horseman passed, then
another, then three, then six, then a dozen, all sitting with
poised carbines, scarcely noticing him at all, the low, blazing
sun glittering on the silver skulls and crossed thigh-bones, deep
set in their sombre head-gear.

They were Black Hussars.

A distant movement came to his ear at the same time, the soft
shock of thousands of footfalls on the highway. He sprang up and
started forward, but a trooper warned him back with a stern
gesture, and he stood at the foot of the shrine, excited but
outwardly cool, listening to the approaching trample.

He knew what it meant now; these passing videttes were the dust
before the tempest, the prophecy of the deluge. For the sound on
the distant highway was the sound of infantry, and a host was on
the march, a host helmeted with steel and shod with steel, a vast
live bulk, gigantic, scaled in mail, whose limbs were human,
whose claws were lances and bayonets, whose red tongues were
flame-jets from a thousand cannon.

The German army had entered France and the province of Lorraine
was a name.

Like a hydra of three hideous heads the German army had pushed
its course over the Saar, over the Rhine, over the Lauter; it
sniffed at the frontier line; licked Wissembourg and the
Spicheren with flaming tongues, shuddered, coiled, and glided
over the boundary into the fair land of Lorraine. Then, like some
dreadful ringed monster, it cast off two segments, north, south,
and moved forward on its belly, while the two new segments,
already turned to living bodies, with heads and eyes and
contracted scales, struggled on alone, diverging to the north and
south, creeping, squirming, undulating, penetrating villages and
cities, stretching across hills and rivers, until all the land
was shining with shed scales and the sky reeked with the smoke of
flaming tongues. This was the invasion of France. Before it
Frossard recoiled, leaving the Spicheren a smoking hell; before
it Douay fell above the flames of Wissembourg; and yet Gravelotte
had not been, and Vionville was a peaceful name, and Mars-la-Tour
lay in the sunshine, mellow with harvests, gay with the scarlet
of the Garde Imperiale.

On the hill-sides of Lorraine were letters of fire, writing for
all France to read, and every separate letter was a flaming
village. The Emperor read it and bent his weary steps towards
Chalons; Bazaine read it and said, "There is time;" MacMahon,
Canrobert, Leboeuf, Ladmirault read