Chapter II: Pucella Rapta (2)

One might have been surprised on entering Metz for the first time since the capitulation how little sickness was apparently existing in the town. One strolled on to the Place Royale, and there saw the streets of railway waggons, which in the early days had been brought into the town from the station—300 of them—and diverted from the carriage of luggage or merchandise to be hospitals for the reception of the sick and wounded. Here and there a convalescent limped about on crutches, or a pallid-faced man glided past, from whom you instinctively shrank with a curious feeling that the taint of the fever must be hanging about him still. But of sweeping pestilence there seemed no traces. One had to look for the deadly sickness in quiet corners in the little improvised hospitals, where there were only a few cases, or in the neglected villages around the town where hygiene had been comparatively neglected. There it was and there alone, where you could find forms which you were told were those of men, but passed out of all recognition as such, discoloured and bloated in the last stages of the foul black small-pox. It might be that you chanced on a lazarette into which the terrible demon of hospital gangrene had entered and fixed his relentless fang, never to be withdrawn till the earth should have been heaped on his victim. A few cases of this terrible disorder, and only a few, I saw. Not alone was the sense of sight called into requisition; no cordial in Metz seemed to have the virtue of washing the horribly fœtid odour out of my throat, where it stuck as if it were something solid. I trust no reader will ever be called to look upon the corpse of one who has died of pyæmia. One took his life in his hand going among such spectacles. Here is a house in the Isle de Saulcy in which there are five sick men and two corpses. There is a doctor with them—a lone man, for the very women, with their tender hearts hardened by the terror of the dread infection, have run away. The doctor is a mere youth in years, but there is grey already in his hair, and he tells me that the last six weeks have made him feel as an old man. With every breath he inhales he risks his life nearly as much as if he held his fist into the cage of a cobra capella. What words can describe the colour of these semicomatose forms which he handles so tenderly? Have they been blown up in an explosion, and had their skins dusted over to ease the smart of the burn, and to hide the swarthy brand of the powder? No, they are the victims of a far worse misfortune. They lie smitten to the marrow with the terrible _Typhus exanthematicus_, the floury typhus, which is happily so rare that many a respectable and capable general practitioner in Britain has never heard of it. The flour which the exanthematicus powders on the skin of its victim, seldom washes off. Almost invariably face and flour dust are alike hidden in the grave.

The railway station outside the Porte Serpenoise of Metz was a curious sight. It was the depôt of all the vast train of that Corps-Francs organized by the Chemin de fer de l’Est, with a military constitution, and having a material that had cost fifteen millions of francs. The corps numbered 1200 men, and they, with all their material, their bridges, their stalls, their waggons, their pontoons, and their vast timber blocks, were destined to act as the pioneers of the French army on its march “à Berlin,” and to repair the damage to the communications wrought by the Germans, falling back beaten and demoralised across the Rhine on their capital. There was a bridge here in pieces, specially constructed to be thrown across the Rhine. The bridge had never quitted the locality where it was constructed. It was the prize of the army that had not only kept the watch fast and true on the German Rhine, but that was standing sentry on the Moselle, the Marne, the Seine, and the Loire. And to-day in the drizzle of the small rain, the bold Corps-Francs were slowly jogging it on the prisoner-train towards the Rhine which they had thought to approach in array so different.

Many a day it will take Metz to recover from the handiwork of the men who undertook to defend it. The tourist who in the early summer came to this virgin queen of the Moselle might have noticed outside the fortifications a belt of buildings about half an English mile in breadth. The trim villas of the wealthy citizens had stood here in the dainty gardens; the pretentious house of the mayor had been here behind its red-brick walls. There had been snug little cottages _ornées_, where dwelt ladies, about whose antecedents few knew anything, but who had fair faces and who dressed magnificently. Not one stone now remained upon another of all the villas, the mansions, the cottages. All was blank desolation. Here and there the stump of a fountain, erstwhile standing in a pretty garden, asserted itself disconsolately, its once superincumbent Cupid or Neptune half battered into the mud. The ground was churned into slush by the tread of many footsteps, and fetid odours blew over it from the dead horses that were rotting on its surface. This belt of desolation was the _zone militaire_ of Metz—the space outside the fortifications, where buildings were allowed to be erected solely on the condition that if it should be necessary at any time for military exigencies to destroy them, the owners should not be entitled to claim compensation. The military exigency came in July last, and now the portly mayor might bite his thumb, and the owners of the villas and the cottages grope about the ruins for salvage, for no consolation was forthcoming for them in the shape of compensation.

