He found him, with his Staff, not far distant from Rezonville, having
returned there when the French cavalry of the Left withdrew after
their tremendous charge. The King was reading dispatches, seated on
a saddle thrown across a wet faggot, beside a smoky watch-fire. The
farmstead of Malmaison, now sending up showers of sparks like a
set-piece at the end of a display of fireworks, gave light enough by
which to read.
Persuaded to take shelter, the old man found it in a deserted hamlet,
of which the very name was uncertain, so sorely had it been mauled
about. A crust of stale bread and a mutton-chop grilled on some wood
embers furnished his supper. Water fit for drinking being
unattainable, he tossed off a nip of sutler's rum out of a broken
tulip-glass, and lay down in his clothes to rest upon the royal
ambulance, within four walls and under a roof holed and gapped by
shot and shell.
The Princes of the Suite, much to their Highnesses' chagrin, were
compelled to subsist on fragments of stale sandwiches from their
holster-cases. The escort bivouacked about the Royal lodging.
Troops, wearied to exhaustion by the two days' continuous fighting,
lay down to sleep in the pouring rain.
The Warlock supped with his personal Staff on ration-biscuit and raw
bacon, and spent the night by a bivouac-fire, among the living and
the dead. Can you see him sitting on the empty ammunition-box,
buttoned in his dripping waterproof, his scanty meal eaten and his
cigar well alight? ... How contentedly he listens while the bulbul
Henry sings, without notes of accompaniment, his moving ballads. How
piously he rises, bares his old head, and joins in the robust hymn
sung by his battered but victorious legions, "Now thank we all our
God..."
Or, with the mind's eye, one can follow the Man of Iron as, having
bidden his master good night and left the young Hereditary Grand Duke
of Mecklenburg to keep guard over the royal carriage, he set out, in
company of his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen, a lieutenant of Dragoon Guards
and one of the minor Councillors of the Embassy, in search of a
lodging until break of day.
Sheridan, the famous American General, representing the United States
with the Prussian Headquarters Staff, a short, alert gentleman of
forty-five, with a dark mustache and chin-tuft, and a pronounced
Yankee twang, followed, begging leave to accompany the expedition.
The first cottage approached as likely to afford a night's shelter
was found to be on fire.
"Too hot, though I like warm quarters!" the Chancellor commented.
The next house was found crammed with wounded soldiers, all suffering
from the excellent shell-practice made by the gunners of General
Frossard. The next house and the next had also been converted into
field-hospitals. The fourth yielded to the Minister's personal
investigations a vacant attic, with three truckle-beds, provided with
straw palliasses, tolerably clean.
Sheridan and Bismarck-Böhlen threw themselves upon their rude beds
and very soon were soundly sleeping. For a little while the Man of
Iron stood beside the narrow unglazed window in the attic gable, his
great arms folded on his broad breast, his eyes, bloodshot and
strained with gazing through the fire and smoke of bombardments,
looking out into the wild black welter of the rainy night.
Those torn-up pastures and plow-acres, those devastated cornfields
and woodlands, those burning farms and villages of Lorraine lay in
comparative quiet now.... The hellish roar and crash and tumult of
War had ceased for the time being. Its ghastly sights were veiled,
for the most part, by merciful darkness, though the innumerable
little sputtering fires kindled by the soldiers threw fitful
illuminations upon grotesque, or strange, or terrible, or
indescribably hideous things....
Hungry, thirsty, weary, and saddle-sore as any trooper of his own
White Cuirassiers was the Man of Iron, having broken his fast at dawn
upon a hunch of bread and bacon-fat, and supped upon a couple of raw
hen's eggs, broken on the pommel of his big steel-hilted sword. But
as his bloodshot eyes looked upon his handiwork, he was contented.
This huge, vehement, and bloody conflict had established the mastery
of Germany: France was outnumbered, out-generaled, and out-fought.
With frightful loss Moltke had attained his premier object. The Army
of MacMahon had been driven in rout to Châlons, the retreat of
Bazaine's Army westward had been effectually checked. The South road
from Metz to Verdun, hitherto lightly held by the advance-patrols of
the Prussian Crown Prince, was now blocked by the whole effective
strength of two out of the three armies of Germany; weakened,
wounded, and bleeding after the two days of desperate fighting, but
still powerful, menacing, and grim.
One desperate effort made at this juncture might have broken through
the barrier of living flesh and steel. Would it be made, or would
the French Army of the Rhine fall into the snare so cunningly left
open, and retire within the fortified area of Metz?
