Upon losing sight of the general at the Minil gate Delaherche had hurried back to the factory at the best speed he was capable of, impelled by an irresistible longing to have another look from his observatory at what was going on in the distance. Just as he reached his door, however, his progress was arrested a moment by encountering Colonel de Vineuil, who, with his blood-stained boot, was being brought in for treatment in a condition of semi- consciousness, upon a bed of straw that had been prepared for him on the floor of a market-gardener's wagon. The colonel had persisted in his efforts to collect the scattered fragments of his regiment until he dropped from his horse. He was immediately carried upstairs and put to bed in a room on the first floor, and Bouroche, who was summoned at once, finding the injury not of a serious character, had only to apply a dressing to the wound, from which he first extracted some bits of the leather of the boot. The worthy doctor was wrought up to a high pitch of excitement; he exclaimed, as he went downstairs, that he would rather cut off one of his own legs than continue working in that unsatisfactory, slovenly way, without a tithe of either the assistants or the appliances that he ought to have. Below in the ambulance, indeed, they no longer knew where to bestow the cases that were brought them, and had been obliged to have recourse to the lawn, where they laid them on the grass. There were already two long rows of them, exposed beneath the shrieking shells, filling the air with their dismal plaints while waiting for his ministrations. The number of cases brought in since noon exceeded four hundred, and in response to Bouroche's repeated appeals for assistance he had been sent one young doctor from the city. Good as was his will, he was unequal to the task; he probed, sliced, sawed, sewed like a man frantic, and was reduced to despair to see his work continually accumulating before him. Gilberte, satiated with sights of horror, unable longer to endure the sad spectacle of blood and tears, remained upstairs with her uncle, the colonel, leaving to Mme. Delaherche the care of moistening fevered lips and wiping the cold sweat from the brow of the dying.
Rapidly climbing the stairs to his terrace, Delaherche endeavored to form some idea for himself of how matters stood. The city had suffered less injury than was generally supposed; there was one great conflagration, however, over in the Faubourg de la Cassine, from which dense volumes of smoke were rising. Fort Palatinat had discontinued its fire, doubtless because the ammunition was all expended; the guns mounted on the Porte de Paris alone continued to make themselves heard at infrequent intervals. But something that he beheld presently had greater interest for his eyes than all beside; they had run up the white flag on the citadel again, but it must be that it was invisible from the battlefield, for there was no perceptible slackening of the fire. The Balan road was concealed from his vision by the neighboring roofs; he was unable to make out what the troops were doing in that direction. Applying his eye to the telescope, however, which remained as he had left it, directed on la Marfee, he again beheld the cluster of officers that he had seen in that same place about midday. The master of them all, that miniature toy-soldier in lead, half finger high, in whom he had thought to recognize the King of Prussia, was there still, erect in his plain, dark uniform before the other officers, who, in their showy trappings, were for the most part reclining carelessly on the grass. Among them were officers from foreign lands, aides-de-camp, generals, high officials, princes; all of them with field glasses in their hands, with which, since early morning, they had been watching every phase of the death-struggle of the army of Chalons, as if they were at the play. And the direful drama was drawing to its end.
From among the trees that clothed the summit of la Marfee King William had just witnessed the junction of his armies. It was an accomplished fact; the third army, under the leadership of his son, the Crown Prince, advancing by the way of Saint-Menges and Fleigneux, had secured possession of the plateau of Illy, while the fourth, commanded by the Crown Prince of Saxony, turning the wood of la Garenne and, coming up through Givonne and Daigny, had also reached its appointed rendezvous. There, too, the XIth and Vth corps had joined hands with the XIIth corps and the Guards. The gallant but ineffectual charge of Margueritte's division in its supreme effort to break through the hostile lines at the very moment when the circle was being rounded out had elicited from the king the exclamation: 'Ah, the brave fellows!' Now the great movement, inexorable as fate, the details of which had been arranged with such mathematical precision, was complete, the jaws of the vise had closed, and stretching on his either hand far in the distance, a mighty wall of adamant surrounding the army of the French, were the countless men and guns that called him master. At the north the contracting lines maintained a constantly increasing pressure on the vanquished, forcing them back upon Sedan under the merciless fire of the batteries that lined the horizon in an array without a break. Toward the south, at Bazeilles, where the conflict had ceased to rage and the scene was one of mournful desolation, great clouds of smoke were rising from the ruins of what had once been happy homes, while the Bavarians, now masters of Balan, had advanced their batteries to within three hundred yards of the city gates. And the other batteries, those posted on the left bank at Pont Maugis, Noyers, Frenois, Wadelincourt, completing the impenetrable rampart of flame and bringing it around to the sovereign's feet on his right, that had been spouting fire uninterruptedly for nearly twelve hours, now thundered more loudly still.
