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By Root 2146 0

amid the bullets and shells, unhurriedly, with his usual gloomy, indifferent bearing, going to meet his destiny. Perhaps he could hear behind him that implacable voice hounding him on, the voice screaming from Paris: ‘March on! March on! Die like a hero on the piled-up corpses of your people, fill the whole world with admiration and awe so that your son may reign!’ So he went on, urging his horse at a gentle trot. For a hundred metres he went on. Then he stopped and waited for the end he had come to find. Bullets whistled by like a hurricane, and a bursting shell had bespattered him with earth. Still he waited. His horse’s mane stood on end and its skin was twitching as it recoiled instinctively in the face of death which passed by at every moment but had no use for either man or beast. Then after this seemingly endless wait the Emperor, with his fatalistic resignation, understood that his hour was not yet, and slowly returned as though all he had wanted to do was reconnoitre the exact position of the German batteries.

‘Sir, what courage!… For pity’s sake don’t expose yourself any more…’

But with another gesture he invited his staff to follow him, without sparing them this time any more than he spared himself, and he rode up towards La Moncelle over the fields and the open ground of La Rapaille. One captain was killed and two horses were brought down. He passed in front of the regiments of the 12th corps, who watched him come and go like a ghost, with no salute, no acclaim.

Delaherche had witnessed all this. It made him shudder, especially when he reflected that as soon as he left the brickworks he also would be right in the path of the firing. He waited about and listened to some dismounted officers who had stayed there.

‘But I tell you he was killed instantly, a shell cut him in two!’

‘No he wasn’t. I saw him carried off… Just a straightforward wound, a splinter in the buttock…’

‘What time?’

‘About six-thirty, an hour ago… Up there near La Moncelle, in a sunken road…’

‘So he’s gone back to Sedan?’

‘Yes, of course, he’s in Sedan.’

Who were they talking about? Delaherche suddenly realized that it was Marshal MacMahon, wounded while inspecting the outposts. The marshal wounded! Just our luck, as the lieutenant of the marines had put it. He was thinking about the consequences of the accident when a dispatch-rider tore past, shouting to a friend he recognized:

‘General Ducrot is commander-in-chief! The whole army is to be concentrated at Illy to withdraw towards Mézières.’

He was already galloping away into Bazeilles under renewed fire, and Delaherche, appalled by all these extraordinary bits of news, one after another, and in danger of finding himself caught in the retreating army, made up his mind and ran all the way to Balan, whence he regained Sedan at last without too much trouble.

In Bazeilles the dispatch-rider went on galloping, looking for officers to give orders to. And the news galloped too – Marshal MacMahon wounded, General Ducrot appointed commander-in-Chief, the whole army falling back on Illy.

‘What? What are they saying?’ asked Weiss, his face blackened with powder. ‘Retreat to Mézières now! But it’s madness, they’ll never get through!’

He was full of despair and remorse at having advised this course the day before, and to General Ducrot of all people, who was now in supreme command. Of course it was all right the day before, and there was then no other line to take: retreat, immediate retreat through the Saint-Albert gap. But by now that route must be cut, the whole black swarm of Prussians had gone that way into the plain of Donchery. And, to weigh one act of folly against another, there was now only one left, and that was a desperate and courageous one, to throw the Bavarians back into the Meuse and pass over them and go back along the Carignan road.

Weiss, pushing up his glasses every second, explained the position to the lieutenant who was still propped against the door, with both legs gone, white and bleeding to death.

‘Sir, I assure you I am right… Tell your men to hold on… You can see