And then, with a stiffening of every muscle and a cold and deadly
sinking at the heart, the English boy realized that Angéle's father
had been murdered, and knew what had been the unendurable injury that
had provoked the man of eighty to strike in his daughter's defense.
Next instant a gun banged, but the charge of slugs that had been
meant to lodge in P. C. Breagh's cerebellum merely smashed the
conservatory glass and peppered the walls and trees. The intended
recipient of these favors had previously been lame. Now, regardless
of blisters and skin cracks, he cast away his improvised crutches,
darted down the garden-path, nipped through the shattered door that
hung upon one twisted hinge, and ran for dear life.
Thenceafter our young friend did not stray too far from the column he
temporarily marched with. The secret of those haggard eyes and
scowling looks was clear to him now. And the discovery of a giant
velocipede with the solid rubber tires of the period and a front
wheel of four feet in diameter abandoned in a ditch, presently
enabled him--previously schooled by Mr. Tickling in the management of
a machine of similar construction to outpace the Red Prince's
marching battalions; and--upon highways, keep abreast of his flying
cavalry.
Now, hugely daring, he pounded along in the wake of the Great
Headquarter Staff, guided by the whipping flicker of the black and
white lance-pennons of the Red Uhlans bringing up the rear.
There were troops upon the road.... One or two stray batteries of
artillery, and part of an Engineer Corps going the same way, halted
to give a cheer for the King. But the galloping dispatch-bearers
with their guards of troopers, bound for Pont à Mousson, meeting the
Great Staff on the way, turned back with it, adding to the clouds of
dust in its wake.
The Doctor had promised P. C. Breagh plenty of raw-head and
bloody-bones whether he marched with the Advance or remained at the
rear. The prophecy had been verified. He had not yet seen a battle
or even a battlefield. But thousands of wounded men, displaying
every sickening mutilation that shot and shell and steel can inflict
upon the human body; thousands upon thousands of prisoners, gaunt
with fatigue, hunger and misery, had passed in an almost unending
panorama before his sickened, pitying eyes. Ruined châteaux, farms
and churches, crops destroyed or rotting in the ground ungarnered,
villages razed or burned, towns battered out of shape, and
fortifications breached by heavy gunnery, were to become sights of
common occurrence as he traveled the long red road that was to lead
him home at last.
Now he rode and odd lines of songs, comic or tender, fragments of
Fleet Street talk, brain-pictures of things seen or persons
remembered passed through his mind as he pedaled between long lines
of roadside poplars, whitening in the hot breeze that carried the
scorching dust along in clouds.
The face of the peasant girl who had tried to poison him. By George!
if Mrs. Rousby or Miss Marriott or Mrs. Vezin could have seen her
fierce, gleaming eyes, and her heavy black eyebrows lifted at the
outer corners, and the way a white canine tooth had nipped her red
underlip.... The voice of Mr. Knewbit barking, "Avoid Sham
Technicality and Sentimental Slumgullion," the well-bred voice of
Valverden dealing the unforgotten snub. The fortune told him by the
gipsy woman on Waterloo Bridge after that unforgettable January
night's vigil: "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road; and
yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it, until the
end, when tute is jasing...."
"When tute is jasing" meant "When thou art going" he had been told so
by a man who knew a bit of Romany. His imagination made a
grasshopper-leap of years to the death-bed of a celebrated War
Correspondent.--a grim, bronzed man who had followed his arduous
calling in many quarters of the world, and had earned much kudos and
a whole chestful of decorations, but had never married, and was
understood to look with coldness upon the loveliest women, his heart
having been irrevocably given in earlier days. Juliette--still
young, and ah! how exquisite in maturity--Juliette in widow's weeds,
would hasten to the moribund's side and place her little hand in his,
gaunt and damp with approaching death. She would hear his story of
faithful, hopeless passion, and close his eyelids for the last long
sleep. And standing by his pillow, looking pityingly at the dead
face, she would realize that she loved--too late....
He sniffed and gulped as the tears stung his smarting eyelids, so
moving was the picture of that death-bed scene.
A picture of the King of Prussia as he had seen him sitting at the
open window of his lodgings at the Mairie of Pont à Mousson next came
up, with faces of market-people and street-boys gaping round-eyed at
_Le Roi de la Prusse_, who nursed his clean-shaven chin and stared
unwinkingly before him. Again, the old man, pale, square-shouldered,
capped and tightly-buttoned, riding through the market-place with his
Iron Chancellor by his side.