On the 1st of November I continued my investigations as to the condition of the French sick who had been left by the capitulation as a legacy to the Germans. In those inquiries I derived great assistance from the courteous kindness of Dr. Leithold, of the division of General Kummer, on whom devolved the supervision of all the medical and sanitary arrangements. Dr. Leithold had in all inherited about 19,000 sick men, among whom were included only sixty German prisoners—all the rest were Frenchmen. This included the sick in the field hospitals and the various forts. The diseases chiefly raging were typhus and dysentery, the latter with a strong tendency to assume the phase of the former. There were not many cases, however, of spotted or floury typhus. Small-pox was far from rare, and in not a few cases it was of the most virulent form. A good deal of scurvy was also existing. I fancy that a great quantity of scurvy cases of a mild type had not been allowed to enter the hospitals, for of the prisoners in the lager by Retonfay I saw a considerable number bearing the evidences of suffering from this disease. With the good and varied rations now being distributed, a disease which had been superinduced by their absence was sure soon to disappear. In order at once to clear for the occupation of troops the barracks in Metz, hitherto used as hospitals, and to provide a change into higher and purer air, all the sick able to move were being sent out into the highlying forts surrounding the town. This step, it was hoped, would stimulate healthy action in systems which had become low, degenerate, and stagnant, and good nourishment, which was being provided with a lavish hand, would naturally co-operate greatly in the setting up of this healthy action. His Excellency von Kummer deserves to be held in honour by all humanity for the prompt and solicitous arrangements which he caused to be instituted for relieving the pressure on the sick of the pre-capitulation condition of things. A great bakery of white bread was at once set up in the Caserne des Chasseurs, and orders were circulated that all medical officers in charge of lazarettes should have carte blanche to make requisitions for bread. Stores were hurried in of coffee, chocolate, soup extract, and other comforts, and by Sunday morning there were very few sick who were not the better of the advent of the Germans. Prior to the establishment of the regular system of supply, the Berliner Hülfsverein, represented by Herren Adolph Schwabe and E. Minlos, was, with the English Ambulance, among the first to commence a distribution of comforts. Britons may be glad to know that they too helped towards the Liebesgaben with which were packed the fourgons of the Berliner Hülfsverein, since the British National Society helped its funds with a donation of 1000_l._, the administration of which was confided to Mr. Schwabe. As General von Senden and his staff entered the town a scene occurred, pathetic enough in one aspect to move the deepest sympathies of those who love the Fatherland and its children, and yet not without a certain grotesqueness that only affords another illustration of the narrow gap which exists between tears and laughter. As the General rode down the Rue de la Prison Militaire, he passed the prison of the Maison d’Arrêt, where the German prisoners taken on the 7th at Maizières were confined. As the Landwehrmen on that day had met the foe with shouts of “Hurrah Preussen!” and “Immer vorwärts!” so now, gaunt, hollow-eyed, and squalid, the great gallant fellows cheered their countrymen as they came on. The cheer was hardly so full-volumed as when it had echoed through the gables of Ladonchamps; scanty rations exclusively of horseflesh were not quite the class of feeding off which to cheer lustily. But von Senden, not unfamiliar with the cheers of his Landwehr men, heard the “Hurrah Preussen!” from behind the bars, and, halting, called out to his Kinder to know how they fared. The hungry men told their plight, and the general turning to the Intendant who rode behind him, asked when he could have food up for the wants of the prisoned Landwehrmen. “Not for an hour at least,” was the reply. Then von Senden turned to Mr. Schwabe, the bearer of the Liebesgaben, and asked whether he could do nothing till the Intendant got up his column. The fourgons of the Berliner Hülfsverein were not a furlong behind, and they came up at the trot. The bread tumbled out of the waggons, and in at the prison windows. But the waggons contained other provender than bread, and the question was asked of the prisoners as they munched their bread, what relish they would have to it. Who that knows the German palate but can anticipate the reply. “Haben Sie Wurst?” was the response, as if from one man, and then from behind came a piping voice, it must have been an epicurean boy who spoke—“Oder Schinken?” Wurst is the German sausage, suggestive to the British mind of trichinæ, and other nameless horrors, but dearer to the German heart than any other edible. Then they got cigars—the prisoners—and von Senden and the Berliner Hülfsverein passed on, the former to take up his head-quarters, the latter to distribute their arrowroot, tea, woollen garments, winter beds, biscuits, and what not of Liebesgaben to the wretched French sick.

