There was a pause; the hand of the Countess de Vassart trembled on my
shoulder.
Under the window strident Prussian bugles were blowing a harsh
summons; the young officer stepped to the loop-hole and looked out,
then hastily removed his helmet and thrust his blond head through the
smoky aperture. "March those prisoners in below!" he shouted down.
Then he withdrew his head, put on his polished helmet of black
leather, faced with the glittering Prussian eagle, and tightened the
gold-scaled cheek-guard.
A moment later came a trample of feet on the landing outside, the door
was flung open, and three prisoners were brutally pushed into the
room.
I tried to turn and look at them; they stood in the dusk near the bed,
but I could only make out that one was a Turco, his jacket in rags,
his canvas breeches covered with mud.
Again the lieutenant came to the loop-hole and glanced out, then shook
his head, motioning the soldiers back.
"It is too high and the arc of fire too limited," he said, shortly.
"Detail four men to hold the stairs, ten men and a sergeant in the
room below, and you'd better take your prisoners down there. Bayonet
that Turco tiger if he shows his teeth again. March!"
As the prisoners filed out I turned once more and thought I recognized
Salah Ben-Ahmed in the dishevelled Turco, but could not be certain,
so disfigured and tattered the soldier appeared.
"Here, you hussar prisoner!" cried the lieutenant, pointing at me
with his white-gloved finger, "turn your head and busy yourself with
what concerns you. And you, madame," he added, pompously, "see that
you give us no trouble and stay in this room until you have permission
to leave."
"Are--are you speaking to me, monsieur?" asked the Countess, amazed.
Then she rose, exasperated.
"Your insolence disgraces your uniform," she said. "Go to your
French prisoners and learn the rudiments of courtesy!"
The officer reddened to his colorless eyebrows; his little,
near-sighted eyes became stupid and fixed; he smoothed the blond down
on his upper lip with hesitating fingers.
Suddenly he turned and marched out, slamming the door violently behind
him.
At this impudence the eyes of the Countess began to sparkle, and an
angry flush mounted to her cheeks.
"Madame," said I, "he is only a German boy, unbalanced by his own
importance and his first battle. But he will never forget this lesson;
let him digest it in his own manner."
And he did, for presently there came a polite knock at the door, and
the lieutenant reappeared, bowing rigidly, one hand on his sword-hilt,
the other holding his helmet by the gilt spike.
"Lieutenant von Eberbach present to apologize," he said, jerkily, red
as a beet. "Begs permission to take a half-dozen of wine; men very
thirsty."
"Lieutenant von Eberbach may take the wine," said the Countess,
calmly.
"Rudeness without excuse!" muttered the boy; "beg the graciously
well-born lady not to judge my regiment or my country by it. Can
Lieutenant von Eberbach make amends?"
"The Lieutenant has made them," said the Countess. "The merciful
treatment of French prisoners will prove his sincerity."
The lad made another rigid bow and got himself out of the door with
more or less dignity, and the Countess drew a chair beside my
sofa-chair and sat down, eyes still bright with the cinders of a wrath
I had never suspected in her.
Together we looked down into the street.
Under the window the flat, high-pitched drums began to rattle; deep
voices shouted; the whole street undulated with masses of
gray-and-black uniforms, moving forward through the smoke. A superb
regimental band began to play; the troops broke out into heavy
cheering.
"Vorwärts! Vorwärts!" came the steady commands. The band passed with
a dull flash of instruments; a thousand brass helmet-spikes pricked
the smoke; the tread of the Prussian infantry shook the earth.
"The invasion has begun," I said.
Her face was expressionless, save for the brightness of her eyes.
And now another band sounded, playing "I Had a Comrade!" and the
whole street began to ring with the noble marching-song of the coming
regiment.
"Bavarian infantry," I whispered, as the light-blue columns wheeled
around the curve and came swinging up the street; for I could see the
yellow crown on the collars of their tunics, and the heavy leather
helmets, surmounted by chenille rolls.
Behind them trotted a squadron of Uhlans on their dainty horses, under
a canopy of little black-and-white flags fluttering from the points of
their lances.
"Uhlans," I murmured. I heard the faint click of her teeth closing
tightly.
