“The Prussians are in the town; the hussars are at Gunstett—for God’s sake come quickly, Captain—the battle is to-day!”
“‘The Prussians are in the town!’”
BOOK II
Battle
CHAPTER XII
THE BLOOD-RED DAY OF WÖRTH
A figure as of the blood-red day seemed to pass through the sleeping woods and to awaken them with a voice that terrified and a command which quickened the laggard’s heart. Above the murmur of leaves and the babbling of the brooks the cry “Aux armes!” brought men staggering to their feet from the stupor of dreams now broken, from victories, perchance, that sleep had numbered. There was still the shivering woodland life, the dark places of the thickets, the merry splash of streams, the note of birds; but these were things apart. The herald of the breaking day had breathed upon the passions of those who slept; the rising sun shone upon the faces of fifty thousand whose pulses quickened already with the ferocity of combat. As fire leaping from brake to brake and dell to dell, that spirit of the battle moved. Children ran from it to their homes as before the outposts of a spectre army. Women pressed babes to their breasts and prayed to the saints. From the height of Froeschweiler in the north to the marshy brookland by Gunstett in the south that thunder of the new day rolled. To arms! The very sky, in changing lights of crimson and of purple and of grey-black cloud, gave canopies of storm to the tumult that it looked upon.
To Beatrix, standing at the gate of the châlet as the night merged into day, the torrent of sounds was as some cataclysm which swept away all thought of self, of her own life and her own safety. She saw the things about her; she beheld men running wildly through the woods; she could have touched the mud-stained horses of the cuirassiers; the dark faces of the Africans looked into her own; the swinging, impetuous march of infantry delighted her—yet the meaning of these things, the reality of it all, the import of it was not realised. There stood her own little house with its girdle of tree and thicket; there below were the vineyards and the rivers. War and battle must be something far distant from the homes of these children that she knew. And Edmond! The jeopardy of her husband’s life she dared not contemplate. An irony of fate which had given her this good measure of happiness that she might suffer through the years was not to be believed in.