On returning to the Hôtel de l’Europe, after a round of the hospitals, I found in the _salle_ an officer from Retonfay who had ridden in to tell me that the General in command of the brigade had sent to desire me to call upon him. It was very well calling on generals if one went of his own accord, but a summons to attend was calculated to make one nervous. Had I been writing of the positions without sufficient discretion, I anxiously asked of myself, or had any order been issued to forbid correspondents from frequenting the foreposts? Speculation was useless, and I went straight out in the moonlight to the big château inhabited by the General, in the outskirts of Retonfay. There was no frown on the features of the gallant old Pole; my portion was a warm grip of the hand, and a cordial salutation. The General, instead of having a wigging for me, wished to ask a favour of the journal I represented. The General’s children are half English, his wife is an English lady, and his mother-in-law, who, to judge from the enthusiastic manner in which the General spoke of her, is utterly unlike mothers-in-law in general, had thoughtfully sent her fighting son-in-law a box of concentrated soups all the way from a western suburb of London. The gift had moved the General to tender thanks, if he might, through the columns of an English journal, and to make of the box of soups a peg on which to hang a compliment to the British nation. The General pondered, as he ate his soup, on the form which this communication should take, apologising to me for his silence from the circumstance that he desired “to make a little wit.” When he had got to the salad, he found the spirit move him, and he dictated as follows:—“I thank you, dear grandmamma, for your delicious soups; the vermicelli and the tail ox are delicious. The North German Ambassador has made a mistake when he said that the English nation has only manifested a warm-heartedness towards the French. As I eat my dinner, I am a witness to the contrary.—Your loving son,—Von Zglinitzki, Major-General.” The good General slightly distorted the relation existing between him and the relative he desired to address; but I supposed he had taken the word from his children.

On the 2nd of November the whole of the 10th Army Corps defiled through Metz on its southward march towards Troyes. Its General, Voight Rhetz, sat in the saddle in the Place Royale, with Kummer beside him, and a background formed of the trucks devoted to hospital purposes. On the other side of the broad thoroughfare stood groups of French officers looking on critically as the men went past with whom they had so often been engaged. To have seen the different regiments pass the saluting point with everything about them as neat as if they had come out of barracks, you would never have thought they could have been doing forepost work and fighting for two months. Fresh, stout, clean, and supple, the great stalwart fellows came past with the German quick step in one long continuous stream for two hours, and long before all had passed the Frenchmen had sunk into a dull silence that seemed to betoken acquiescence in an inevitable fate. There was no cheering or singing; the bands played as they passed the General, but the “Wacht am Rhein” was kept for the country roads. Besides the 10th, the 3rd Army Corps was on the march for Troyes. The 7th for the present was to remain in Metz; the 2nd had started Paris-ward before the capitulation; and the 1st, after seeing off the last of the prisoners, was destined for the northern march toward Lille and Amiens, along with the 8th Corps. General Kummer, leaving the commandership of the town for an active command, was succeeded by General von Löwenfeld. General Kummer, during his brief tenure of a very difficult and delicate office, had earned a well-deserved popularity. His urbanity and consideration to the French officers were appreciated warmly by them all, and not a few of them referred to the subject in my hearing with deep feeling. I have omitted to mention before, that when the report of the capitulation became spread abroad throughout the army on the evening of the 28th Oct., a great number of regimental officers had a sort of caucus meeting, in which they discussed the matter. Universal indignation at the conduct of Bazaine was expressed, and it having been estimated that the officers present were able to rely on the fidelity of a following of some 25,000 men, it was resolved that a desperate effort should be made that same night to cut a way through the German lines. The meeting separated, and one of its members came to the Hôtel de l’Europe, where, over a bottle of champagne, he made his last will and testament, and with a tear in his eye, committed it to his friend my informant, and went forth with set teeth on his desperate emprise. Next morning he came back to breakfast, blythe as a bird, and reclaimed his will. It seemed there had been a miscalculation. Instead of the following of 25,000 men on which the officers had relied, they could not get a man to follow them. The realisation of the misconception prevented the attempt being made.

I never tired of passing my time in watching the Place Royale and the Esplanade, on which were quartered the wounded. On the former were the railway car hospitals, on the latter are fine roomy tents, holding twelve men each comfortably. What a variety of mutilations you noticed among the convalescents. Men who had lost a leg, others a foot, others an arm; the gamut of mutilation was run up and down till you almost expected to see a man walking about without a head. It was a listless, weary promenade which these unfortunates executed. Some few formed little groups for conversation, and others made belief to play at a kind of outdoor billiards on a wooden frame on the ground, but most patrolled languidly backwards and forwards, with a dejected listlessness that was the more painful to witness because it is so un-Frenchlike. I suppose they must have been tired of the promenade at the top of the Esplanade over against the river, for there were seldom more than a few there. And yet the view from it is one of which I think it must take a long time to get weary. If I could think the inhabitants of the Esplanade possessed of so much depth of feeling, I would fain have imagined that they shun the promenade on the ramparts that the sight of so much of beauty lost to France might not wound them too poignantly. Behind, among the tents, are the statues, and the still bright flower-beds. In front, at one’s feet, are the outworks, and then the broad stream of the river, with the fertile meadows of Simphorien beyond. On the right, across the stream, is the Isle de Sauley, the island of the weeping willows, with its powder-magazines all but hidden among the graceful willows and the tall poplars. On the left is the citadel, with its green earthworks and glacis, and beyond the beautiful suburb of Montigny, with the bend of the stream farther on ending in the railway bridge, the horizon to the south, bounded by the range of heights, of which the highest is Mont St. Blaise, with its ruined château and the Observatory, from which I had looked down on the plain and city. Over St. Simphorien is the other branch of the Moselle, fringed by the nestling villages of Moulin, St. Ruffine, Ban St. Martin, and Devant-les-Ponts, wearing a very peaceful aspect but for the absence of smoke from the chimneys. Over them towers abruptly the rugged Mont St. Quentin, with the vineyards on its shoulders, lovingly hugging the white villages, then the bare interval of red scarp, and then the summit, crowned by the great spreading fortress, its warm grey tint brought out in the slanting sunbeams. Well may St. Quentin be called “the eagle of Metz,” soaring over the valley, as it does, up in the very sky. Alas! for France and Metz, the wings of the eagle were shorn. On its ramparts there was an eagle still, it is true, but it was the eagle on the helmet of the Prussian sentry, who as he paused in his beat, and looked down on what a week before deserved the name its inhabitants so fondly gave it, “La Pucelle,” may be trying how he can adapt the German song, “Oh Strassburg, oh Strassburg, Du wunderschön stadt,” to the new conquest. Verily, it is a wonderful city, a city for the possession of which to stake everything and to fight to the last man and the last ditch. Now that the German army had seen it—few who have not studied him know what an instinctive eye the German soldier has for the beauties of nature—he would not be a discreet man who should have suggested that the prize should be let slip. Nothing so much strengthened Bismarck’s hand in his demand for Lorraine, as the opportunity the German army had for seeing and admiring Metz.

The very heavens seemed to smile on the capture of la Pucelle. For days before Bazaine had sent in his capitulation it had seemed as if a repetition of the deluge of Noah was in progress. All the low country was inundated; where the waters had not yet reached, the ground was a thin, spongy, quagmire of mud. On the day that the Germans marched in and the French marched out, the heavens still wept copiously, as if in lamentation over a spectacle so full of woe for France. But when the German sentry had taken his post on the gates, and when the black and white flag floated out over the huge brown works of Plappeville, out came the sun in a joyous radiance. As if by magic, the waters abated. On St. Simphorien, where but the day before the dove could have found no rest for the sole of her foot, an army might now have manœuvred. The mud dried up, and the roads become hard again—those wonderful roads that stubbornly resisted deterioration by the grinding wheels of the cannon and proviant columns, and which ought of themselves to prevent the name of the Third Napoleon, their constructor, from being held in execration by the French. Under the bracing influence of the bright sun and the frosty wind, everybody and everything seemed to regain cheerfulness. The French prisoners yet remaining in Retonfay had somehow got the mud off their clothes, and with the mud had gone the moodiness. The German troops had heel-balled the eagle on their helmets, and polished after a fashion the long boots that for days before had been caked with successive layers of mud. The townspeople, in all their sullenness, felt and yielded to the influence of the fine weather. The ladies of the place, of whom hitherto we had only caught glimpses as a pretty face peered out from behind a window-blind, came out into the streets, and tripped along, daintily booted and delicately gloved, among the dashing German subalterns, who might have been excused for glances of undisguised admiration, and among the throng of common soldiers, who seemed unimpressible, but were as courteously civil as if they had served an apprenticeship as masters of the ceremonies. Metz seemed to have no objection to any amount of what it no doubt considered the mammon of unrighteousness in the shape of Prussian thalers. All the shops were open, and had got stocked with a rapidity that might have been accounted for either by concealed stores or by wonderful enterprise in getting supplies speedily from Saarbrück or Nancy. The cafés swarmed with German officers, with French officers, with French civilians. It was already two days since the departure of the last train had been notified for the conveyance of French officers to Germany, but there must still have been close on 1800 of them left in Metz. I suppose the greater proportion of them must have been on the sick or convalescent list, but I saw comparatively few who appeared seriously ailing. The diverse propensities of the two armies in the matter of drinking could be seen at a glance by a visit to a café. The German officer, trim, neat, buttoned up to the throat, dressed as regimentally as if on parade, and with a carriage that might suggest his having swallowed a ramrod, entered, saluted the room all round with a stiff-necked bow and a chink together of his spurred heels; then stalked to a seat, and called for a “Glas Bier.” The French officer, his frogged and furred undress pilot coat open at the throat, and showing a slice of shirt-collar and of front—a dickey, for aught I know—and with the invariably white or brightly-coloured cravat, thrown loosely round his neck, lounged in with his hands in his pockets, nodded to a friend, tumbled in a heap on to a settee—if he ever swallowed a ramrod the gastric juice must have made pulp of it long ago—and called for a _petit verre_ of cognac or absinthe. He took his tipple neat, fiery as it is. As the German plunged his moustache into the froth of his beer flagon, he gave one the idea that he was drinking because he had thirst and wanted to quench it. It was impossible to think the same of the Frenchman as he took a sip out of the little glass, and rolled the spirit round his mouth and under his tongue with as much gusto as if it had been a sin.

As I was strolling on the Esplanade, on the morning of the 4th, I met a comfortable-looking old gentleman, in gaiters and woollen gloves. A remark as to the scenery served as a mutual introduction, and he told me he was an old officer of artillery who, during the greater part of the siege, had held the position of Commandant of Fort Queleu, and who, when capitulation seemed imminent, had returned to the civil life, out of which the siege had temporarily called him, so as to escape expatriation as a prisoner of war. The good old gentleman spoke very frankly as to the events of the siege, and had no hesitation in speaking his mind as to Marshal Bazaine, and the motives by which, from first to last, he had been actuated. When the Army of the Rhine first fell back around the fortifications of Metz, after the battle of the 18th of August, instead of making efforts which he thought undoubtedly would have been successful, to push onward for a junction with the rest of the French forces, Bazaine’s explanation to his principal officers for his policy was to the effect that the forts of Metz were in a defensive condition so backward that he dared not, consistently with his duty to France and his impression as to the importance of Metz as the premier fortress of the Empire, abandon it in its then inchoate condition to a defence to be carried on solely by its garrison. In this view the commander of Fort Queleu declared that he completely coincided. Comparatively trivial efforts would, he believed, have sufficed to reduce Metz immediately after the 18th of August, had there been no army to support the garrison, and to strengthen the fortifications, and had the Germans taken immediate advantage of the state of weakness. Bazaine, he continued, with a zeal and industry beyond all praise, had put the forts into a state of efficient defence by the end of the month. It was then, according to my informant’s views, that his presence for the first time became _de trop_ in Metz, and then it was that he ought, with all the vigour he could exert, to have burst through the German cordon and got at large. That he could have done this, whether in prosecution of the temporarily energetic sortie which lasted over two days—31st August and 1st September—in the direction of Nosseville, Servigny, and St. Barbe, or in the better line down the valley of the Moselle, my interlocutor had no doubt; and it is fair to him to mention that I found many German officers who could not conscientiously differ from this view. After the middle of September, however, Bazaine’s position, in view of breaking-out tactics, had become hopeless. Sickness was decimating his ranks; his troops had already eaten deep into the means for transporting artillery and train. I asked the old commandant how, in his opinion, it was that Bazaine did not strike a decisive blow for extrication after his presence in Metz for good had ceased. The reply, to my thinking, was very pregnant. Bazaine, a capable general, a gallant man, and a sincere patriot, hung balanced between two stools. Instead of looking with a single eye to his duties as a military commander, he became distracted with political complications. In the early days he was studying the interests of the Emperor, and the means of conserving for Imperialistic uses the army under his command. Later on, the poison of personal ambition had impregnated the system of the hitherto straightforward soldier. He had nourished dreams of seeing himself Regent of France, and made ducks and drakes of his reputation without attaining the personal _quid pro quo_ he hankered after.

What a strange kaleidoscopic scene in those early post-capitulation times did the great room of the Hôtel de l’Europe present from day to day! Yesterday it had been thronged by officers of the 7th Army Corps; to-day it was the 8th; on the morrow it would be the turn of the first to snatch a glass of the “sparkling” before the route is taken for the champagneless villages on the line of march. As I sit in my quiet corner, there comes clinking and clattering in a divisional staff; hussars blue, hussars green, hussars red, hussars brown, and hussars black—the last with the grinning death’s head and the crossed thigh-bones in silver on the busbies. All are speaking at once, most at the top of their voices, and the clamour is for champagne, of which 400 bottles were drunk in one day in the room in which I sit. If I had the portrait edition of the _Almanach de Gotha_, I might identify the bearers of some of the proudest names in the Fatherland; for the wearers of the showy uniforms are many of them princes and poins. Of Grafs and Freiherrs, the crop is too large to take any account of. This young slip of a lad with the pale face and the slight moustache is of the blood royal of Russia, and not many removes off the throne of the Czar. He is studying the art of war, attached to the staff of General Manteuffel. If grim Nicholas—he of the Roman nose and strong jaw—were alive to-day, with what interest would he be watching this contest, and how searching would be his questioning of his young kinsman on his return to the banks of the Neva! Who is this straight, square man, stiff of figure and massive of head, that comes quietly into the room alone? All rise respectfully as the door frames, as in a picture, that powerful figure. The sparse hair on the face is but slightly grizzled; surely the man with the few medals on his broad breast, and the simple General’s star at his button-hole cannot be a personage of great distinction. You may search in vain the roll of the German army to find a name more honoured or more deserving of honour. The big quiet man is General von Göben, the commander of the 8th Army Corps, the youngest commander of an army corps in the Prussian service, the one who has seen the most fighting. So gluttonous is he for fighting, that when there was peace within the borders of the Fatherland this modern Bayard was fighting in the fierce internal strifes of Spain. In this war he has borne the brunt of the hardest fighting. At Spicheren he had relieved Kamecke of the command; on the rugged slope of Gorze, and in the thickets of the Bois des Genivaux, he saw full many of his Rhinelanders go down. Von Göben seats himself beside a burly officer with a bushy beard, clad in the white and green of the Cuirassiers. The pallor of the big officer’s face contrasts markedly with his jetty beard. Well may he be pale. A furrow of that field at the north of Vionville soaked in not a little of his blood as he lay there on the night of the 16th of August, a chassepot ball in his chest and a sword-cut across that hard, bullet head of his. It was he who led the Cuirassiers, diminished from a strong regiment to a weak squadron in that last death-charge against the French battery. He took the cigar out of his mouth to shout the “Vorwärts,” and then sat down in his saddle and spurred the big bay into a charging gallop. It was his luck and his hard head, he tells you, that pulled him through when so many of his brother officers fell to rise no more. And now he is a Rittmeister, no less, and has a good chance of the order _pour merite_. At a side-table there sit together an Oberst of reserve Uhlans, and a quiet little officer in a general’s uniform. The chubby Oberst ought to have an army corps at least, if, indeed, he should not supersede von Moltke, to judge of the energetic and fluent manner in which he is demonstrating how a battle should be won to the quiet little taciturn man beside him, who has a queer half comical look in those grey eyes of his. The Oberst is, to use a vulgar phrase, teaching his grandmother to suck eggs. The little General commands a division, and has before to-day directed the operations of an army. He is the author of a standard work on military strategy; whereas the Oberst for the last dozen years has been tilling his acres away in Pomerania. Nearer to me is a group of subalterns of a Hohenzollern regiment, the youngsters drinking Rhine wine when all others in the room are votaries of champagne. The Hohenzollerns affect “a deep deep draught of the good Rhine wine,” for they are a Rhineland Regiment, and it has always been a regimental tradition to stick to the Rudesheim. In the group is a blithe young face I know right well. Many a hearty clink of glasses has passed between us, not a few mornings have we patrolled together the foreposts in the valley on the French side of Saarbrück. Under the silky moustache you may faintly trace two slight weals. How they came there is a story. The lad was among the foremost up the steep of the Spicheren-berg. So difficult was the climb that he had to take to his hands and knees, and, as you may see a butcher do, he stuck his sword between his teeth. Like a silly fellow, he turned the edge inwards instead of outwards, and when, after his manner, he took to roaring “Vorwärts,” the keen blade enlarged the naturally by no means diminutive orifice of his mouth. At another table sits Kummer, the chief of the Landwehr men, with a certain Landwehr, fatherly look about himself. In the corner opposite me is the sole group out of uniform. Two are the almoners of the Berliner Hülfsverein, the third is Professor Kollmann, of Munich, who has thrown aside the toga and the doctor’s cap to take the charge of a lazarette. The fourth is, what think you?—a lady. In the military history of Europe the name of von Alten is not unknown to fame. It can be unfamiliar to no student of Waterloo literature. The male von Altens of to-day are all soldiers, and the lady at the table with the Professor is their sister, and a sick nurse in an hospital at Chalons. In the salons of Berlin there was no fairer face than that of Agnes von Alten; now the salons know it no more; but when the soldier awakes from out of his delirium, or when the chloroform-influence leaves him after an operation, he finds her bending over him in tender solicitude. There are those, I fancy, in the gay staff coats at the centre table, who would gladly hail a wound if they could only choose their nurse.

