Jaegers, nimble as
cats, climbing up them.... Some of them, who are hit by the enemy's
shot, suddenly stretch out both their arms, let their muskets fall,
and, with their heads falling backwards, drop off the height, step by
step, from one rocky point to another, smashing their limbs to pieces.
I saw a horseman at some distance, obliquely behind me, at whose side a
shell burst. His horse swerved aside and came against the tail of
mind, then shot past me. The man sat still in the saddle, but a
fragment of the shell had ripped his belly open and torn out all the
intestines. The upper part of his body was held to the lower only by
the spine. From the ribs to the thighs nothing but one great, bleeding
cavity. A short distance farther he fell to the ground, one foot still
clinging in the stirrup, and the galloping horse dragging him on over
the stony soil.... Another street fight in the little town of Saar....
In the middle of the square stands a high pillar of the Virgin. The
mother of God holds her child in one arm, and stretches the other out
in blessing.... Here the fight was prolonged, man to man. They were
hacking at me, I laying about me on all sides.... A Prussian dragoon,
strong as Goliath, tore one of our officers (a pretty, dandified
lieutenant--how many girls are, perhaps, mad after him?) out of his
saddle and split his skull at the feet of the Virgin's pillar. The
gentle saint looked on unmoved. Another of the enemy's dragoons--a
Goliath, too--seized, just before me almost, my right-hand man, and
bent him backwards in his saddle so powerfully that he broke his
back--I myself heard it crack. To this the Madonna gave her blessing
also."

VIII.

It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, like the
facts of Vereschagin's pictures, but like these they are imagined
rather below than above the real horror of war, and represent them
inadequately. The incidents of another book, the last on my list, are
of the warfare which goes on in times of peace, and which will go on as
long as there are human passions, and mankind are divided into men and
women, and saints and sinners. Of all the books on my list, "Let Not
Man Put Asunder" is, narrowing the word to the recognition of the
author's intellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest. The
story is of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond the
wont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author, who
cann