The gable-attic looked toward the great fortress. In vain his
glasses swept the formless blackness. The sparkle of a moonbeam on a
bayonet-point--the green or crimson ray cast by a Staff lantern
moving over the ground, yet screened by the French batteries, might
have cleared the point in doubt. Save for the sputter of German
watch-fires over the recent field of battle, and the yellow
candle-flare in the windows of half-ruined cottages and outbuildings,
where wounded men lay on straw or the bare earth, no light showed, no
life seemed to be.... He swung the shattered casement wide, and
thrust his head out, gripping the window-sill, intently listening....
No distant roll of iron-shod wheels, no reverberating tread of
countless footsteps; no other sounds, such as might betray the
retreating movement of an armed host, broke the silence of that
tragic night.
Only the sob of the wind and the dripping of the chill rain from the
overflowing roof-gutters, came to him, with the deep ruckling snores
of exhausted Divisions, and the strangling coughs and hollow groans
of mangled and dying men and beasts.
All would be well, he told himself, as he shut up the glasses,
unbuckled his sword-belt, and unhooking his collar stretched himself
in his great boots upon the groaning truckle-bed, his heavy revolver
ready to his hand. Moltke's great plan would be successful.... The
King would once more prove his Chancellor a true prophet.... The
hand that could build up Prussia from a fourth-rate State into a
world-power, would yet hold the German Empire in its grip of iron,
and through that Empire rule the world!
If He Who created the World had been displeased by Bismarck's
ambitions, things would have gone less smoothly from the outset....
If He Who wrought Man in His Image had been moved to wrath by all
this bloodshed, He would have shown it by letting something happen to
the boys....
But Bill was safe, while Herbert was only slightly wounded.
To-morrow he should be brought back to the hospital at Pont à Mousson
and thence invalided home.
Reverting to Bill, secretly the father's idol, in whose person he saw
his own lost youth renewed, the Chancellor smiled now, painting in
imagination on the darkness a picture of that charge of the French
square at Mars la Tour. According to Herbert, who had put the thing
badly, Bill had had his horse shot, and jumped on another, taking a
comrade behind him as he rode off the field.
A fine story to write home to the boy's mother.... How her deep eyes
would glow and kindle as she read.... An exploit with which to
dazzle fat Borck, hated keeper of the King's Privy Purse.... Nor
must one omit to embody the incident in the next official
communication penned to Count Bernstorff, Prussian Ambassador in
London, who would be sure to retail it to some Lady-in-Waiting
possessing the ear of the Queen. Lastly, what a magnificent anecdote
for the convivial stage of a Foreign Office Staff dinner, or an
official banquet, related with spirit garnished with exaggerations of
the pardonable harmless kind. Indeed, with such embellishments he
subsequently related the slight episode, proving himself capable of
the very folly of paternal tenderness. The picture cropped up
constantly among his dreams on this wild night of Gravelotte. And
when the wan-faced Dawn peeped shuddering between her blood-stained
curtains, and the reveillé sounded, waking the living from their
sleep among the dead, so that their haggard uprising seemed as though
in answer to the trump of the Archangel of the Resurrection--he
heaved his giant's frame from the squalid bed to learn, with a savage
thrill of exultation, that Bazaine had fallen into the trap.
In the dead of night, behind the screen of the unsilenced French
batteries yet emplaced behind the high-walled farms of Montigny la
Grange, La Folie, and from thence to Point du Jour, the bleeding Army
of the Rhine had retreated to the treacherous shelter offered beneath
the guns of Metz.
Said the Warlock, smiling in his sunniest manner as he made his hasty
morning toilet in the shelter of a baggage-wagon tilt:
"Three French Marshals are twittering in this birdcage on the
Moselle--one Army has been shut up with them. Another yet remains at
large, with Paris and the huge resources of France in rear of it."
He paused to absorb a pinch of snuff and extract a clean white shirt
from a small and shabby japanned tin field-case, then added: "A
France on the point of Revolution--an Army commanded by MacMahon, who
has been badly beaten, and has that Old Man of the Sea, the Third
Napoleon, sitting on his back wherever he goes!" He put on the shirt
and emerged from temporary obscurity to finish. "If the spirits of
the just be permitted knowledge of earthly matters, my beloved wife
Mary is pleased with her old man!"
And he equipped himself in his old war-harness, and crowned his old
wig with his battered war-helm, and got on his fine charger and rode
off to meet and confer with his King, the Chancellor, and the War
Minister, and issue instructions to his Chiefs of the various Staffs,
trolling even less tunefully than usual, another verse of his
favorite song:
"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!'"