She sprang to her feet, stood a moment, then stepped swiftly forward into the angle of the tower.
“Look there!” she cried, in terror.
“Push my chair—quick!” I said. She dragged it forward.
An old house across the street, which had been on fire, had collapsed into a mere mound of slate, charred beams, and plaster. Through the brown heat which quivered above the ruins I could see out into the country. And what I saw was a line of hills, crowned with smoke, a rolling stretch of meadow below, set here and there with shot-torn trees and hop-poles; and over this uneven ground two regiments of French 82 cuirassiers and two squadrons of lancers moving slowly forward as though on parade.
Above them, around them, clouds of smoke puffed up suddenly and floated away—the shells from Prussian batteries on the heights. Long, rippling crashes broke out, belting the fields with smoky breastworks, where a Prussian infantry regiment, knee-deep in smoke, was firing on the advancing cavalry.
The cuirassiers moved on slowly, the sun a blinding sheet of fire on their armor; now and then a horse tossed his beautiful head, now and then a steel helmet turned, flashing.
Grief-stricken, I groaned aloud: “Madame, there rides the finest cavalry in the world!—to annihilation.”
How could I know that they were coming deliberately to sacrifice themselves?—that they rode with death heavy on their souls, knowing well there was no hope, understanding that they were to die to save the fragments of a beaten army?
Yet something of this I suspected, for already I saw the long, dark Prussian lines overlapping the French flank; I heard the French mitrailleuses rattling through the cannon’s thunder, and I saw an entire French division, which I did not then know to be Lartigue’s, falling back across the hills.
And straight into the entire Prussian army rode the “grosse cavallerie” and the lancers.