by Max Hennessy
The night of Germaine de Maël’s ball was hotter and more sultry than ever and there seemed to be an increased excitement on the boulevards because over the last few days the talk of war in the bars had grown louder.
Bands of students and workmen were patrolling the streets, singing patriotic and revolutionary songs like ‘The Marseillaise.’ In front of the Prince Eugène Barracks, a great demonstration was being held, and thousands of workmen had gathered from the adjacent faubourgs to witness the departure of a regiment for the frontier. There was a great deal of drinking going on and much cheering, singing and fraternisation, more crowds in the Boulevard Montmartre, and several thousand people parading up and down the Place Vendôme with shouts of ‘Vive Napoléon!’
Lacquered landaus and daumonts with matched horses were already drawing up outside the home of the Baronne de Maël as Colby arrived in a hired carriage driven by the ubiquitous Ackroyd. Germaine was dressed in white, with as much of her bosom showing as possible without being vulgar, her dark hair done in ringlets round her head. As she held out her hand for Colby to kiss, just behind her he saw a man in the uniform of the Cavalry of the Guard, slight and dandified with a moustache and a small imperial beard. His uniform seemed to consist chiefly of gold buttons and lace frogs.
‘This is Narcisse,’ she said quietly. ‘He has to leave this evening for Metz.’
De Polignac clicked his heels, but he didn’t smile, studying Colby with unfriendly eyes. It wasn’t hard to guess that Germaine, in her honest way, had let it be known what the relationship between them had been before he had appeared on the scene.
‘I have heard of you, Major Goff,’ he said.
The house was full of noise. Loud voices were raised in an excited chatter and the sound of an orchestra came from the ballroom in a muted thump-thump. It was a strange atmosphere that seemed confident yet somehow seemed to suffer from a dreadful doubt, as if they were all rushing to a climax at a breakneck speed and were well aware of the fact. The certainties which had founded the Napoleonist regime seemed somehow to have lost their grip and everybody seemed to be grasping at the crisis as a means of keeping up their spirits, revelling in the fact that they had forced Bismarck’s climb-down, because they all secretly entertained a morbid fear of the Prussian Chancellor and felt that next day they would awaken to news of fighting along the frontier.
As the band swung into the gentle lilt of one of Waldteufel’s waltzes, Colby held out his arm.
‘The last time I danced to this tune,’ Germaine said, ‘it was at the Tuileries and you could hear the police charging the crowds outside. They were rioting about the election. They smashed windows and burned a cabman’s shelter. But it turned out all right in the end and when the Emperor drove out in an open carriage the next day he well received.’ She looked meaningly at Colby. ‘I shall expect you to return when this is all over,’ she said quietly. ‘I shall need calming. This talk of war tires me.’
‘If it does come to war,’ Colby asked, ‘where will you see it out?’
‘Metz, of course. I have promised to join Narcisse there for three weeks. That should be enough to see the armies move into Germany. I have a friend who is prepared to lend me his house. Number Twenty-Nine, Avenue Serpenoise, if you should be in the area. It’s in the best part of town.’
‘Suppose it doesn’t work out that way?’
She looked at him with large puzzled eyes. ‘What other way could it work out?’
‘Suppose the Prussians move into France instead?’
She stared at him for a moment then gave a tinkling laugh and slapped his wrist with her fan. ‘You silly goose! How could that happen?’
When they returned to the salon, the lurking anger against Prussia that had been below the surface for months had risen like bubbles from the depths of a dark pond. The band had retired to eat and everybody was standing about arguing, the men in a group, the women looking nervously towards them.
‘France can’t stand by while a foreign power disturbs the equilibrium of Europe. In any case, the Prussians are nothing but hastily trained levies.’ The speaker was a hot-eyed de Polignac and his audience, judging by their stomachs, were all civilians. He seemed to be enjoying the standing his military rank gave him and as his eye fell on Colby he swept him into the discussion. ‘Don’t you agree?’
Colby hesitated. ‘I think the Prussian generals have profited by their wars,’ he said slowly.
‘And ours haven’t?’
‘Yours are very affable,’ Colby said warily. ‘And they are splendidly dressed.’
‘We have MacMahon, Bourbaki, Bazaine.’
From what Colby had heard, MacMahon, Bourbaki and Bazaine were all Cardigans, elderly lieutenants incapable of running armies.
He shrugged and said nothing and de Polignac went on, his eyes blazing. ‘We shall cross the Rhine and intimidate South Germany into neutrality. Then the Austrians and the Italians will come in and all that will be needed for the Prussians will be a covering force in Lorraine. Don’t you agree?’
It seemed to be a plan that called for the first Napoleon and Colby forced a smile. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I would like to see. Perhaps as an observer with the armies.’
De Polignac laughed and began to head for the door. ‘There’ll be no time. It will be over too quickly.’ He gestured to the toadies who followed him. ‘These English,’ he said. ‘They have no idea of the art of war.’
As Colby glared at his retreating back, a voice came quietly from behind him. ‘Take care, my friend, or you’ll be needing a second.’
