"News? The same as usual. They are sh.e.l.ling Stra.s.sbourg with mortars; the city is on fire. Six hundred women and children left the city; the International Aid Society demanded it."
Presently he added: "A big battle was fought this morning along the Meuse. You can hear the guns yet."
"I have heard them for an hour," replied Jack.
They listened. Far to the south the steady intonation of the cannon vibrated, a vague sustained rumour, no louder, no lower, always the same monotonous measure, flowing like the harmony of flowing water, pa.s.sionless, changeless, interminable.
"Along the Meuse?" asked Jack, at last.
"Yes."
"Sedan?"
"Yes, Sedan."
The slow convoy was pa.s.sing now; the creak of wheel and the harsh sc.r.a.pe of axle and spring grated in their ears; the wind changed; the murmur of the cannonade was blotted out in the trample of hoofs, the thud of marching infantry.
Jack swung his horse"s head and drove out across the boundary into the French road. On every side crowded the teams, where the low mutter of the wounded rose from the foul straw; on every side pressed the red-legged infantry, rifles _en bandouliere_, shrunken, faded caps pushed back from thin, sick faces.
"My soldiers!" murmured Lorraine, sitting up straight. "Oh, the pity of it!--the pity!"
An officer pa.s.sed, followed by a bugler. He glanced vacantly at Jack, then at Lorraine. Another officer came by, leading his patient, bleeding horse, over which was flung the dusty body of a brother soldier.
The long convoy was moving more swiftly now; the air trembled with the cries of the mangled or the hoa.r.s.e groans of the dying.
A Sister of Mercy--her frail arm in a sling--crept on her knees among the wounded lying in a straw-filled cart. Over all, louder, deeper, dominating the confusion of the horses and the tramp of men, rolled the cannonade. The pulsating air, deep-laden with the monstrous waves of sound, seemed to beat in Lorraine"s face--the throbbing of her heart ceased for a moment. Louder, louder, nearer, more terrible sounded the thunder, breaking in long, majestic reverberations among the nearer hills; the earth began to shake, the sky struck back the iron-throated echoes--sounding, resounding, from horizon to horizon.
And now the troops around them were firing as they advanced; sheeted mist lashed with lightning enveloped the convoy, through which rang the tremendous clang of the cannon. Once there came a momentary break in the smoke--a gleam of hills, and a valley black with men--a glimpse of a distant town, a river--then the stinging smoke rushed outward, the little flames leaped and sank and played through the fog. Broad, level bands of mist, fringed with flame, cut the pasture to the right; the earth rocked with the stupendous cannon shock, the ripping rifle crashes chimed a dreadful treble.
There was a bridge there in the mist; an iron gate, a heavy wall of masonry, a glimpse of a moat below. The crowded wagons, groaning under their load of death, the dusty infantry, the officers, the startled horses, jammed the bridge to the parapets.
Wheels splintered and cracked, long-lashed whips snapped and rose, horses strained, recoiled, leaped up, and fell scrambling and kicking.
"Open the gates, for G.o.d"s sake!" they were shouting.
A great sh.e.l.l, moaning in its flight above the smoke, shrieked and plunged headlong among the wagons. There came a glare of blinding light, a velvety white cloud, a roar, and through the gates, no longer choked, rolled the wagon-train, a frantic stampede of men and horses. It caught the dog-cart and its occupants with it; it crushed the horse, seized the vehicle, and flung it inside the gates as a flood flings driftwood on the rocks.
Jack clung to the reins; the wretched horse staggered out into the stony street, fell, and rolled over stone-dead.
Jack turned and caught Lorraine in both arms, and jumped to a sidewalk crowded with soldiers, and at the same time the crush of wagons ground the dog-cart to splinters on the cobble-stones. The crowd choked every inch of the pavement--women, children, soldiers, shouting out something that seemed to move the ma.s.ses to delirium. Jack, his arm around Lorraine, beat his way forward through the throng, murmuring anxiously, "Are you hurt, Lorraine?
Are you hurt?" And she replied, faintly, "No, Jack. Oh, what is it? What is it?"
Soldiers blocked his way now, but he pushed between them towards a cleared s.p.a.ce on a slope of gra.s.s. Up the slope he staggered and out on to a stone terrace above the crush of the street. An officer stood alone on the terrace, pulling at some ropes around a pole on the parapet.
"What--what is that?" stammered Lorraine, as a white flag shot up along the flag-staff and fluttered drearily over the wall.
"Lorraine!" cried Jack; but she sprang to the pole and tore the ropes free. The white flag fell to the ground.
The officer turned to her, his face whiter than the flag. The crowd in the street below roared.
"Monsieur," gasped Lorraine, "France is not conquered! That flag is the flag of dishonour!"
