No one listened to the little colloquy; some of the Sisters were already stooping beside the prone bodies, two of them were helping the vocal Cuirassier into a cart....
With a great longing P. C. Breagh had longed to make the ridge south of Flavigny, and see with his own eyes how the Man of Iron comported himself in the clash of war. And to stay behind and forego the possibility cost him poignant anguish, but one could not leave the Superior and the Sisters to dabble unaided in that ghastly ravine.
"I will stay, Reverend Mother," he said, with a bow that might have been more clumsy. Next moment Brotherton's property had vanished into a huge pocket hidden somewhere in the black habit. The nun clapped her hands, crying to the peasants:
"Thanks! thanks! Come, Antoine, Pichegru, Eloi, Bénoit! Dubois! To the wood, my friends! and the hollow, where are many sufferers! I place you under the orders of this English Monsieur."
XLIV
Upon that battlefield of Gravelotte, France, driven to bay, fought like a royal tigress. How many times the dark blue Divisions were thrown back in their assault upon positions zoned with death-bellowing cannon and death-barking mitrailleuses, History relates. So murderous was the fire of her chassepotiers from their densely manned rifle-pits that you could trace Moltke's plans of assault in mounds of dead Uhlan cavalry and long regular swathes of motionless blue objects that had been Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz....
Yet if the Warlock had said within himself, "This shall be above all a battle of cavalry," it would seem as though the determination had been formed upon the other side.
For this day that saw the death-charge of Von Bredow's brigade upon the Gorze Road—Uhlans, White Cuirassiers, and Dragoons of the Guard hurled in a solid column of shining steel against French field-batteries and battalions of riflemen—also saw the cavalry of Frossard, of Ladmirault, and Canrobert ride down whole squares of German infantry, who rose again and poured in volleys from their needle-guns, to be beaten down by the storms of leaden hail ground out by the mitrailleuse.
A glowing, coppery sun looked down on those six square miles of fiercely contested ground. Over its whole expanse there was not one patch as big as a National School playground without its débris of arms and accouterments, its ghastly or ludicrous tokens of war.