he earthenware tiles they have stuck all over it. I'll be hanged if
I know why we let go our hold of it that morning, for we broke all our
teeth and nails trying to get it back again in the afternoon, without
succeeding. Oh, my children, if I were to tell you of the slaughter
there, the throats that were cut and the brains knocked out, you would
refuse to believe me! The next place where we had trouble was around a
village with the jaw-breaking name of Elsasshausen. We got a peppering
from a lot of guns that banged away at us at their ease from the top of
a blasted hill that we had also abandoned that morning, why, no one has
ever been able to tell. And there it was that with these very eyes of
mine I saw the famous charge of the cuirassiers. Ah, how gallantly they
rode to their death, poor fellows! A shame it was, I say, to let men and
horses charge over ground like that, covered with brush and furze, cut
up by ditches. And on top of it all, _nom de Dieu!_ what good could
they accomplish? But it was very _chic_ all the same; it was a beautiful
sight to see. The next thing for us to do, shouldn't you suppose so? was
to go and sit down somewhere and try to get our wind again. They had set
fire to the village and it was burning like tinder, and the whole gang
of Bavarian, Wurtemburgian and Prussian pigs, more than a hundred and
twenty thousand of them there were, as we found out afterward, had got
around into our rear and on our flanks. But there was to be no rest
for us then, for just at that time the fiddles began to play again
a livelier tune than ever around Froeschwiller. For there's no use
talking, fellows, MacMahon may be a blockhead but he is a brave man; you
ought to have seen him on his big horse, with the shells bursting all
about him! The best thing to do would have been to give leg-bail at the
beginning, for it is no disgrace to a general to refuse to fight an army
of superior numbers, but he, once we had gone in, was bound to see the
thing through to the end. And see it through he did! why, I tell you
that the men down in Froeschwiller were no longer human beings; they
were ravening wolves devouring one another. For near two hours the
gutters ran red with blood. All the same, however, we had to knuckle
under in the end. And to think that after it was all over they should
come and tell us that we had whipped the Bavarians over on our left!
By the piper that played before Moses, if we had only had a hundred and