The command came to the woods when the Prussians were already in the outstanding thickets. Lefort heard it, and scarce believed his ears. They were to charge then! They must drive those spiked helmets from the vineyards or their own right would be turned. He rode up to his troops and spoke a good word of encouragement. It was odd to draw his sword for the first time in earnest and to know that he must kill wherever the enemies of France were to be seen. The danger of the charge was never in his thoughts. It was dreadful ground; the obstacles were many—but for this day all his life had been the school.
“We go to save our comrades down yonder,” he said. “You will win honour for us, mes enfants—for me and for France. You will remember our fathers who fought at Jena!”
Ringing cheers greeted his words. At last, at last, the weary hours of waiting were done with. The woods quickened to the awakening impulses. A fever of excitement lighted eyes dull and savage with delay. The breastplates of the cuirassiers glittered as the golden shields of a mighty host, moving apace in the sunshine. En avant! En avant! The bugle’s blast was as some call to judgment and to victory. Onward—if to death, it mattered not. Onward—it was good to be out there where the bullets fell as hail and the shells dug graves for the living. Onward—for the sake of France, if you wished it so; for the sake of movement and of life, as the dull truth went.
In columns of squadrons, the eighth cuirassiers leading, the ninth following, the lancers last of all, General Michel led his brigade through the stubble of the wood to the steeper slopes beyond it. From shadow they passed to the glare of the fuller day. Whatever quaking hearts the white tunics covered, no sign there was of hesitation or of delay. The troopers were to charge those Prussians and to send them back across the river. Prayer, death, the morrow—Lefort himself had no thought for any of them. He seemed to pass through some door to a mighty amphitheatre beyond. The thunder of battle crashed in his ears. His horse stumbled over the terrible ground, leaped the trenches, snorted with the delight of it—yet never faltered. Hills and valleys, crested helmets, golden trappings, houses aflame, rivers glistening in the sun’s rays—he saw them all as things far off. The very danger was a delight inexplicable. Down and yet down into the very pit of death. Onward—over the living and the dead.
As the slopes became steeper, so the ferocity of that death-ride was the greater. Men and horses fell together in blinding clouds of dust. Troopers hung limp from their stirrups; blood gushed from their mouths and ears. Or stiff figures, with swords upraised, sat rigidly in their saddles, where Death had chained them sardonically. The trail they left was a trail of mangled beasts and men—a trail of glittering cuirasses and battered helmets and bloody shapes. The living knew nothing of it. They swept on in a delirium of slaughter. “For France,” they said. Yet France was far from their thoughts. Life—for that their hunger was.
Out into the sunny fields, over the ripened crops, into the mazes of the vineyards, downward always toward the shimmering river and the valley’s heart. The Prussians heard their cheers and answered them with rifles at their shoulders and bayonets fixed. Coiled as black snakes behind every sheltering furrow or outstanding ridge, they were there to prove that the glorious cavalry of France was invincible no more. It mattered not that lances cleaved the hearts of some; that swords struck upturned faces; that screams of pain and rage followed the horses’ path. The rifle would avenge their comrades. The mighty human cataract pouring about them did not envelop or dismay them. Even the coward forgot his cowardice and struck a blow for his very life. The lowliest trooper among them remembered the General’s word, “I must do my duty.” Behind him lay the Fatherland. The cities of France were beyond the hills—the goal of victory and of duty vindicated.
Into the death-pit Lefort rode; sword in hand, a cry that was almost incoherent upon his lips. He saw the shimmer of the light, the burning houses, the black figures in the grass; but of his own acts he carried no memory. Once he remembered asking himself what Beatrix was doing at that moment—but all thoughts of her were far from him when, at length, the woods were passed and the great shock of encounter fired his very heart with all the impulse of deed and of desire. To slay! He had no other wish but that. To slash the life from the upturned faces, to hack and cut, to strike a good blow for France, to avenge the dead upon the hills. Bayonets glistened at his very breast, the smoke of the rifles enveloped him, the acrid taste of gunpowder was in his mouth always. He knew not what power enabled him to ignore these things. A madness of the death-ride possessed him. The thunder of his horse’s hoofs was as a melody recurring again and again or singing in his ears defiantly. He was aware that half his men lay dead on the slopes behind him; he understood that General Michel’s great attack had failed and that the chosen cavalry of France had been annihilated that day. But still he rode on. There was neither wish nor thought to regain the shelter of his own camp. The Prussians lay before him. His way lay there to the guns upon the heights. Fatigue intolerable could not tighten his hand upon the rein. He had no longer the power to lift his sword.
When the sun set, a regiment of Prussian hussars, riding through the hills of Baden, found him alone upon the road, far from Wörth and the battle there. He sat with haggard face and dizzy head and tears upon his cheeks beside the horse which never more would hear his voice or stretch its neck at his caress.