Our next day's march brought us to Vitry le Francois, a walled town, built of wood. Here we crossed the Marne; the cavalry by a ford, the infantry and artillery by boats and floats; and here a singular episode occurred.
As the soldiers of the seventh battalion of Camp-Marechal Hepburn's regiment of Scots were crossing, a boat full of them overturned; a musketeer, in the confusion and dismay of the moment, grasped a woman who sat next him, believing she was his wife, and swam ashore with her. On reaching the bank, he turned joyfully to embrace her; when, lo! he found that he had saved the wife of another, and left his own, with her babe, to perish in the river, which swept most of these unfortunates away, to drown among the boats and barges, mud and slime, below the ford. The poor soldier, in the first impulse of his grief and despair, threw himself into the stream again, and being heavily armed and accoutred, sank like a stone, though the Laird of Tushielaw, one of our cuirassiers, made a brave attempt to save him.
We were now in Lorraine—the country of the enemy, and our troops began to plunder in every direction; yet we saw little fighting for some days. As for the plunder, it was the fashion of war in France.
'A little legitimate contribution,' the Chevalier Livingstone called it; 'M. le Cardinal would have us to pay for everything here, as we would in the Rue St. Honoré!'
On entering Toul, which until 1550 had been a free city of the German empire, the hundred cuirassiers were the advanced guard of the army; and here I was detailed as one of a foraging-party under the old Marechal de Logis. As the people treated us scurvily, we foraged with such enthusiasm, that with cocked pistols we ransacked bureaux and boxes, as well as barns and pantries; and some of our men realised a very pretty sum. The aspect of our Marechal de Logis, dark, weather-beaten, scaled all over in an old suit of James V.'s time, and whiskered like a seahorse, made the poor Lorrainers yield up the best of everything in the name of king Louis.
'Always take plunder and provender when they are to be had,' was his maxim; 'for in war, we know not when an evil day may come. By Jove, sirs! when I was besieged in Ulm, with old Velt-Marechal Ruthven, I ate more rats than any old tom-cat; for provisions were short, and the wine being bad, it always flew to my head; because it is an empty place, and clear of brain, you young fellows may think; but your own will be light enough when you have soldiered as long as old Patrick Gordon. Forward, my foragers!—hack and manger and spare not!'
On leaving the fertile valley, where the quaint old city of Toul clusters by the bank of the blue Moselle, surrounded by a chain of hills, that are covered to their summits by teeming vineyards, green foliage, and fertility—on leaving it, we took the road direct to Strasbourg and the Rhine, every night engirding our camp and cantonments with strong out-picquets, as we drew nearer the vicinity of the foe.
On the 16th of March, we passed close to the strongly-fortified city of Nanci, the crooked and narrow, quaint and dark streets of which stand in the centre of a beautiful plain; and we Scots thought it worth a month's pay to see old Ramsay's regiment, five thousand strong, marching through its thoroughfares in column, with all their drums and fifes making them echo to the 'East Neuk o' Fife,' the liveliest of all our quick-steps.
We had now marched two hundred and thirty miles from Paris.
The French out-picquet, on the road to our front, alarmed the whole army one night, by firing at a mysterious object which hovered before them in the dark. A party of M. de Brissac's dragoons were ordered out to patrol; but as they always required a long time to grease and blacken their boots and mustachios, Dundrennan, Home, Livingstone, and I galloped forward to ascertain the cause of alarm; and discovered an old cow, riddled with bullets, lying on the roadway. By this time the whole army were under arms, thinking the Imperialists were upon us; and there was no small amount of laughter and grumbling at those young soldiers—vieilles mustaches—who caused such a disturbance. The cow we gave to our fourrier-major, and her collops were all simmering in the camp-kettles, long before our trumpets blew à cheval again.