Turning, he found himself staring into the pale face of Hans-Viktor von Hartmann.
‘By God,’ he said. ‘You’re in dangerous company tonight!’
Von Hartmann smiled. ‘They think I’m an Alsatian.’
‘What are you doing? Spying?’
‘Not at all.’ Von Hartmann was quite unperturbed. ‘I was invited quite properly. But a long time ago before the hubbub about the Hohenzollern Candidature appeared. I met her in Mainz. She’s forgotten who I am.’
‘It’ll be as well if nobody finds out.’
Von Hartmann shrugged. ‘I can always retreat to the Embassy. I’m there as military attaché.’ He gestured at the people about him. ‘Everybody in Paris is giving parties like this, this summer. I’ve been to dozens. I think they’re all a little worried, don’t you?’
It didn’t surprise Colby that the Prussian had also noticed the underlying current of uncertainty.
‘The Emperor’s growing old,’ von Hartmann continued. ‘He no longer holds the balance of power and everybody knows he’s lost his touch. I couldn’t resist being here when they heard the news.’
‘What news?’
Von Hartmann smiled. ‘The King of Prussia will turn down France’s demand for an apology.’ He shrugged. ‘After all, they are asking rather a lot, aren’t they? Bismarck’s not the man to eat humble pie for anyone. That war they’re wanting is a lot nearer today than it was yesterday.’
‘And if it does come to war, what will the result be?’
Von Hartmann smiled. ‘We shall win, of course. We don’t play at war. We study it. For your information, my dear Major, our railways run towards the frontier – not like the French – across what will be the line of march. When ours were built, we had a staff officer working with the builders.’ The Prussian’s smile widened. ‘As I once told you, our generals don’t guess. You have only to look at what happened to the Austrians at Sadowa to see that. The French army’s nothing but a shop window with nothing on the shelves, and the men they will appoint to command aren’t so much generals as dancing masters and court favourites. Imperial aides-de-camp to a man, picked for their ability to entertain the Empress.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps they’re no worse than any others in the end, of course, but they have no staff to guide them, so they will fail.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Von Hartmann’s shoulders moved. ‘We make a point of knowing. Th
ey also have to mobilise more quickly than we do if they’re to inflict damage, but they won’t because they’re short of supplies and maps, and medicaments for their hospitals.’ He tapped Colby’s arm with his glove. ‘If you are so keen on being a military observer,’ he went on, ‘why not join the Prussian army? We are anxious for people to see how good we are, and, after all, our countries are almost allies. With your royal family of German descent, we are even interrelated. It is the French who are the enemies.’ He fished in his pocket and produced a small square of pasteboard. ‘My card,’ he said. ‘If you’re interested, go to Mainz. That’s where headquarters will be.’
When Colby returned to the ballroom, it was clear that the news von Hartmann had heard had arrived. The men were drinking suddenly as though they were the last drinks in the world. There was a lot of noise and the group round de Polignac was noisy with the noisiness of the uncertain and over-excited. From outside, they could hear the roar of the crowd, which was swarming even into the Champs Elysées. Snatches of ‘The Marseillaise’ kept coming through the window and the excitement spread through the house as people from the ballroom joined the crowd in the salon.
‘They’re throwing things at the Prussian Embassy,’ someone said.
The room was pulsating with noise, and the war fever was so obvious you could almost reach out and touch it. In the street outside, the bands of students and working men were now arm-in-arm, sweeping into their midst anyone who happened to be in the way. One group had a couple of soldiers in uniform on their shoulders, laughing, shouting, waving bottles and yelling ‘Vive Napoléon.’
A band arrived from nowhere, blaring out Partant Pour La Syrie, while the students began to chant and sing, one group against another. Tricolour ribbons and flags appeared and were draped round cabs as they picked their way through the crowd, the horses neighing with fright at the noise. They were all full of people waving bottles and offering drinks and cigars to any soldiers they saw, while the crowds spilling out of the side streets were pushing others from the pavements into the road and women were shrieking as they found themselves under horses’ hooves.
Watching from the balcony, Colby saw a prostitute offer a drink from a brandy bottle to a dandy in evening dress. Then a carriage pushed past with half a dozen people inside, all yelling and laughing and waving flags. A walking stick swung, and the dandy’s top hat vanished, and the next he saw of it was an urchin kicking its dented shape among the shuffling feet.
A sort of hypnotism had caught the crowd inside the de Maël mansion now and everybody began to surge to the stairs, as though they wished to be outside with the mob. Men were shouting and the ballroom was nothing but a gigantic cauldron, as people swarmed in uninvited from outside. Men holding glasses were shaking hands and kissing girls, and a woman began to sing ‘J’Aime Les Militaires.’ Everybody linked arms and flung paper serpentines, then a group of young men appeared with newly-printed newspapers, whose ink smudged their gloves.
‘It’s war all right!’ they were yelling. ‘The Prussian ambassador’s leaving!’
De Polignac, already cloaked and hatted, was pushing his way to the door with his friends. They were obviously trying to make an impression and the crowd was clapping as they went. Ackroyd was waiting in the hall with Colby’s hat, cloak and stick, watching the revellers with a contemptuous expression on his face.
