Chapter II: Pucella Rapta (3)

Hark! I hear the quiet tramp of the German infantrymen marching down the narrow street. It is the 2nd Division of the 1st Army Corps on its way through Metz. Ha! here comes the 45th, fresh, clean, and confident. Can you see any gaps in those dense files of fours, although it was the 45th that furnished the 285 _tapfere Krieger_ that lie in one long grave in the quiet garden by Château Gras? No, the depôt of the 45th has given over 1400 recruits to the Regiment which it feeds, and if more are wanted (and more were wanted), I doubt not the depôt is equal to the demand. And here comes the sister regiment of the brigade, the gallant 5th, the blood of whose linesmen ran in the gutters of Servigny in that “Schlacht bei Noisseville” on the afternoon of the 31st August. Here is the dashing Hauptmann, who one night, having sitten a little in the sun before it went down, took it into his head to pay a visit to the fair maidens of Villiers l’Orme. The Hauptmann lost his way, and only found it when he was under the nose of a French field watch. He lost, too, his horse, and had a night’s rest in the open in the vine-berg; but he does not look much the worse for it, does he? Crash! bang! Surely I know that tune! It is the old “Hohenfriedburg.” Faugh-a-ballagh there for the fighting 4th. If the obstruction consisted of men with arms in their hands, instead of a posse of _gamins_, the 4th would do their own work in the way of Faugh-a-ballagh. At the head of the brigade rides General Zglinitski, full, let us hope, of “vermicelli and tail ox.” He looks quite fresh and rosy. I wish his “grandmamma” could see him as he jogs through the Port de France. Ha! here comes the good Oberst, with the cares of that horrible lager of French prisoners off his mind; and now he is on the road again with a reasonable prospect of a fight. Behind him comes the 1st Battalion, marching splendidly; the houses echo again to their firm tread; and the 2nd Battalion follows, with the portly Mecklenburgher Major at its head, and young von Verzen, his adjutant, by his side. Here comes Puttkamer, “the good old man,” as we used to call him, who speaks English with a Scotch accent, because he learnt it from a certain Jessie of northern extraction. What do I hear? Can it be? Yes; it is the familiar, although still far-off, salutation of “Miss Lucy, Lucy Long.” Verily there is von Hosius in the flesh, and a good deal of that same, too. At his heels his Scotch terrier “Phipps,” and by his side his trusty Fïscher, adept at pantomime and lover of salt herrings. “_Kommen Sie mit?_” is the hearty question that greets me on every side. _Ach nein_, worse luck, old friends. To the 2nd succeeds the Fusilier Battalion, with the stalwart senior Hauptmann at its head, its major is detached on another command. Company after company passes me, the honest Kerle in the ranks grinning a kindly greeting to one who had shared with them their roughs and smooths, chiefly the former, goodness knows, for not a few weeks. Near the tail of all comes the 11th Company, my own, with stately Ertmann marching in its front. There is a little darn on the right breast of his coat; you would scarcely guess, to see his sturdy step and upright carriage, that it marks the spot where entered the bullet that went through him on the 14th of August. _Mein leiber Werth_, best of chums! truest of comrades! Shall we ever meet again, I wonder? And as I live, here is Feldwebel Strauss mended again after that unlucky bullet at the Brewery, and with the company account-book sticking out of his breast as of old. They turn the corner over the bridge, and my Metz friends are out of sight. Good luck and plenty of fighting be their lot wheresoever the fortune of war may carry them, and a glad home-coming when the _Friede_ comes at last!

END OF VOL. I.

BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Gustave von Alvensleben who commanded the 4th Corps is a full general.

[2] I observe it has been asserted that the French in those earlier battles did not resort to rifle-pits. Anybody asserting this who was in sight of the operations must have been stone-blind. I have been in dozens of them. The story of 800 and odd corpses having been found in one after the battle of the 14th of August must have been a “goak” perpetrated by some youngster on the staff eager to feed Germany with sensationalism. There were two varieties of what the Germans call schützen-graben. Of one the churchyard at Point du Jour is a good example—a triangle surrounded with a low wall, which had been loopholed, and with a trench inside for additional cover. The other pattern consisted of a small half-moon excavation—the convexity toward the enemy—the earth from the hole breasted up in front, over which the marksmen fired in a kneeling position. The maximum garrison of one of these rifle-pits must have been about twelve men, half of them firing while the other half rested behind the shelter. To have packed throngs of men into large rifle-pits would simply have been to provide so many charnel-houses. Doubtless numbers of the little half-moons are still to the fore on the battle-fields. It is easy to tell the French works from the German by the objective of their convexity. The Germans, however, converted many of them.

[3] I give no heed to the balderdash written about Bazaine’s abandonment to sensual indulgence, of which I have been unable to find a scintilla of unprejudiced and impartial confirmation.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

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Page 17. “petty” replaced by “pretty”.
Page 93. “eft” replaced by “left”.
Page 315. The scanned image was of poor quality for the phrase “About a mile and a half due south of”.
Page 433. The scanned image was of poor quality for the phrase most likely to be “top of the crust”.
Page 463. ““Vorwärts,’” replaced by ““Vorwärts,”” Divine
Emblems advertisement. “3s. 6a” replaced by “3s. 6d”.