Part 38

Had not a comparatively fresh and vigorous Prussian Army Corps dropped in at the crucial moment success had hardly crowned the arms of United Germany. They had been marching every day since they quitted the Saar, those solid-thewed Pomeranians of the 2d Corps, but at Puxieux they had cooked and eaten, and now appeared like giants refreshed.

Not only Steinmetz rode at their head, with their commander Von Fransecky, but the Warlock in person directed their attack. Battalions that had retired in disorder reformed and rushed back to meet afresh the brunt of battle. Wherever the red eye glittered and the withered finger pointed, fresh swarms of fierce assailants were hurled against the dwindling hosts of France.

Down came the dark, and now St. Privat was burning; the village under the lee of the fort was burning--sending up great columns of livid smoke shot with licking tongues of flame. The day was over. But crackling lines of fire outlined the position of the rifle-trenches; the mitrailleuse batteries still spat death unwearyingly, as what remained of Bazaine's Army retired in comparative safety to the Fortress of St. Quentin under cover of that fiery screen.

There the shattered brigades and mutilated divisions clung like swarming wasps "with plenty of sting in them yet," said Moltke, "and the hive"--meaning the huge Fortress of Metz--"handy in their rear. But, on the whole," he added, "I am excellently well satisfied. My calculations have worked out correctly. Those Pomeranians of the Second Corps arrived just in time!"

And the veteran galloped joyously as a young trooper of twenty-five to cheer his King with the good news.

And can you see that other man, to whom Emperors and Kings and Ministers referred when they mentioned Prussia, who outwitted nations in policy and made wars at will, spurring the great brown mare wildly through the weltering darkness, with salt drops of mortal anguish coursing down his granite cheeks?

"Bazaine's right has been turned by the Saxons, the Guards have smashed his center, and the Pomeranians of the Second Corps have taken St. Privat and forced him to retreat, leaving Germany master of the field. Success has crowned beyond hope the arms of the Fatherland, but where are the sons who called me father? ... Is this Thy judgment upon one through whom so many fathers are sonless, O my offended God?"

Perhaps he groaned forth such words as these, as he bucketed the great brown mare through the perilous darkness, over roads bestrewn with helmets, swords, and cuirasses, knapsacks, talpacks, forage-caps, and schakos, needle-guns, and chassepots, and camp kettles, as well as the human _débris_ of War. The flare of a lantern tied to and swinging from one of the great steel stirrups threw a treacherous and fitful light upon his road.

Follow him as he ranged from camp to camp, questioning, investigating.... It was black night and raining heavily when a gleam of hope dawned upon the man.

The cavalry piquet-officer who had given the clue beheld the great brute and her huge rider vanish in a cloud of their own steam. A furious clatter of hoofs came back out of the welter ing darkness, as the flaring lantern, gyrating like some captive fiend at the end of its tether, dwindled to a dancing will-o'-the-wisp and vanished, the officer exclaimed:

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ he must have a neck like other men. Yet he rides as though it were forged of tempered steel!"

"Who rides? ... What was that?" asked a brother officer, waking from a doze of exhaustion beside the hissing logs of the rain-beaten watch-fire. He got reply:

"Only the Pomeranian bear ranging in search of his lost cubs." He added: "I was able to tell him that he would find the eldest of them at the field-hospital of Mariaville, upon which he galloped away like mad."

"The field-hospital of Mariaville" proved to be a farmhouse on a hill-top near the battlefield of Mars la Tour. Candles stuck in the necks of empty wine-bottles revealed, through the open, unblinded windows, the figure of the surgeon in charge and those of his orderly-assistants passing to and fro.

"Have you a Bismarck here?"

The stentorian shout from the yard made wounded men turn upon their improvised pillows, and brought the head and shoulders of the bibbed and shirt-sleeved surgeon thrusting out of a window on the first floor. A colloquy ensued between the unseen and the medical officer. Presently the arbitrary voice interrupted:

"What do you call not seriously wounded, man? Describe the casualty clearly, without professional Latin, or too many crackjaw words."

The dressers winked to each other behind the back of the surgeon. He said, supporting himself with one hand against the crazy window-frame as he thrust his head and shoulders forth into the dripping darkness and gesticulated with a hand that held a probe:

"Excellency, your elder son has received three bullets. One lodged in the breast of his tunic, another hit his watch, and the third is at present in the upper part of his thigh. I was about to place the patient under chloroform when Your Excellency's call summoned me from his side."

The voice said, with a clang of anger in it:

"You should not have left him had it been the King who called. Go back to him instantly. I am coming up."

And he came striding in his great boots up the crazy one-flight stair. Ghastly faces of wounded soldiers turned upon their pillows of straw as that gigantic figure filled up the doorway. His shadow, thrown by the flaring tallow-candle flames, loomed portentously on the whitewashed walls. He wore no cloak or overcoat and dripped as though he had swum, not ridden, through water to his finding; the peak of his field-cap discharged quite a little deluge upon his son's white face as he stooped over the stretcher where the young man lay and touched his hand, and kissed him on the cheek.