They stared at each other in silence, then the officer stepped to the flag-pole and picked up the ropes.
"Not that!--not that!" cried Lorraine, shuddering.
"It is the Emperor"s orders."
The officer drew the rope tight--the white flag crawled slowly up the staff, fluttered, and stopped.
Lorraine covered her eyes with her hands; the roar of the crowd below was in her ears.
"O G.o.d!--O G.o.d!" she whispered.
"Lorraine!" whispered Jack, both arms around her.
Her head fell forward on her breast.
Overhead the white flag caught the breeze again, and floated out over the ramparts of Sedan.
"By the Emperor"s orders," said the officer, coming close to Jack.
Then for the first time Jack saw that it was Georges Carriere who stood there, ghastly pale, his eyes fixed on Lorraine.
"She has fainted," muttered Jack, lifting her. "Georges, is it all over?"
"Yes," said Georges, and he walked over to the flag-pole, and stood there looking up at the white badge of dishonour.
x.x.x
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
Daylight was fading in the room where Lorraine lay in a stupor so deep that at moments the Sister of Mercy and the young military surgeon could scarcely believe her alive there on the pillows.
Jack, his head on his arms, stood by the window, staring out vacantly at the streak of light in the west, against which, on the straight, gray ramparts, the white flag flapped black against the dying sun.
Under the window, in the muddy, black streets, the packed throngs swayed and staggered and trampled through the filth, amid a crush of camp-wagons, artillery, ambulances, and crowding squadrons of cavalry. Riotous line soldiers cried out "Treason!" and hissed their generals or cursed their Emperor; the tall cuira.s.siers surged by in silence, sombre faces turned towards the west, where the white flag flew on the ramparts. Heavier, denser, more suffocating grew the crush; an ambulance broke down, a caisson smashed into a lamp-post, a cuira.s.sier"s horse slipped in the greasy depths of the filth, pitching its steel-clad rider to the pavement. Through the Place d"Alsace-Lorraine, through the Avenue du College and the Place d"Armes, pa.s.sed the turbulent torrent of men and horses and cannon. The Grande Rue was choked from the church to the bronze statue in the Place Turenne; the Porte de Paris was piled with dead, the Porte de Balan tottered a ma.s.s of ruins.
The cannonade still shook the hills to the south in spite of the white flag on the citadel. There were white flags, too, on the ramparts, on the Port des Capucins, and at the Gate of Paris. An officer, followed by a lancer, who carried a white pennon on his lance-point, entered the street from the north. A dozen soldiers and officers hacked it off with their sabres, crying, "No surrender! no surrender!" Sh.e.l.ls continued to fall into the packed streets, blowing horrible gaps in the ma.s.ses of struggling men. The sun set in a crimson blaze, reflecting on window and roof and the b.l.o.o.d.y waters of the river. When at last it sank behind the smoky hills, the blackness in the city was lighted by lurid flames from burning houses and the swift crimson glare of Prussian sh.e.l.ls, still plunging into the town. Through the crash of crumbling walls, the hiss and explosion of falling sh.e.l.ls, the awful clamour and din in the streets, the town clock struck solemnly six times. As if at a signal the firing died away; a desolate silence fell over the city--a silence full of rumours, of strange movements--a stillness pulsating with the death gasps of a nation.
Out on the heights of La Moncelle, of Daigny, and Givonne lanterns glimmered where the good Sisters of Mercy and the ambulance corps pa.s.sed among the dead and dying--the thirty-five thousand dead and dying! The plateau of Illy, where the cavalry had charged again and again, was twinkling with thousands of lanterns; on the heights of Frenois Prussian torches swung, signalling victory.
But the spectacle in the interior of the town--a town of nineteen thousand people, into which now were crushed seventy thousand frantic soldiers, was dreadful beyond description. Horror multiplied on horror. The two bridges and the streets were so jammed with horses and artillery trains that it seemed impossible for any human being to move another inch. In the glare of the flames from the houses on fire, in the middle of the smoke, horses, cannon, fourgons, charrettes, ambulances, piles of dead and dying, formed a sickening pell-mell. In this chaos starving soldiers, holding lighted lanterns, tore strips of flesh from dead horses lying in the mud, killed by the sh.e.l.ls. Arms, broken and foul with blood and mud--rifles, pistols, sabres, lances, casques, mitrailleuses--covered the pavements.
The gates of the town were closed; the water in the fortification moats reflected the red light from the flames. The glacis of the ramparts was covered by black ma.s.ses of soldiers, watching the placing of a cordon of German sentinels around the walls.
All public buildings, all the churches, were choked with wounded; their blood covered everything. On the steps of the churches poor wretches sat bandaging their torn limbs with strips of b.l.o.o.d.y muslin.