ven to make now and then
fifty miles a day. Matters were pressing, you see (_sehen Sie
'mal_). At last we crossed at Coblentz, and got from there into
Belgium the first days of June. We met the French at Ligny,--a close,
bitter fight,--and half my battalion were left behind there where they
had stood. We were a few paces off, posted in a graveyard, when the
French cavalry rode over old Marshal Vorwaerts, lying under his horse.
I saw the rush of the French, then the countercharge of the Prussian
troopers when missed the General and drove the enemy back till they
found him again; though what it all meant we never knew till it was
over. Then, after mighty little rest, we marched fast and far, with
cannon-thunder in our ears in a constant mutter, always growing
louder, until in the afternoon we came at a quickstep through a piece
of woods out upon the plain by Waterloo, where they had been fighting
all day. Our feet sucked in the damp ground, the wet grain brushed our
knees, as our compact column spread out into more open order and went
into fire. What a smoke there was about La Haye Sainte and Hougomont,
with now lines of red infantry, or a column in dark blue, or a mass
of flashing cuirassiers hidden for a moment, then reappearing! It was
take and give, hot and heavy, for an hour or so about Planchenoit. A
ball grazed my elbow and another went through my cap; but at sunset
the French were broken, and we swept after the rout as well as we
could through the litter, along the southward roads. We were at a halt
for a minute, I remember, when a rider in a chapeau with a plume, and
a hooked nose underneath, trotted up, wrapped in a military cloak,
and somebody said it was Wellington." Grandfather was sure to be at
a white heat before he had finished, and so, too, his audience. The
athletic student grandson, with a deep scar across his cheek from a
_Schlaeger_ cut, rose and paced the room. The _Fraeulien_,
his sister, to whom the retired grenadier has told the story of the
feather-beds at Weimar, showed in her eves she remembered it all.
"Yes, friend American!" breaks in the father of the family, "and it
all must be done over again. Sooner or later it must come, a great
struggle with France; the Latin race or the Teutonic, which shall be
supreme in Europe? We are ready now; arsenals filled, horses waiting,
equipments for everybody. Son Fritz there has his uniform ready, and
somewhere there is one for me. _Donnerwetter_! If they g