Wiry, hawk-eyed Moltke and saturnine, shaggy-browed Roon clattered
upon the heels of them, but P. C. Breagh had had eyes only for the
great soldierly figure that bestrode the big brown mare.
Did he not owe his life to the well-shaped hand that had rested on
the thigh of the brown mare's rider, as the Minister bent to speak to
the King?
No common bond of confidence and friendship seemed to unite the
master of seventy-three and the man of fifty-five. The hard,
somewhat vulpine face of the Hohenzollern, with its drooping,
aquiline nose, narrow light hazel eyes, curled white mustache,
precise, tight-lipped mouth and rounded chin projecting between the
brushed back white whiskers, had been all alight with interest, and
warm with kindliness.
This is what the Man of Iron had said with his small square teeth
showing laughingly under the heavy hair-brake, and his fierce,
prominent blue eyes sparkling with humor and fun:
"The final scenes of melodrama are always the most strenuous. Your
Majesty must regard the ridge over Flavigny as your Royal box on the
Grand Tier, the occasion as a farewell performance of the French
Empire--played for the benefit of United Germany, before the whole
world!"
Flavigny was a village.... But the flickering black-and-white
pennons that tipped the dust-cloud ahead were slowing.... Three
battalions of infantry, each with its band playing gaily at its head,
the bronzed, healthy-looking, white-powdered men marching eight
abreast, had halted and front-faced as the word of command followed
the sound of the Great Staff trumpeter:
"_Clear the way! Clear the way! Here comes the King!_"
And now the scorching air vibrated with their vigorous cheering as
the King cantered by and was gone with a shout and a wave of the hand.
"Our old one takes dust and sun, saddle-blisters and short commons
like any old trooper!" P. C. Breagh heard a Lieutenant say to a
subaltern as the dusty ranks half-wheeled and fell into step once
more. "He's a precisian too.... _Zum Beispiel_, he called to a man
in Vidler's company that he had got his 'needler' on the wrong
shoulder. Now that's another thing I like in the old man!..."
"The Field Marshal is taking the Great Headquarters to where it will
be hellishly risky," a Captain with Staff shoulder-cords was saying
to another, as a new outbreak of cannon and mitrailleuse-fire caused
his horse to start and rear. He added: "They were hard at it at Mars
la Tour, Vionville and Rezonville all day yesterday: the 5th Division
were in action all round Moltke as he stood on the high ridge above
Flavigny.... To-day our 7th and 10th are fighting between Gravelotte
and St. Hubert, where the French have the devil's own array of
battery-emplacements and rifle-pits--our guards are at Doncourt, our
9th and 8th corps are at Verneville and Amanvilliers. Now the
fighting seems to have rolled down nearer the river. I have
certainly heard cavalry trumpets sounding the charge, and volleys of
musketry--French, I judge!--coming from that direction. I should
judge that...."
"Bazaine must have turned the handle in too much of a hurry!"
retorted the junior, who enjoyed a regimental reputation for humor,
and a volley of laughter rattled along the marching files, now
breasting a steep and gravelly hill, half-way up which the rider of
the giant-wheeled velocipede had been compelled to dismount.
P. C. Breagh had seen, reproduced from the _Charivari_ in all the
German illustrated papers, the famous caricature of Cham, over which
King Wilhelm's brown-faced infantrymen were grinning as they climbed
the hill. Who does not remember the Count de Noë's memorable
presentment of the field of war dotted with defunct Prussians, and
the French mitrailleuse-gunner in the foreground who exclaims in
astonishment: "_Sapristi!_ the battle is over. I must have turned
the handle too fast!"
But more than the sardonic jest of Cham, the Captain's reference to
the nearness of a possible action interested the would-be spectator
of a battlefield. The wiry, sun-bronzed young man in the broken
boots and the dusty brown Norfolk jacket, now pushing the solid-tired
giant-wheel up a steep and lung-testing hill which the bearers of the
needle-gun took in a canter, had seen war-casualties in appalling
numbers, but he had not yet beheld War.
And now sharp bugles and piercing trumpets were clamoring of War all
round one. The musketry that one could hear at Pont à Mousson
clattered in volleys among the neighboring hills. The deep booming
of heavy field-batteries persistently answered. Every now and then
the ear was violently assaulted by the hideous hyena-yapping of the
mitrailleuse.
These breasting hills, these deep-cupped valleys walled and ramparted
with wood-crested hill-ranges, cut up the honest battle into a dozen
skirmishes. Oh! for an open, campaign and a vantage on some breezy
hill-top whence one might see, as the King was seeing with Moltke and
his Chancellor from the ridge above Flavigny!