Lorraine, A Romance

Metz, crouching behind Saint-Quentin and Les Bottes, turned her anxious eyes from Thionville to Saint-Julien and back to where MacMahon's three rockets should have starred the sky; and what she saw was the Red Prince riding like a fiery spectre from east to west; what she saw was the spiked helmets of the Feldwache and the sodded parapets of Longeau. Chained and naked, the beautiful city crouched in the tempest that was to free her forever and give her the life she scorned, the life more bitter than death.

Something of this ominous prophecy came to Jack, standing below the shrine of Our Lady of Morteyn, listening to the on-coming shock of German feet, as he watched the cavalry riding past in the glow of the setting sun.

And now the infantry burst into view, a gloomy, solid column tramp, tramp along the road--jägers, with their stiff fore-and-aft shakos, dull-green tunics, and snuffy, red-striped trousers tucked into dusty half-boots. On they came, on, on--would they never pass? At last they were gone, somewhere into the flaming west, and now the red sunbeams slanted on eagle crests and tipped the sea of polished spiked helmets with fire, for a line regiment was coming, shaking the earth with its rhythmical tramp--thud! thud! thud!

He looked across the fields to the hills beyond; more regiments, dark masses moving against the sky, covered the landscape far as the eye could reach; cavalry, too, were riding on the Saint-Avold road through the woods; and beyond that, vague silhouettes of moving wagons and horsemen, crawling out into the world of valleys that stretched to Bar-le-Duc and Avricourt.

Oppressed, almost choked, as though a rising tide had washed against his breast, ever mounting, seething, creeping, climbing, he moved forward, waiting for a chance to cross the road and gain the Château, where he could see the servants huddling over the lawn, and the old vicomte, erect, motionless, on the terrace beside his wife and Lorraine.

Already in the meadow behind him the first bivouac was pitched; on the left stood a park of field artillery, ammunition-wagons in the rear, and in front the long lines of picket-ropes to which the horses were fastened, their harness piled on the grass behind them.

The forge was alight, the farriers busy shoeing horses; the armourer also bent beside his blazing forge, and the tinkling of his hammer on small-arms rose musically above the dull shuffle of leather-shod feet on the road.

To the right of the artillery, bisected as is the German fashion, lay two halves of a battalion of infantry. In the foreground the officers sat on their camp-chairs, smoking long faïence pipes; in the rear, driven deep into the turf, the battalion flag stood furled in its water-proof case, with the drum-major's halberd beside it, and drums and band instruments around it on the grass. Behind this lay a straight row of knapsacks, surrounded by the rolled great-coats; ten paces to the rear another similar row; between these two rows stood stacks of needle-guns, then another row of knapsacks, another stack of needle-guns, stretching with mathematical exactness to the grove of poplars by the river. A cordon of sentinels surrounded the bivouac; there was a group of soldiers around a beer-cart, another throng near the wine-cart. All was quiet, orderly, and terribly sombre.