'For your own, rather. Whether you believe in such things or not, it will do you no harm to wear it.'
'Très bon, my child!' said the old gentleman; 'but Monsieur has a cross already,' he added, patting the iron one at the breast of Charlie's blue tunic.
'And now I must go,' said he, putting on his helmet; 'there sounds the trumpet again.'
As he bade them adieu and left them, the French girl, with a quick pretty action, flicked some holy water in his face from a Dresden china font that hung inside the door of the dining-room, and the glittering drops fell on his moustache and silver gorget, which the Prussians still wear, or at least wore then; and father and daughter stood sadly in the porch, looking after their protector as he marched off at the head of his men, for Charlie, though a thorough English gentleman, was, as some say, 'the soldier all over, but the soldier adventurer—the soldier of fortune, rather than the soldier of routine.'
Charlie, we fear, and are ashamed to admit it, did not pray often. 'It wasn't much in his line; besides, what was the Herr Pastor paid for?' but as he marched back to headquarters on the Bellecroix road, at the head of his picket, he prayed in his heart that no harm—no perils, such as those of last night—might ever again menace that frank, engaging, and innocent young girl at the Chateau de Caillé.
But he had not seen the last of that old mansion.
By this time, a considerable portion of the German army had penetrated so far to the west and north-west of Metz, as to be almost already between Marshal Bazaine and Paris! The line of the invading forces was thus so greatly extended that the French generalissimo dared not make any offensive movement against them, but was compelled to retreat along the highways that led from Gravelotte to Verdun.
Charlie had barely rejoined his regiment, and exchanged a few words with Heinrich, Schönforst, and other friends, when the order came for the line to advance, as the French were in position at Vionville, covering the whole southern road to Verdun, with a front extending to the village of Gorz, eight miles south-west of Metz; and in their martial ardour to meet the enemy, many of the Thuringians, as the march forward began, struck up the fine war-song of Arndt.
In the ranks of this regiment, as in others of the Prussian army, were many well-born and gently nurtured young men, bred to professions or businesses, and who could speak several languages, and take their place in good society, but were dragged away from their avocation, hearth, and home, by the Prussian military system. There were others, again, grey, brown, and hardy men, who could digest sutler's beef and eat such ammunition bread as the Kaiser's commissariat supplied, sleep in their spike-helmets as soundly as in a velvet night-cap, feel, by a bivouac fire, as comfortable as if in the Grand Hotel at Cologne, and march to be maimed or massacred, to wound and to slay, with genuine Teutonic taciturnity and phlegm.
The battle of the day began on some wooded hills above the pretty red-tiled village of Gorz, near a pleasant stream that meanders between fields and beautiful coppices from Mars-la-Tour to the Moselle.