"I've no notion; but I'll make amends if ever he crosses my path again. It's not my way to hurt a boy."
"Bet you five bob he hails from Fleet Street," the friend had cried; and the Doctor had answered:
"If so, he has a claim on me I'm not going to deny."
Dust underfoot made the tread fall as on velvet. Dust in the air parched the throat and got in the eyes. And the incessant rolling of the Prussian side-drums, lanced through with signal whistles and sharp bugle-calls, made the hot baked atmosphere quiver, and the play of early sunshine on myriads of brass helmet-spikes made the eyes water and blink, as the battalions of blue infantry that had marched into Bingen on the previous day mustered from their billets, were entrained and conjured away; and other battalions that had marched fifteen miles since cock-crow tramped in with the thick white dust turned to mud upon them by the heavy Rhineland dews that had soaked their boots and damped their uniforms, halted but to breakfast—and were off, almost on the heels of the first.
Division after Division of Cavalry—Uhlans in light or dark blue piped with red, and shiny black Lancer schapkas, Cuirassiers in white uniforms, with steel breast and back plates, and steel helmets simple in design as those of Cromwell's Ironsides; light blue Dragoons, Hussars with tufted shakos of miniver, and braided jackets of red, black, green, brown and pale blue, with their flying batteries of Horse Artillery, their proviant columns and ammunition-trains, had been rushed to the frontier with astounding speed. Now the blue deluge of marching men with needle-guns came rolling after. With thunder of heavy siege-trains, with patches of green upon the monotonous blue, that stood for picked battalions of sharpshooters; sons of gamekeepers and forest-rangers; bred from childhood to woodcraft and hunter's lore; experts in the use of the rifle, scouts and trackers of daring and skill.
On the seventeenth of July the Warlock had said to his King, "Give me to the third of August and we are safe." This was the third of August. And the air was thick with something besides dust.
Conscious of this, they talked, the neophyte and the adept discussing things that had happened during the pregnant interval. How Forbes of the Daily News, who tramped it up to Saarbrück by the Nahe Valley Road from Kreuznach, had seen the first blood flow, when a couple of infantrymen of the garrison were brought in in a chipped condition, having been sniped at by red-breeched French marksmen across the frontier-line.
With a single battalion of the Hohenzollerns, the 7th Regiment of Rhineland Uhlans had hitherto constituted Saarbrück's garrison. And the French being reported in force at Forbach, some fifteen or sixteen thousand men being said to be strung out along the frontier, a detachment of Uhlans with spare troop-horses had ridden into Neunkirchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July, and borrowed from the collieries a dozen stout miners, armed with picks, and supplied with blasting cartridges, fuses, and so on. These grimy stalwarts they tied on troop-horses; crossed the frontier, and blew up the viaduct on the railway-line branching from the Forbach-Metz railway near Cocheren and connecting Metz with Saarguemines, Bitche, Hagenau and Strasbourg.
Thenceafter, nothing of note happened until the twenty-eighth of July, when the Emperor Napoleon III. entered Metz with his Staff and the heir to the Throne Imperial, and formally took command of the seven corps d'armée known as the "Army of the Rhine." Upon the same day, a party of the Hohenzollerns, commanded by an N.C.O., reconnoitering on the right front, flushed a French vidette, in a wood covering a knoll of rising ground, over the top of which went the imaginary frontier-line.
Being shot at, the Hohenzollerns retired to garrison. But about regimental soup-time, twelve or thereabouts, a battery of six French field-pieces came over the slope of the Spicherenberg heights, getting into position on a plateau half-way down.