But King William, to give his tired eyes a moment's rest, dropped his glass to his side and continued his observations with unassisted vision. The sun was slanting downward to the woods on his left, about to set in a sky where there was not a cloud, and the golden light that lay upon the landscape was so transcendently clear and limpid that the most insignificant objects stood out with startling distinctness. He could almost count the houses in Sedan, whose windows flashed back the level rays of the departing day-star, and the ramparts and fortifications, outlined in black against the eastern sky, had an unwonted aspect of frowning massiveness. Then, scattered among the fields to right and left, were the pretty, smiling villages, reminding one of the toy villages that come packed in boxes for the little ones; to the west Donchery, seated at the border of her broad plain; Douzy and Carignan to the east, among the meadows. Shutting in the picture to the north was the forest of the Ardennes, an ocean of sunlit verdure, while the Meuse, loitering with sluggish current through the plain with many a bend and curve, was like a stream of purest molten gold in that caressing light. And seen from that height, with the sun's parting kiss resting on it, the horrible battlefield, with its blood and smoke, became an exquisite and highly finished miniature; the dead horsemen and disemboweled steeds on the plateau of Floing were so many splashes of bright color; on the right, in the direction of Givonne, those minute black specks that whirled and eddied with such apparent lack of aim, like motes dancing in the sunshine, were the retreating fragments of the beaten army; while on the left a Bavarian battery on the peninsula of Iges, its guns the size of matches, might have been taken for some mechanical toy as it performed its evolutions with clockwork regularity. The victory was crushing, exceeding all that the victor could have desired or hoped, and the King felt no remorse in presence of all those corpses, of those thousands of men that were as the dust upon the roads of that broad valley where, notwithstanding the burning of Bazeilles, the slaughter of Illy, the anguish of Sedan, impassive nature yet could don her gayest robe and put on her brightest smile as the perfect day faded into the tranquil evening.
But suddenly Delaherche descried a French officer climbing the steep path up the flank of la Marfee; he was a general, wearing a blue tunic, mounted on a black horse, and preceded by a hussar bearing a white flag. It was General Reille, whom the Emperor had entrusted with this communication for the King of Prussia: 'My brother, as it has been denied me to die at the head of my army, all that is left me is to surrender my sword to Your Majesty. I am Your Majesty's affectionate brother, Napoleon.' Desiring to arrest the butchery and being no longer master, the Emperor yielded himself a prisoner, in the hope to placate the conqueror by the sacrifice. And Delaherche saw General Reille rein up his charger and dismount at ten paces from the King, then advance and deliver his letter; he was unarmed and merely carried a riding whip. The sun was setting in a flood of rosy light; the King seated himself on a chair in the midst of a grassy open space, and resting his hand on the back of another chair that was held in place by a secretary, replied that he accepted the sword and would await the appearance of an officer empowered to settle the terms of the capitulation.
VII.
As when the ice breaks up and the great cakes come crashing, grinding down upon the bosom of the swollen stream, carrying away all before them, so now, from every position about Sedan that had been wrested from the French, from Floing and the plateau of Illy, from the wood of la Garenne, the valley of la Givonne and the Bazeilles road, the stampede commenced; a mad torrent of horses, guns, and affrighted men came pouring toward the city. It was a most unfortunate inspiration that brought the army under the walls of that fortified place. There was too much in the way of temptation there; the shelter that it afforded the skulker and the deserter, the assurance of safety that even the bravest beheld behind its ramparts, entailed widespread panic and demoralization. Down there behind those protecting walls, so everyone imagined, was safety from that terrible artillery that had been blazing without intermission for near twelve hours; duty, manhood, reason were all lost sight of; the man disappeared and was succeeded by the brute, and their fierce instinct sent them racing wildly for shelter, seeking a place where they
