"And when in addition, the unlucky horsemen are charged as at Wörth, over hop-poles and tree-stumps, open field-drains and shattered garden walls," said the Minister, "then they are worse than useless, I should add."
The Warlock's thin-lipped mouth opened in a silent laugh that creased his lean cheeks and displayed the gums that were all but toothless. He rubbed his hairless chin and said:
"Ay, unless from the point of view of that farmer of Schleswig-Holstein who said as our troops marched by his barn-yard: 'Let us look on them as manure for next year's wheat!'"
The Iron Chancellor's blue eyes hardened with sudden anger. Imagine him in his great muddy jack-boots, with cord breeches not innocent of clay and soil, the black double-breasted frock with pewter buttons and yellow collar and cuff-facings, the white cap with the yellow band and the long, heavy, steel-hilted cavalry sword, puffing at a giant cigar as he stood on the doorsteps of the Mairie, over whose door drooped the Prussian flag, and the white Hohenzollern pennon with the Black Eagle and the gold blazoning, showing, like the bodyguard of Red Dragoons and White Cuirassiers, the numerous orderlies, and the double cordon of sentries placed about the building, that there lodged the King. While the Red Prince's headquarters were distinguished in similar fashion at the National Bank of France.
"I have not forgotten!" The response came in Bismarck's grimmest vein of humor. "Nor has the rascal either, if he happens to be alive still. Our infantry taught him very thoroughly that there are more uses than one for a bundle of straw."
"Some of our German Princes have mastered that lesson quite recently, Excellency," said Count Paul Hatzfeldt, First Secretary of the ambulatory Foreign Office, turning a handsome, humorous face upon his Chief. "The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg slept in a barn at the last halting-place, and Prince Leopold of Bavaria in a loft over a stable yard, where, as he explained afterward, there were not only mice, but rats!"
"I understand His Excellency to refer," said Moltke, taking a pinch of stuff, "to the Polish method of flogging, which is to tie a man face-downward on a truss and thrash him to a jelly with green birch-rods."
"Precisely. Only not having birch rods 'convenient' as Lever's Irishmen would say," returned the Chancellor, "our fellows used their belts—buckle-end preferably. Then they pitched the farmer on his own dunghill, and left him to rot there for the land in spring."
"Severe, but severe lessons are best remembered," said the Warlock, placidly. "Thus MacMahon will perhaps throw no more regiments of cavalry away! As for ourselves, we have hardly brought that arm of the Service to its present condition of usefulness to handle it wastefully. Military science—true military science—does not allow of undue extravagance in the sentient material of war. Nay,—it will never be said of me that I wasted blood prodigally!" He curved his long thin hand about his large and beautifully shaped ear, and added, as the distant detonations of heavy artillery made the windows rattle in their sashes and the pavement quake underfoot. "They are still fighting south and west of Metz. In half an hour, if the firing has not abated, I am going to ride in that direction with the King."
He glanced at his chronometer, then went down the side steps, and strolled, contentedly smoking, to where his own charger and his master's were waiting in charge of some orderlies near the Royal carriages and fourgons that occupied the center of the Market Place. While Count Hatzfeldt, glancing after the thin figure, shrugged and said to his Chief in an undertone: