The idea grew, and he sat up to review its possibilities. Something soft and feathery brushed past his ear as he stirred. An owlet, most likely, yet I prefer to believe that it may have been the wing of Inspiration, touching the head destined to be crowned by Fame.
"Pages from the Diary of 'Bang,' the Battalion Dog." That should be the title, or simply, "The Story of 'Bang.'" "Short and to the point," he heard Mr. Knewbit saying. And Knewbit ...
Here was day! ...
Reveille after reveille sounded, shattering his train of thought, waking the hilly echoes. Under how strange a sky the bugles clamored, the bivouac stopped snoring; men sat up on dew-wet cloaks and rubbed their eyes.
The cup of heaven was red as though brimmed with blood new-drained from the veins of heroes. In the leftward hemisphere looking East, Ursa Major swam in blood, blazing with white-hot fierceness. On the ensanguined South the Dog cowered as though in terror. And like a skeleton arm, the Milky Way pointed over the blood-dabbled hill-crests and the blood-tipped pine-groves from the south-east, West....
Men's faces and hands were crimsoned by reflections cast from that portentous sunrise, the dew-wet grasses were dyed the same hue.
They broke their fast on their black bread washed down with bitter black coffee. In the pause that followed the roll-call, a voice spoke. And amid deafening cheers the news sprang from bearded lip to lip.
"Lucky is the standard that flies over the first-fought field!" says the proverb.
How those Teutons marched, that day of rain-pelts and thunderstorms, upheld by their first draft of the strong wine of Success!
At Mayence, Moltke had commented to his Sovereign, with his keen old eyes twinkling with joy: