trained soldiery to move onward and fill up
the casualties of the campaign--forming a third line of defence.

These gigantic masses were organised with the celerity and precision of
clockwork, and then sent forward westward, perfectly equipped--in the
highest sense a national army, being over four hundred thousand strong!

Day after day, up to the end of July, the different railway lines of
Germany bore the mighty host onward to the banks of the Rhine in endless
succession of train-loads. Mass after mass of armed men, duly supplied
with all the material of war, advanced rapidly, yet in due pre-arranged
order, to the points selected for their gathering; while, in the
meantime, the fortresses along the line of the river, where the first
French attack was expected to be made, were put in a proper state of
defence, and now, with strong garrisons, repaired works, ditches filled,
and ramparts crowned with Krupp cannon, were prepared to defy the
invader. By the first week of August three great armies had taken
possession of the strip of territory, lying between the lower stream of
the Moselle and the Rhine, which had for centuries been a battlefield
between the German and French races, and which was now to witness
fighting on a scale which put every previous campaign into the shade.
The first army, under the veteran General Steinmetz, who had won his
spurs at Waterloo, had been moved from the north down the valley of the
Moselle and along the railway from Bingen, with its headquarters at the
strongly fortified town of Coblentz. The second, or "central army,"
under Prince Frederick Charles, "the Red Prince," as his enthusiastic
soldiers styled him, occupied Mannheim and Mayence, guarding the Vosges,
through which was the principal avenue to the heart of the coveted
Rhineland provinces; while the third army, under the Crown Prince of
Prussia, who, as is well-known, is married to our own "Princess Royal,"
had its headquarters at Landau, where also the Baden and Wurtemberg
contingents had to rendezvous.

"The ball was opened"--to use the light-hearted expression of a French
journalist in describing the commencement of the murderous struggle for
supremacy between the two nations--at Saarbruck on the 2nd of August,
1870, when the late ill-fated Prince Imperial of France received his
"baptism of fire"; but the first real engagement of the war did not
occur till two days later, at Weissembourg, this being succeeded by the
terrib