These breasting hills, these deep-cupped valleys walled and ramparted with wood-crested hill-ranges, cut up the honest battle into a dozen skirmishes. Oh! for an open, campaign and a vantage on some breezy hill-top whence one might see, as the King was seeing with Moltke and his Chancellor from the ridge above Flavigny!
XLIII
The ridge above Flavigny seemed farther off and more inaccessible than the Great Atlas. One must get off the highroad to some elevated bit of ground, consult the Doctor's map, and use the Chancellor's binoculars. Here was a broad track, green with grass grown over ancient wheel-ruts, leading off upon the left near the crest of the hill.
The grass-road led to a stone quarry evidently long abandoned. Skirting the quarry, P. C. Breagh began to climb the grassy scarp of the hill. It grew steeper, and presently he awakened to the difficulties of mountaineering with a velocipede, and hid away, with the intention of retrieving it later, his stolen giant-wheel in a clump of whins. Alas! its bones, like those of many a sentient charger, were to rust in rains and blister in suns upon that hillside of the Meurthe Department for many and many a year.
But not knowing this, P. C. Breagh continued climbing. The ridgy backbone of turf-jacketed rock proved a natural buttress rising to a towering platform sparsely grassed, tufted with thorn and furze-bushes, stunted pines and dwarfy oak-trees, all mossy of stem and bending to the southwest.
The afternoon sunshine was mellow rather than hot. The pure dustless air was fragrant with hill-thyme and the meadow-sweet. The autumn-tinted woods were golden, the hills hathed in clear blue air. The short herbage clothing the steep was warm, smelling like the clean hide of some great grass-feeding animal. But for the restless bickering of trumpets and bugles, and the hellish noise that men with guns were making, it would have been sweet to be upon the hillside alone with God.
There was a great view from the summit of the colossal limestone.... You could see that bone of contention, the road leading to Verdun, stretching away southwestward, a dusty-white ribbon between its lines of whitening poplars, over the tops of three thick patches of rusty-golden woodland, and the bushy uplands above Gravelotte and the church spire of Vernéville.
Dark blue Prussian columns showed on the grassy slopes traversed by the road that ran from Ars to Bagneux. Near the Quarries of Rezerieulles was a huge French battery served by red-legged artillerymen, who ran about like ants. But one could only guess at the fact that Germany and the Bad Neighbor were locked in the death-grips over six miles square of battle-ground, the breasting plumps of trees and towering bush-clad ridges hid so much away.
Ah! but the din was hellish! The woods vomited fire. White balloons that meant shrapnel-shells described arcs against the hot blue sky, crossing and recrossing between Rezonville and Gravelotte. When they fell upon the slippery grass slopes they exploded with fearful crashes, or became black balls that rolled merrily a while and then lay quiet. In the grass near them were shapeless lumps and masses, red and blue, and dark blue; and things with stiff legs sticking up grotesquely,—the human and equine débris of the morning's fighting and the battle of the previous day. The soft westerly breeze brought an ugly taint upon it—less loathsome, but more horrible than the stench coming from the huge crowded camps of French about St. Quentin and Plappeville and Les Carrières and St. Eloy.