"And knew they, the shining stars above me,
Of the bitterness of my woe,
They would come down and bid her love me,
Pleading: 'Ah! do not scorn him so!'"
XLVII
Rumor had it that the King, the Chancellor, Roon, the Royal Staff, and the Tinsel Rabble, with the escort of red, blue, and green Hussars, Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans, had ridden toward Flavigny.
The Warlock placidly followed, traversing the battlefield near Rezonville. Here bearer-parties of the German Ambulance Service, with Red Cross helpers, Knights of St. John, volunteers and French and German surgeons wearing the Geneva badge, were now arriving; and some progress had already been made in the gigantic task of separating the wounded from the dead.
The Iron Chancellor was found here, attended by his shadow, Bismarck-Böhlen, sometimes dubbed "The Little Cousin," other whiles "The Twopenny Roué," according to the humor of his powerful relative. The Minister was glancing through the morning's letters, his cousin was reading him extracts from the Daily Telegraph, a parcel of English papers having arrived. Hard by, squads of fatigue-men, aided by bloused peasants, were working to finish the second of two parallel trenches, in length some three hundred feet, near which had been collected a huge mass of French and German corpses, many half-naked, the majority of them still in uniform. Carts lumbering up with fresh loads to discharge continually, augmented the terrible mound of bodies, a huge percentage hideously displaying the effects of shell-fire, many in the initial stages of decomposition, hastened by the sweltering and oppressive heat.
Soldiers went about with huge canvas sacks, filling these with zinc identification-tags taken from the necks of their dead comrades, gathering a harvest of watches and purses, the former sometimes of such value, and the latter occasionally so well-filled with French money as to suggest that they had previously been taken from the dead.
"Ach Gott!" the perplexed officer of Pioneers in superintendence of the trenching-party kept saying: "More, more, and still more.... What is one to do with so many dead men?"
Some utterance of this kind reaching the ears of the Chancellor, he turned in his saddle and called to the officer:
"Your trench is too deep, sir, and not half wide enough. Three feet is sufficient. Lay them in as cooks dispose herrings in oil-pickle, across in layers and not singly and lengthways—labor and space will be economized thus."