halted just at the entrance to the village.

And now wagon-loads of French wounded began to pass, jolting over
crushed helmets, rifles, cuirasses, and the carcasses of dead horses.

A covey of Uhlans entered the shambles, picking their way across the
wreckage of the battle, a slim, wiry, fastidious company, dainty as
spurred gamecocks, with their helmet-cords swinging like wattles and
their schapskas tilted rakishly.

Then the sad cortege of prisoners formed in the smoke, the wounded
leaning on their silent comrades, bandaged heads hanging, the others
erect, defiant, supporting the crippled or standing with arms folded
and helmeted heads held high.

And at last they started, between two files of mounted Uhlans--Turcos,
line infantrymen, gendarmes, lancers, and, towering head and shoulders
above the others, the superb cuirassiers.

A German general and his smartly uniformed staff came clattering up
the slippery street and halted to watch the prisoners defile. And, as
the first of the captive cuirassiers came abreast of the staff, the
general stiffened in his saddle and raised his hand to his helmet,
saying to his officers, loud enough for me to hear:

"Salute the brave, gentlemen!"

And the silent, calm-eyed cuirassiers passed on, heads erect, uniforms
in shreds, their battered armor foul with smoke and mud, spurs broken,
scabbards empty.

Troops of captured horses, conducted by Uhlans, followed the
prisoners, then wagons piled high with rifles, sabres, and saddles,
then a company of Uhlans cantering away with the shot-torn guidons of
the cuirassiers.

Last of all came the wounded in their straw-wadded wagons, escorted by
infantry; I heard them coming before I saw them, and, sickened, I
closed my ears with my hands; yet even then the deep, monotonous
groaning seemed to fill the room and vibrate through the falling
shadows long after the last cart had creaked out of sight and hearing
into the gathering haze of evening.

The deadened booming of cannon still came steadily from the west, and
it needed no messenger to tell me that the First Corps had been hurled
back into Alsace, and that MacMahon's army was in full retreat; that
now the Rhine was open and the passage of the Vosges was clear, and
Strasbourg must stand siege and Belfort and Toul must man their
battlements for a struggle that meant victory, or an Alsace doomed and
a Lorraine lost to France forever.

The room had grown very dark, the loop-hole ad