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By Root 2151 0

the Balan road and he could not follow the movements of troops there. Moreover, having put his eye to the telescope which was still trained in that direction, he once again had picked out the German Headquarters which he had already seen there at noon. The master, that diminutive tin soldier, as big as half your little finger, in whom he thought he had recognized the King of Prussia, was still standing there in his dark uniform, in front of the other officers, most of whom were lying on the grass and all shining with gold braid. There were foreign officers there, aides-de-camp, generals, court officials, princes, all provided with field glasses, and since early morning they had been following the death-struggles of the French army like a play. And now the terrible drama was drawing to its close.

From these wooded heights of La Marfée King William had just witnessed the conjunction of his troops. It was all over, the third army, under the command of his son the Crown Prince of Prussia, which had come via Saint-Menges and Fleigneux, was taking possession of the plateau of Illy, whilst the fourth, commanded by the Crown Prince of Saxony, was reaching the rendezvous through Daigny and Givonne, by means of a detour round the Garenne woods. The XIth corps and the Vth thus joined hands with the XIIth corps and the Prussian Guard. The supreme effort to break out of this circle as it was closing, the useless and glorious charge of the Margueritte division, had torn from the King a cry of admiration: ‘Oh, what brave fellows!’ Now the inexorable, mathematical enveloping movement was nearly complete, the jaws of the vice had come together and he could take in at a glance the immense wall of men and guns hemming in the defeated army. To the north the embrace was tightening and driving fugitives back into Sedan before the ceaseless fire from batteries in an unbroken line all along the horizon. To the south, Bazeilles, conquered, deserted and tragic, was burning itself out, sending up clouds of smoke and sparks, while the Bavarians, now occupying Balan, were levelling their guns three hundred metres from the town gates. And the other batteries along the left bank at Pont-Maugis, Noyers, Frénois, Wadelincourt, which had been firing non-stop for nearly twelve hours, were thundering louder than ever and completing the impassable girdle of fire right to below where the King was standing.

King William, who was getting tired, gave up using his field glasses for a minute and went on watching with the naked eye. The slanting sun was descending towards the woods and was about to set in a pure cloudless sky. It gilded the whole vast panorama, and shed on it such a clear light that the smallest details stood out with striking clarity. He could pick out the houses of Sedan, with their little black bars across the windows, the ramparts, the fortress, the complicated defensive system with its ridges in high relief. And scattered all round in the countryside, the fresh, gaily-painted villages looked like toy farms, Donchery to his left, on the edge of its flat plain, Douzy and Carignan to his right in the meadows. You could almost have counted the trees of the forest of the Ardennes, and its ocean of green stretched out of sight to the frontier. In this horizontal light the Meuse, with its meanderings, had become a river of pure gold. The atrocious, bloody battle itself, seen from such a height in the setting sun, was like a delicate painting: dead horsemen and disembowelled horses flecked the plateau of Floing with gay splashes of colour; further to the right, towards Givonne, the final scramble of the retreat made an interesting picture with the whirling of black dots running about and falling over themselves; and again in the Iges peninsula to the left a Bavarian battery with its guns the size of matches looked like a piece of nicely adjusted mechanism, for the eye could follow its regular, clockwork movements. It was unhoped-for, overwhelming victory, and the King had no remorse, faced as he was by these tiny corpses, these thousands of men less