The sun rising had found him, lean, inscrutable and silent, on the ridge above Flavigny, where he had told Prince Charles and Steinmetz, Moltke would be found that day....
He had met and primed them with the result of his calculations, had seen a fierce engagement from his coign of observation. By three noon, he was back at Pont à Mousson, had interviewed the King, dined frugally, and now stood chatting with the Iron Chancellor upon the steps of the Mairie.
Guns were muttering in the distance as they had done all day at intervals. There had been fighting, he answered mildly when questioned. Quite a considerable battle one might call it. The villages of Flavigny and Vionville were burning as he spoke.
The potato-gardens of Flauville were thick-strewn with corpses of French and German foot-soldiers. In a little, layer upon layer of dead and dying men and horses had been piled upon these. Necessity knows no law; and it had been found necessary to interpose Prussian cavalry between the French Artillery and exhausted masses of German infantry. Which accounted for a considerable thinning in the ranks of Rauch's Hussars.
The sacrifice had been necessary. He told himself so as he stood there smoking. His high forehead was quite unclouded as he returned in answer to some reference to MacMahon's losses at Wörth:
"It is one of the traditions handed down from the days of Murat and Kellerman and Lassalle—the French belief in the virtue of the massed cavalry charge...."
The Minister to whom he spoke replied:
"The English exploded the theory at Balaklava sixteen years ago, by their magnificent but useless sacrifice of Cardigan's Light Brigade. They learned then, and we have profited by the lesson that MacMahon has just been spanked for forgetting—and that Your Excellency will presently teach Bazaine...."
The great strategist cupped his long chin in his lean hand, and said in his dry, thoughtful way:
"Yes, yes. We will drub this precept into his brain at cost of his breeches. Regiments of mounted men serve admirably for the protection of marching Army Corps—are priceless for reconnaissance, outpost and patrol-work, but when they are thrown against vast bodies of troops armed with the modern breech-loader, their use is unjustifiable, being nil."