The forenoon of the 5th I devoted to a careful examination of the French line of defence which opposed the German environment on the west. A description of its characteristics may, I fear, be but dull reading, but I do not feel myself entitled on that account to refrain from writing it, looking at the fact that the salient points of this line of defence probably disappeared within a few weeks after, and that some details with regard to it may not be useless in a humble way to the Alison or the Kinglake of this stupendous war. Crossing the river and the Thionville Railroad, on which a train of repairing materials was moving forward with a tentative slowness that reminded me of a Highland pony’s movements in a bog, I traversed a flat expanse of considerable size, which had been occupied as the French Guards’ camp, and then passed through Ban St. Martin, noticing on the way the château in which Bazaine had had his head-quarters. The abrupt rise of St. Quentin began two steps after I had cleared the lanes of Ban St. Martin. Looking at this hill from where you will, you cannot question its steepness; but how steep it is on the face looking towards the town is only to be appreciated by whoever essays to climb it on a frosty morning, when the air is rarefied, and when the ground has yielded its hardness caused by the frost into superficial slipperiness caused by the sun’s heat. There was no road but a faint footpath through the vineyards, which soon broke into what may be called a spray of still tinier tracks, and then utterly disappeared. As I toiled slowly and laboriously up the slippery steep, it became apparent to me that a position such as that of Fort St. Quentin, so advantageous because of its isolation and the great area which its height allows it to dominate, may yet have elements of weakness caused by its very isolation and height. Looking upward as I clambered, I could see no grim earthworks on the crest, no cannon mouths depressed so as to sweep this ascent. The hill shoulders up very steeply for three-fourths its height, and then “tumbles home” so rapidly to the summit on which stands the fort, that its base, as well as the lower steeps, are protected from the fire of the fort by the convexity of the more upland configuration. This fire could not be brought to bear upon these spaces directly, no matter by what expedient, and if once, therefore, an enemy’s force could get across the outside area swept by the guns of the fort, it might nestle snugly, if audaciously, right under the lee of the fortress, keeping itself safe much in the same manner as we read of a nigger sticking on the back of a crocodile while the monster snaps his jaws and lashes his tail to no purpose. All that St. Quentin could do in the way of dislodgment must be by an indirect and plunging fire, and the bay of safety is so close, that its artillery essaying any such fire would have to fire at an elevation closely approaching to the perpendicularly upwards. But a glance backward as one climbs forcibly impresses on one the care and skill with which the several parts of the defence of Metz are made to dovetail one into the other. Where the configuration of the ground draws the teeth of St. Quentin, the bare tusks of the citadel of Metz show themselves dangerously. Its guns look across the Simphorien on to the alluvial plateau of Ban St. Martin and the lower steeps of Mont St. Quentin, and change the “bay of safety” into a position utterly untenable, while the batteries of Montigny and Longeville, one face pointing up the river, the other athwart it, opposed at once a direct and enfilading fire to any body of troops rash enough to essay the path leading to this same untenable bay of safety. Nor was this all that has been done to guard this access, and to negative the feasibility of this place of lodgment. Out of the round shoulder of Mont St. Quentin, just where the “tumbling home” begins, there rises an abrupt, isolated peak, a kind of junior Mont St. Quentin in itself. On the summit of this Bazaine’s engineers had knocked up a hasty, but most useful outwork. A strong loopholed palisading enclosed bomb-proof subterranean quarters for about half a battalion, and there were evidences that on the top of this bomb-proof a couple of pieces of artillery had been mounted. From the slits in the palisading the infantry men standing on the tread could have searched with the muzzles of their chassepots the “bay of safety,” while the shells from the depressed pieces of artillery could have torn down through the steeps of the vineyards, or pelted into the pretty châteaux and snug cottages of Ban St. Martin in the level bottom.

Traversing the interval between this useful outwork, and the almost upright substructure of granite blocks which forms the eastern foundation of Fort St. Quentin, I came upon a deep cutting, crossed by a foot-bridge. At the bottom of the cutting was a railway worked by wire ropes. At the summit of the incline, a little to my right, was the house of the stationary engine that had puffed so assiduously during the siege, but that was now silent and deserted. On the left the track seemed to tumble over a precipice into the valley of the Moselle, near to Longeville—the declivity must in truth be very steep. This line, used for the transport of building materials and munitions of war for Fort St. Quentin, and a continuation of which had performed the same function for Fort Plappeville, was constructed, it may be interesting for railway readers to know, on the same gauge as the well-known Festiniog line. It must have been of extraordinary importance during the building and siege operations. Crossing the flying bridge of the railway, I climbed up on to the plateau on which stands the fort, through a perfect litter of chassepot guns and chassepot ammunitions, which had been strewed there by the French troops to whom the order had been given to lay down their arms within the fortification. I skirted its left, making for the brow of the mount, looking out over against the plateau of St. Hubert and Châtel St. Germain, anxious, as on the morning of the 19th of August I had seen the French army lying on this brow, to see how from it the Prussian position must have appeared.

