ronn the
artillery rolled, jolting; cannoneers, wrapped in their wet, gray
overcoats, limbers, caissons, and horses plastered with mud. The slim
cannon, with canvas-wrapped breeches uptilted, dripped from their
depressed muzzles, like lank monsters slavering and discouraged.

A battery of Montigny mitrailleuses passed, grotesque, hump-backed
little engines of destruction. To me there was always something
repulsive in the shape of these stunted cannon, these malicious metal
cripples with their heavy bodies and sinister, filthy mouths.

Before the drenched artillery had rattled out of Morsbronn the rain
once more fell in floods, pouring a perpendicular torrent from the
transparent, gray heavens, and the roar of the downpour on slate roofs
and ancient gables drowned the pounding of the passing cannon.

Where the Vosges mountains towered in obscurity a curtain of rain
joined earth and sky. The rivers ran yellow, brimful, foaming at the
fords. The semaphore on the mountain of the Pigeonnier was not
visible; but across the bridge, where the Gunstett highway spanned the
Sauer, gray masses of the Niederwald loomed through the rain.

Somewhere in that spectral forest Prussian cavalry were hidden,
watching the heights where our drenched divisions lay. Behind that
forest a German army was massing, fresh from the combat in the north,
where the tragedy of Wissembourg had been enacted only the day before,
in the presence of the entire French army--the awful spectacle of a
single division of seven thousand men suddenly enveloped and crushed
by seventy thousand Germans.

The rain fell steadily but less heavily. I went back to my instrument
and called up the station on the Col du Pigeonnier, asking for
information, but got no reply, the storm doubtless interfering.

Officers of the Third Hussars were continually tramping up and down
the muddy stairway, laughing, joking, swearing at the rain, or
shouting for their horses, when the trumpets sounded in the street
below.

I watched the departing squadron, splashing away down the street,
which was now running water like a river; then I changed my civilian
clothes for a hussar uniform, sent a trooper to find me a horse, and
sat down by the window to stare at the downpour and think how best I
might carry out my instructions to a successful finish.

The colony at La Trappe was, as far as I could judge, a product of
conditions which had, a hundred years before, culminated in the French