"The final scenes of melodrama are always the most strenuous. Your Majesty must regard the ridge over Flavigny as your Royal box on the Grand Tier, the occasion as a farewell performance of the French Empire—played for the benefit of United Germany, before the whole world!"
Flavigny was a village.... But the flickering black-and-white pennons that tipped the dust-cloud ahead were slowing.... Three battalions of infantry, each with its band playing gaily at its head, the bronzed, healthy-looking, white-powdered men marching eight abreast, had halted and front-faced as the word of command followed the sound of the Great Staff trumpeter:
"Clear the way! Clear the way! Here comes the King!"
And now the scorching air vibrated with their vigorous cheering as the King cantered by and was gone with a shout and a wave of the hand.
"Our old one takes dust and sun, saddle-blisters and short commons like any old trooper!" P. C. Breagh heard a Lieutenant say to a subaltern as the dusty ranks half-wheeled and fell into step once more. "He's a precisian too.... Zum Beispiel, he called to a man in Vidler's company that he had got his 'needler' on the wrong shoulder. Now that's another thing I like in the old man!..."
"The Field Marshal is taking the Great Headquarters to where it will be hellishly risky," a Captain with Staff shoulder-cords was saying to another, as a new outbreak of cannon and mitrailleuse-fire caused his horse to start and rear. He added: "They were hard at it at Mars la Tour, Vionville and Rezonville all day yesterday: the 5th Division were in action all round Moltke as he stood on the high ridge above Flavigny.... To-day our 7th and 10th are fighting between Gravelotte and St. Hubert, where the French have the devil's own array of battery-emplacements and rifle-pits—our guards are at Doncourt, our 9th and 8th corps are at Verneville and Amanvilliers. Now the fighting seems to have rolled down nearer the river. I have certainly heard cavalry trumpets sounding the charge, and volleys of musketry—French, I judge!—coming from that direction. I should judge that...."
"Bazaine must have turned the handle in too much of a hurry!" retorted the junior, who enjoyed a regimental reputation for humor, and a volley of laughter rattled along the marching files, now breasting a steep and gravelly hill, half-way up which the rider of the giant-wheeled velocipede had been compelled to dismount.
P. C. Breagh had seen, reproduced from the Charivari in all the German illustrated papers, the famous caricature of Cham, over which King Wilhelm's brown-faced infantrymen were grinning as they climbed the hill. Who does not remember the Count de Noë's memorable presentment of the field of war dotted with defunct Prussians, and the French mitrailleuse-gunner in the foreground who exclaims in astonishment: "Sapristi! the battle is over. I must have turned the handle too fast!"
But more than the sardonic jest of Cham, the Captain's reference to the nearness of a possible action interested the would-be spectator of a battlefield. The wiry, sun-bronzed young man in the broken boots and the dusty brown Norfolk jacket, now pushing the solid-tired giant-wheel up a steep and lung-testing hill which the bearers of the needle-gun took in a canter, had seen war-casualties in appalling numbers, but he had not yet beheld War.
And now sharp bugles and piercing trumpets were clamoring of War all round one. The musketry that one could hear at Pont à Mousson clattered in volleys among the neighboring hills. The deep booming of heavy field-batteries persistently answered. Every now and then the ear was violently assaulted by the hideous hyena-yapping of the mitrailleuse.