Hussars in crimson tunics, armed with curious weapons, half carbine,
half pistol, followed the Uhlans, filling the smoky street with a
flood of gorgeous color.
Suddenly a company of Saxon pioneers arrived on the double-quick,
halted, fell out, and began to break down the locked doors of the
houses on either side of the street. At the same time Prussian
infantry came hurrying past, dragging behind them dozens of vehicles,
long hay-wagons, gardeners' carts, heavy wheelbarrows, even a dingy
private carriage, with tarnished lamps, rocking crazily on rusty
springs.
The soldiers wheeled these wagons into a double line, forming a
complete chain across the street, where the Turcos had commenced to
dig their ditch and breastworks--a barricade high enough to check a
charge, and cunningly arranged, too, for the wooden abatis could not
be seen from the eastern end of the street, where a charge of French
infantry or cavalry must enter Morsbronn if it entered at all.
We watched the building of the barricade, fascinated. Soldiers entered
the houses on either side of the street, only to reappear at the
windows and thrust out helmeted heads. More soldiers came, running
heavily--the road swarmed with them; some threw themselves flat under
the wagons, some knelt, thrusting their needle-guns through the
wheel-spokes; others remained standing, rifles resting over the rails
of the long, skeleton hay-wagons.
"Something is going to happen," I said, as a group of smartly
uniformed officers appeared on the roof of the opposite house and
hastily scrambled to the ridge-pole.
Something was surely going to happen; the officers were using their
field-glasses and pointing excitedly across the roof-tops; the windows
of every house as far as I could see were black with helmets; a
regiment in column came up on the double, halted, disintegrated,
melting away behind walls, into yards, doorways, gardens.
A colonel of infantry, splendidly mounted, drew bridle under our
loop-hole and looked up at the officers on the roof across the way.
"Attention, you up there!" he shouted. "Is it infantry?"
"No!" bawled an officer, hollowed hand to his cheek. "It's their
brigade of heavy cavalry coming like an earthquake!"
"The cuirassiers!" I cried, electrified. "It's Michel's cuirassiers,
madame! And--oh, the barricade!" I groaned, twisting my fingers in
helpless rage. "They'll be caught in a trap; they'll die like flies
in that street."
"This is horrible!" muttered the girl. "Don't they know the street
is blocked? Can't they find out before they ride into this ravine
below us? Will they all be killed here under our windows?"
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 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.
"They are doomed, like their fathers," I muttered--"sons of the
cuirassiers of Waterloo. See what men can do for France!"
The young Countess started and stood up very straight.
"Look, madame!" I said, harshly--"look on the men of France! You say
you do not understand the narrow love of country! Look!"
"It is too pitiful, too horrible," she said, hoarsely. "How the
horses fall in that meadow!"
"They will fall thicker than that in this street!"
"See!" she cried; "they have begun to gallop! They are coming! Oh, I
cannot look!--I--I cannot!"
Far away, a thin cry sounded above the cannon din; the doomed
cuirassiers were cheering. It was the first charge they had ever made;
nobody had ever seen cavalry of their arm on any battle-field of
Europe since Waterloo.
Suddenly their long, straight blades shot into the air, the
cuirassiers broke into a furious gallop, and that mass of steel-clad
men burst straight down the first slope of the plateau, through the
Prussian infantry, then wheeled and descended like a torrent on
Morsbronn.
In the first ranks galloped the giants of the Eighth Cuirassiers,
Colonel Guiot de la Rochere at their head; the Ninth Cuirassiers
thundered behind them; then came the lancers under a torrent of
red-and-white pennons. Nothing stopped them, neither hedges nor
ditches nor fallen trees.
Their huge horses bounded forward, manes in the wind, tails streaming,
iron hoofs battering the shaking earth; the steel-clad riders, sabres
pointed to the front, leaned forward in their saddles.
Now among the thicket of hop-vines long lines of black arose; there
was a flash, a belt of smoke, another flash--then the metallic rattle
of bullets on steel breastplates. Entire ranks of cuirassiers went
down in the smoke of the Prussian rifles, the sinister clash and crash
of falling armor filled the air. Sheets of lead poured into them; the
rattle of empty scabbards on stirrups, the metallic ringing of bullets
on helmet and cuirass, the rifle-shots, the roar of the shells
exploding swelled into a very hell of sound. And, above the infernal
fracas rose the heavy cheering of the doomed riders.