"Never mind. Clean water does no hurt," he said, for he had drawn out his handkerchief to wipe the splash away, and finding it soiled with dust and powder-grime had returned it to his pocket.

The surgeon returned:

"I wish we had clean water--it would be above price. But all the springs are fouled with blood, and there are dead French in the courtyard-well."

"They must be got out and the well cleansed, if possible," said the Chancellor. "Meanwhile, a temporary supply must be found.... What nourishment have you, fit for wounded men?"

The surgeon responded, busy with a cotton-wool chloroform pad:

"Nothing, Excellency, except wine and a little Extract of Liebig."

The Chancellor said harshly:

"Yet this appears to be a farm-house, and I heard the clucking of fowls down below!"

The surgeon, who was a bullet-headed, obstinate East Prussian, and did not relish this sort of hectoring, returned, thrusting out a stubbly under-jaw:

"Excellency, there are certainly fowls in the farmyard. But they are not mine, nor have I money to buy. They belong to the unhappy wretch who owns this place, and has lost everything else."

And he gave back the stare of the fierce eyes that raked him. The Minister began to lisp, an ominous sign:

"Ah, indeed! ... May I--may I ask where you--where you gained your notions of the code of ethics that should prevail in warfare?"

Said the surgeon, fronting him fairly and squarely:

"Excellency, from my father, who was an honest man!"

Straw rustled under heads that slewed to look at the blunt speaker. There was a long instant's pause. Then the Chancellor thrust his hand into his breeches-pocket, pulled out a gold coin, and said, tendering it to the medical officer:

"Kindly pay this to the object of your pity for twenty fowls at a mark apiece. Now I will keep you no longer from your patient. Good night to everyone here."

"Good night, Excellency!" came in chorus.

He gave his brusque salute and had already reached the threshold, when his son, a colossal, black-haired, brown-skinned young trooper, who lay back upon his stretcher, staring sulkily at the smoke-blackened rafters, or contemplating the twitching bare toes of the leg that bore a tourniquet above the plugged and bandaged wound, started slightly, looked round, and called:

"Father!"

"What is it, my dear fellow?"

His great stride took him back to the prone young giant on the stretcher. Count Herbert said, barely removing his eyes from the ceiling, and speaking in a studiously indifferent tone:

"If you are upset about Bill, sir, there's no need to worry. His horse was shot under him, but he got hold of another. I saw him ride off all right with a wounded comrade behind him. That's all. Goodnight!"

The son nodded surlily and resumed his inspection of the ceiling. The sire, who had received the news in silence, went out at the door, stooping under the lintel, his great shoulders rasping the posts on either side. They heard his heavy footsteps pass down the crazy staircase. A curt sentence or two reached them, spoken as he went through the kitchen on his way to the door. Then he was in the yard, loudly calling for an orderly to bring a lantern. An instant, and three revolver-shots cracked in rapid succession, each followed by a significant cackling and squawking. The surgeon, now fitting the cotton-wool pad upon the wire mouthpiece and signing to his assistant to hand him the chloroform, clapped the pad upon the mouth and nostrils of young Bismarck, and said, with a dry chuckle as he poured the pungent anaesthetic upon the wool:

"His Excellency is having a little sport. All the same, without water, one cannot cleanse wounds or boil hen-broth."

Water arrived an hour later, two barrelsful upon a hand-cart drawn by terrified peasants, behind whom rode a trooper of Uhlans, accelerating their movements with prods of the lance. A general officer had sent the barrels for the use of the wounded at Mariaville. This service rendered to his son, he rode in search of his King.

XLVI

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!'"

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."

"Alas, Excellency!" protested the officer, "will not such a method be very unwholesome? The churchyard at Flauville is already raised four feet above the pavement of the church."

"Let them lay on fresh dead," said the Chancellor, smiling grimly, "and stop when they reach to the level of the window-sills. Thus our good fellows will be able to listen to the Curé's Sunday address. Meanwhile, bury thick." He added, as Moltke rode up, pointing to the ground now trodden into mud and littered with French schakos and _képis_, Prussian helmets and schapkas, knapsacks, arms, under-clothing, accouterments, brushes, razors, and shoes: "Would not one call this 'Death's Rag Fair'?" He added as the wind, blowing over a battery of dead horses, brought with it an odor that made the senses reel: "Or 'Death's Perfumery Shop' would be as appropriate a title.... I must advise the King not to breathe this atmosphere longer, fasting. It might result in dysentery."

Moltke agreed, expanding his thin nostrils: "Truly, the effluvium is exceedingly bad!"

"Hypocrite!" said the Chancellor, openly laughing. "Do we not all know that the bouquet of a battle-field covered with slain enemies is sweeter to you than November violet-blooms."