In an intermittent lull of the racket you could hear the dry earth, that had been pounded bare of verdure, sucking moisture as though after heavy rain. Only the rain was red. The faint, sour smell of it came to the nostrils mingled with the smell of burnt gunpowder, human and equine exhalations, and the acrid stifle of burning wood.
For Flavigny was yet smouldering, the farm-buildings at Gorze were burning, Malmaison was a furnace; houses and barns at Verneville were wrapped in clouds of black smoke shot with lurid flame.
Exhausted battalions, sick and stupefied with slaughter, were lying down among the dead and the wounded to snatch a wink of sleep. Others opened their haversacks to snatch a hasty mouthful, or drained their canteens of the last drop. Surgeons were going up and down among them, patching up flesh-cuts with lint and diachylon, temporarily plugging bullet-wounds of the minor order. "There!" they would say to the Schmidt, Kunz, or Schultz so treated; "now you are fit for fighting again!"
Perhaps you can see the Man of Iron in his white Cuirassier cap, black undress frock with the pewter buttons, and great steel-spurred jack-boots, standing, grim-jawed and inscrutable, behind his King's camp-chair. Through the stress and storm of two long days of hot fighting, that patch of high ground south of Flavigny had been the point to which orderlies and aides-de-camp furiously galloped from every point of the compass, and from which they galloped back in even more desperate haste.
In the rear of the camp-chair, not so close to it as to draw fire, were the King's personal military staff, a bevy of Princes, and the representative of the British War Office, Colonel ——. Several Councillors and Secretaries of the Chancellor's traveling Foreign Office stood about, stout, gray-haired, important-looking persons in semi-military uniform. The carriages that had conveyed them waited at Tronville. The King's charger and those of the other great personages were in the care of orderlies. The Escort waited by their horses in the background.
Moltke stood apart, taciturn and inscrutable, nursing his thin elbow and cupping his long chin. Roon, who contrary to his custom was not wearing his helmet, gloomily champed his cap-strap, unable to disguise his anguish of anxiety. He would have given a year of life to say:
"Old man, so cool in the midst of this hellish slaughter, can it be that you do not know how things really are going? Since two of the clock the French have had the best of it! The chassepot you termed a 'magnificent weapon' has justified your eulogism. The mitrailleuse we despised, not comprehending its terrible capabilities, has revealed them to our undoing. The Army of United Germany bleeds at every pore!"
He tore his mustache, the dye upon which had not been renewed recently. His heart swelled with the flood of pent-up speech.
"The Commander-in-Chief's dispatches to the Queen have been cheered in Berlin. Throughout Germany they are hailed with joy.... 'France now fights with her back to the Rhine,' the people say. 'Our Army stands arrayed between Bazaine and Paris!' Is it possible they do not realize that the situation is critical? Have they no suspicion that the tables might be turned?"
He wrung his knotted hands together in torment, and the sweat started in gouts upon his livid skin.