"This is horrible!" muttered the girl. "Don't they know the street
is blocked? Can't they find out before they ride into this ravine
below us? Will they all be killed here under our windows?"

She sprang to her feet, stood a moment, then stepped swiftly forward
into the angle of the tower.

"Look there!" she cried, in terror.

"Push my chair--quick!" I said. She dragged it forward.

An old house across the street, which had been on fire, had collapsed
into a mere mound of slate, charred beams, and plaster. Through the
brown heat which quivered above the ruins I could see out into the
country. And what I saw was a line of hills, crowned with smoke, a
rolling stretch of meadow below, set here and there with shot-torn
trees and hop-poles; and over this uneven ground two regiments of
French cuirassiers and two squadrons of lancers moving slowly forward
as though on parade.

Above them, around them, clouds of smoke puffed up suddenly and
floated away--the shells from Prussian batteries on the heights. Long,
rippling crashes broke out, belting the fields with smoky breastworks,
where a Prussian infantry regiment, knee-deep in smoke, was firing on
the advancing cavalry.

The cuirassiers moved on slowly, the sun a blinding sheet of fire on
their armor; now and then a horse tossed his beautiful head, now and
then a steel helmet turned, flashing.

Grief-stricken, I groaned aloud: "Madame, there rides the finest
cavalry in the world!--to annihilation."

How could I know that they were coming deliberately to sacrifice
themselves?--that they rode with death heavy on their souls, knowing
well there was no hope, understanding that they were to die to save
the fragments of a beaten army?

Yet something of this I suspected, for already I saw the long, dark
Prussian lines overlapping the French flank; I heard the French
mitrailleuses rattling through the cannon's thunder, and I saw an
entire French division, which I did not then know to be Lartigue's,
falling back across the hills.

And straight into the entire Prussian army rode the "grosse
cavallerie" and the lancers.

"They are doomed, like their fathers," I muttered--"sons of the
cuirassiers of Waterloo. See what men can do for France!"

The young Countess started and stood up very straight.

"Look, madame!" I said, harshly--"look on the men of France! You say
you do not understand the narrow love of country! Look!"

"It is too pitiful, too horrible," she said, h