Fort St. Quentin by no means occupies the whole of the summit of the hill of the same name. It stands on an almost imperceptibly raised space on the extreme verge of the eastern extremity. To the westward extends a rugged flat of about a mile in length, by half as much in breadth. The appearance the hill presents was as if some Titan of old had shaved off flat its pointed top, and then strewed boulders over the surface. These boulders, as well as the space between them, are now covered with a short, half-heathy sward. It was then on this flat that the French had sought refuge when at daylight on the 19th of August we looked out from the miserable bivouac on the blood-stained field of Gravelotte, and saw their white tents between us and the dull heavy mass of Fort St. Quentin, as if for safety they were throwing their bare arms around the protecting fortress. On the flat were yet visible the traces of the trenches they had dug around the tents, and their _al fresco_ kitchen fires had left their marks on the sward. I was not a little surprised on pressing forward to the edge of this flat to find its margin bordered by a substantial and systematically constructed entrenchment. This line of entrenchment sprang up the steep side of the hill between the top and the village of Scy, which is just outside its cordon. If constructed at all during the siege, it must have been made in the early days. The face was banked up with an earthen slope now grass grown; inside was the inner face of an upright wall of stones uncemented by mortar. This entrenchment was regularly constructed with salient and re-entering angles, and with bastion-like projections at intervals, for sweeping the face laterally. Close behind were, at intervals, bomb-proof half-underground constructions for the protection of troops not actually lining the entrenchment, and that it was not meant as a place of occasional resort, but was habitually held by defenders, was evidenced by the durable construction of the kitchens, as well as by other less savoury tokens of the continuous presence of troops. In the rear of the bomb-proofs, at frequent intervals, were the earthworks thrown up for batteries. Encircling, as this entrenchment did, the extreme edge of the plateau, its defenders could look right down into the valley below, as well as across at the lower and less abrupt heights opposite which constitute the fringe of the plateau of St. Hubert; and with proper appliances and moderate determination, could, to all appearance, have prevented anything from living in, much less successfully traversing, that valley, to make an assault. This defence work of the summit of Mont St. Quentin, which may be called the key of Metz, presented an appearance so formidable as to seem almost to reduce into a superfluity the great fort in its rear; although of course the utility of the latter became obvious for all round firing at long ranges in co-operation with the other forts for the protection of Metz. This line ran away, still as strong as ever, down into the dip between the summit of Mont St. Quentin and the longer hog-backed ridge of Plappeville. As it came on upon the latter, instead of climbing directly up the face and so passing close under the greater fortification, it took a sweep westward, skirting the eminence near its base, and was continued right round to the northern front of Plappeville, putting an effectual check upon any sudden surprise from the Bois de Châtel or the Bois de Saulny.

How deceptive are appearances! From the shattered hamlet of St. Hubert, on the grand chaussée, I had looked over to St. Quentin on the morning of the 19th August, and had thought I could have knocked at the gates of the fort after a short half-hour’s walk. Now, looking from St. Quentin to St. Hubert, I could barely see the ruined hamlet, and the poplar trees on the chaussée stood up against the horizon. Yet the distance could not have been so great after all, since a shot from Fort St. Quentin on the morning I refer to had killed two German soldiers mounted at the hamlet on the chaussée. Now on the horizon were visible the long low huts which the Germans had erected as their temporary barracks. Much closer on the left, and near the chaussée, where it passes through Roserieulles on its way into the Moselle valley, I noticed the trim square earthwork, so completely constructed as to have been sodded up with turf, of a German battery. In this battery had stood the 12-pounder guns which had burned the village of Moulin les Metz in the early days of October. What the gunners in St. Quentin were thinking of to allow the erection of this earthwork in such a position I could not comprehend. To pound it to pieces they need scarcely have taken the trouble to elevate the muzzles of the great guns on the top of the casemates. A steady cannonade must have made its construction too arduous for the Germans, not given, save in rare instances, to squander lives wantonly. Nay, more, at a quarter of a mile closer still, at La Maison Blanche, just behind Longeau, there stood an impudent little affair of an improvised battery, thrown up for a few field pieces. I wondered if the gunners there, whose lives were not worth five minutes’ purchase had St. Quentin been in earnest to dislodge the cocky little concern, ever sent a six-pound shell flying across the valley at the big guns of the fort, in mere bravado. Quitting the entrenchment, I plunged down the slope, about midway between the villages of Lessy and Scy. Now I was among what had been the French outposts, guarding the country roads and the hill paths. The inartistic character of the field defences, on the French side, surprised me not a little. There was a trench across the path with the earth thrown up on the farther side, and that was all. There was no cover for retreat, there were no means of pouring in a cross fire, there was no continuation of the cordon of entrenchment, so as to give cover for a thin line of riflemen connecting the posts. It was the same with the position for a field watch in front of Plappeville, between the entrenchments and the Bois de Châtel. The half-moon ditch and paltry earthen breastwork stood there utterly isolated and disconnected. Under a hot fire from the adjacent wood, no relief could have reached it, nor could its occupants have fallen back on their supports in the inner entrenchments, without ruinous loss. It was another story when, having crossed the bottom, I came upon the German foreposts on the opposite slope. On one side of the narrow path there looked down on me a venomous little work, behind which some half-a-dozen marksmen might have stood. Half-a-dozen paces forward, on the other side, there was a duplicate. It made one uncomfortable, even in the solitude, to move about in the continual consciousness that, look which way one might, there was one of these posts looking one all but full in the face, while at least a couple of others were squinting at one on the flanks. Then right in front came an obstruction of felled trees, then the _chevaux de frise_ of vineyard stakes stuck in the ground, and last of all the deep trench across the road, with its substantial parapet running away on either side in an unbroken cordon. It was not one road that was so protected on the German side, but all. A comparison of the field works of the rival armies impressed me, in short, with the conviction that the French works were constructed by soldiers, the German by engineers; and this surprised me the more, because the engineering ability displayed on the part of the French in the choice of sites for the forts, and in their construction, was of a very high order, an opinion, I am sure, which will be confirmed by our highest military critics.