at their first entry into France they came in contact with French troops. A day's march ahead of the Army Corps' advanced-guards, Divisions of Uhlans, Dragoons and Hussars—(in a little all were "Uhlans" to the terrified French peasants)—provided for the security of the huge infantry bivouacs behind them; made requisitions for provisions, fuel, and forage; rendered railways and telegraphs useless—scouted for the enemy's positions—took prisoner or shot dispatch-bearers and patrol-riders—harassed marches, and boldly fired into camps. Many fell in forays, or skirmishes, many were those accounted for by the long-range hitting chassepot, which was heartily detested by Prussia's mounted men.
"If I had not been called to Metz to attend an Imperial War-Council," Marshal MacMahon is reported to have said bitterly, when the news of the defeat of Wissembourg reached him, "this blow upon the south would not have fallen. My Second Division would still be left to guard the opening between the Vosges and the Rhine."
The thunder of the guns of Worth add their comment upon that utterance.
Over the head of the town, lying at the bottom of a fertile valley patched with hop-gardens and vineyards, and threaded by a river, was waged between the Marshal with 50,000 troops, the pick and flower of the French Army, and "Unser Fritz" with twice the number of men, a desperate and bloody fight.
The French on the bluffy wooded cliffs that are the foothills of the Vosges, occupied, as strategists have declared, an almost unassailable position. But the fire of the mitrailleuses was hampered by the artillery of the 2d Bavarians under Hartmann, that seasoned veteran, who had fought at Waterloo in 1815 and now led an Army Corps against France in his seventy-sixth year. Thus the Prussian infantry crossed the Sauerbach on bridges improvised of planks and hop poles; and though the chassepot proved an infinitely deadlier weapon than the needle-gun, the generalship of Von Kirchbach and Von der Tann,—in command of the Prussian 4th Division and 5th Corps, backed by a division of the 11th Corps,—forced MacMahon's hand.
Outnumbered, outflanked and disorganized, with the loss of 9,000 men killed, 5,000 taken prisoners, twenty pieces of artillery, six mitrailleuses, and two eagles, the Marshal fled by the way of Zabern, under cover of night, trailing after him the beaten remnant of the Army of Strasbourg.
The Third Army of Germany had lost 489 officers and 10,153 rank and file. Before night of the 7th the dead were buried in great trenches, the columns of the Society of the Red Cross, the Sisters of Mercy and Lutheran Deaconesses, with surgeons, volunteers, and Army ambulance-bearers, had cleared the wounded from the field.
"Ah! if we had only had this sort of thing at the Alma and at Inkerman!" a grizzled Zouave sapper growled to one of the ladies of the Red Cross. "I was wounded there—sacred name of a pipe! My belt-buckle was carried by a shell-splinter through my ceinture into my stomach. This very buckle, look you, that I wear to-day!" He added, rubbing the locality of the previous casualty: "There is nothing inside there now, because of late they have not fed us, or our chassepots. How the devil can men kill Prussians without soup in their bellies or cartridges in their guns?"
The Zouave spoke truth. It was a half-equipped and under-rationed army that had made such a splendid show at Froeschwiller. It was a starving, demoralized remnant that surged and weltered through the passes of the Vosges at MacMahon's flying heels. Cavalry on foot, Zouaves riding Artillery-horses, mitrailleuse corps without mitrailleuses, baggage-wagons crowded with men of a dozen different regiments, went clanking and jolting over the roads that were littered with discarded chassepots, bearing witness to the pitiable, ghastly disorder of the retreat.
The hour of their defeat had seen Frossard's Army Corps holding with Forton's Cavalry Brigade the heights over Saarbrück, simultaneously attacked by the 7th and 8th Corps of Unser Fritz's terrible army, and driven back in confusion and with slaughter, toward Metz.