Into the deep, narrow street wheeled the horsemen, choking road and
sidewalk with their galloping squadrons, a solid cataract of impetuous
horses, a flashing torrent of armored men--and then! Crash! the first
squadron dashed headlong against the barricade of wagons and went
down.
Into them tore the squadron behind, unable to stop their maddened
horses, and into these thundered squadron after squadron, unconscious
of the dead wall ahead.
In the terrible tumult and confusion, screaming horses and shrieking
men were piled in heaps, a human whirlpool formed at the barricade,
hurling bodily from its centre horses and riders. Men galloped
headlong into each other, riders struggled knee to knee, pushing,
shouting, colliding.
Posted behind the upper and lower windows of the houses, the Prussians
shot into them, so close that the flames from the rifles set the
jackets of the cuirassiers on fire: a German captain opened the
shutters of a window and fired his pistol at a cuirassier, who replied
with a sabre thrust through the window, transfixing the German's
throat.
Then a horrible butchery of men and horses began; the fusillade became
so violent and the scene so sickening that a Prussian lieutenant went
crazy in the house opposite, and flung himself from the window into
the mass of writhing horsemen. Tall cuirassiers, in impotent fury,
began slashing at the walls of the houses, breaking their heavy sabres
to splinters against the stones; their powerful horses, white with
foam, reared, fell back, crushing their riders beneath them.
In front of the barricade a huge fellow reined in his horse and
turned, white-gloved hand raised, red epaulets tossing.
[Illustration: "'HALT! HALT!' HE SHOUTED"]
"Halt! Halt!" he shouted. "Stop the lancers!" And a trumpeter,
disengaging himself from the frantic chaos, set his long, silver
trumpet to his lips and blew the "Halt!"
A bullet rolled the trumpeter under his horse's feet; a volley riddled
the other's horse, and the agonized animal reared and cleared the
bristling abatis with a single bound, his rider dropping dead among
the hay-wagons.
Then into this awful struggle galloped the two squadrons of the lancers.
For a moment the street swam under their fluttering red-and-white
lance-pennons, then a volley swept them--another--another--and down
they went.
Herds of riderless horses tore through the street; the road undulated
with crushed, quivering creatures crawling about. Against the doorway
of a house opposite a noble horse in agony leaned with shaking knees,
head raised, lips shrinking back over his teeth.
Bewildered, stupefied, exhausted, the cuirassiers sat in their
saddles, staring up at the windows where the Prussians stood and
fired. Now and then one would start as from a nightmare, turn his
jaded horse, and go limping away down the street. The road was filled
with horsemen, wandering helplessly about under the rain of bullets.
One, a mere boy, rode up to a door, leaned from his horse and began to
knock for admittance; another dismounted and sat down on a doorstep,
head buried in his hands, regardless of the bullets which tore the
woodwork around him.
The street was still crowded with entrapped cuirassiers, huddled in
groups or riding up and down the walls mechanically seeking shelter. A
few of these, dismounted, were wearily attempting to drag a heavy cart
away from the barricade; the Prussians shot them, one at a time, but
others came to help, and a few lancers aided them, and at length they
managed to drag a hay-wagon aside, giving a narrow passage to the open
country beyond. Instantly the Prussian infantry swarmed out of the
houses and into the street, shouting, "Prisoners!" pushing, striking,
and dragging the exhausted cuirassiers from their saddles. But contact
with the enemy, hand to hand, seemed to revive the fury of the armored
riders. The débris of the regiments closed up, long, straight sabres
glittered, trembling horses plunged forward, broke into a stiff
gallop, and passed through the infantry, through the rent in the
barricade, and staggered away across the fields, buried in the smoke
of a thousand rifles.
So rode the "Cuirassiers of Morsbronn," the flower of an empire's
chivalry, the elect of France. So rode the gentlemen of the Sixth
Lancers to shiver their slender spears against stone walls--for the
honor of France.
Death led them. Death rode with them knee to knee. Death alone halted
them. But their shining souls galloped on into that vast Valhalla
where their ancestors of Waterloo stood waiting, and the celestial
trumpets pealed a last "Dismount!"