“Did not I say that I prescribed knowledge, Madame?” he cried, pointing joyfully with his lean finger to the spectacle below; “and here is the medicine. Look well at it, for you will never see its like. The army of France—it is there. The glory of France—it is there also. You cannot understand that, my child, you who are not a Frenchwoman. You do not know why an old man’s cheeks are red. Ma foi—that I must sit here—I, whose father was at Jena.”
She did not hear him. There was a hard expression upon her face very foreign to it.
“Where is the cavalry?” she asked. “Where is Edmond?”
He pointed southward to a thicket distant from them a mile or more.
“Lartigue is there with the eighth and ninth cuirassiers and two squadrons of the lancers. Your husband is with him, be sure of it. He could not find a safer place. There will be nothing for him to do to-day. Look how those black fellows run. Ma foi!—they are crossing the river again—those that have the legs. They fall like the trees—I count fifty. Ah, what a thing to tell your children, Madame, that the Prussians ran at Wörth.”
She had been looking at the wood wherein the lancers stood, but now she turned, and down at the valley’s heart the spectacle rewarded her. A great veil of smoke was lifted from the mill in the marsh, and beneath it she beheld the red and blue line advancing and still advancing, while black figures were seen to stumble and to fall, and the roar of the guns upon the height was as a crash of doom. A surpassing joy of the glory of France came to her. These men who advanced with terrible cries and bayonets brandished, they were driving the enemy from the place where Edmond stood. She cared not that dead and dying lay in their path. The faint cries of ultimate agony which were heard at the watching place were nothing to her. Edmond was not there. The victory was being won. He would come back to her.
Old Jules Picard talked always, but she did not listen to him. The wavering lines, retreating, advancing, fascinated her beyond any spectacle she had ever beheld. A battery of artillery, crashing through the wood behind them, seemed a new tribute to the glory of her new country. She did not quail when the guns belched flame and the shot hurtled toward the distant hills. The answering note from the German guns beyond the Sauer inspired her to an emotion as of defiance. A shell of theirs cutting the branches of a tree and sending a shower of brown leaves upon her pony left her with flaming cheeks and laughter in her eyes.
“They run away—they run from Wörth,” she cried delightedly, “and they are firing at us! Is it not splendid, Monsieur Picard? Do you not understand now why men can say that war is a noble thing? Oh, I do. If one could remember the children and the homes of France and forget everything else. Who could be a coward then?”
She sat with glistening eyes and fast-beating heart, and he applauded her.