‘Come on, Tyas,’ Colby said. ‘We’re going to take the train to Brussels.’
Ackroyd’s face fell. ‘Brussels?’ he said. ‘There won’t be no fightin’ in Belgium.’
‘No, Tyas, my lad,’ Colby agreed. ‘But the French frontier will have been closed already and the only way to get into Germany now will be via Belgium and the Palatinate.’
Three
The Belgian trains were crammed with Germans hurrying home to swell their army. Two of them informed Colby that they had come from as far away as New York, and they were an extraordinary mixture of American financial astuteness and single-hearted German patriotic zeal, as much concerned with their shares as they were with the wish to see Prussia win.
When they reached Cologne, working parties were already felling trees on the ramparts and repairing the forts, and a state of siege had already been declared. There was a quiet regularity about the German mobilisation, however, that compared favourably with the French frenzy. Bemedalled men called up from the reserve were mixed with young soldiers serving their first period of three years, balancing their dash with steadiness. Their shoulders were well back, their legs straight and their chins well ‘off the stock.’ They were gaunt, long-thighed, big-jointed men, all corners and muscle, from the mountains and plains, but they were clearly as tough as whipcord with a curious sobriety and docility, so that there were no parties out to pick drunken men out of the gutters or stop incipient riots, and there were no women hanging round the barrack gates.
The 19th Prussian Lancers were at Kaiserslautern and due to leave for the frontier, and Von Hartmann was bubbling over with excitement.
‘The French are having problems with their mobilisation,’ he pointed out. ‘Ours goes well and if they don’t move in the next week, we shall have no trouble. We’re to go to Saarbrücken.’
He escorted Colby to headquarters and saw him issued with passes. The place was bustling with activity but the Germans seemed occupied with a deep sense of earnestness and moral purpose that reminded Colby of Cromwell’s Ironsides with their sense of Justice and their Lutheran hymns.
As they took the train for the frontier, France was still playing a waiting game and the Germans were breathing more freely with every day. Bingerbruck, the terminus from which the Rhine railway system ran towards the frontier, was totally blocked for civilian passengers but, with the passes von Hartmann had supplied, there was no problem. The regiments moving west, powdered with dust after a fifteen-mile march, had no stragglers, Colby noted, and there were only a few cases of sunstroke despite the temperature of eighty-five in the shade and the weapons, knapsacks, ammunition, greatcoats, camp kettles, swords, spades and other odds and ends they carried.
Saarbrücken, where they booked in at the Hotel Hagen, was divided into two towns. Saarbrücken to the south, St Johann to the north, the bridges connecting them obstructed by casks filled with stones. The town seemed to be held only by a single battalion of infantry, though the 19th Lancers had a detachment there, and the streets seemed as normal as in peacetime, girls making eyes at subalterns outside the shops and little to be seen of the war except the pickets, the sentry on the door of the hotel occupied by the military commandant, and Red Cross flags on the hurriedly-established hospitals.
To the west the road lifted sharply towards a plateau then fell gently through densely wooded ground. In the centre of the valley was the French town of Forbach and to the left a series of heights terminating in a hill called the Spicherenberg. All along the line, pickets were confronting each other, cavalry vedettes circling in the distance, their lance pennons fluttering. A few hundred yards further on was a big blockhouse where the French had gathered in large numbers, their scouts out in front of them. Von Hartmann’s lancers had already cut the railway line that connected Metz with Strasbourg, but there was nothing to see and the only excitement came when Colby went out with a feldwebel’s patrol that was set upon by French North African troops, fortunately far too excited to shoot straight. As they returned, von Hartmann was looking eager. ‘The French are moving cannon over the Spicherenberg,’ he announced. ‘They reconnoitred it last evening. Something is clearly coming.’
Nothing did, however, beyond a salvo from the French guns which scattered a watching crowd and demolished a beerhouse, and a bout of spy-fever which resulted as often as not in the Germans arresting men of their own side sent forward to watch the French or a local yokel romping in the bushes with his girl.
As August came, a few infantry and guns arrived and the nervously-clicking telegraph at the station warned that more were needed. Armed with cigars, which they had alread
y found an excellent introduction to German soldiers, Colby and Ackroyd headed for the front. The artillery was drawn up in line with the ammunition wagons and horses in the rear. A forge was alight and the farriers were busy shoeing, while von Hartmarm’s officers sat in the sunshine drinking coffee, their colour in its cover stuck in the ground with the drum major’s halberd. Behind were knapsacks and rolled greatcoats in straight rows. A crowd had gathered round carts carrying beer and casks of wine, and a few men were singing, the camp kettles simmering on the fires for their meal. The whole place seemed drowsy with summer.
Crossing the valley, they climbed the slope. There was no sign of excitement, but as they neared the Exerciseplatz they saw men running about, then an officer came hurtling down the slope on a horse. Streaming down the roads from France were dense and glittering columns of troops, the sun striking sharply on bayonets and scarlet trousers. They were advancing swiftly, six abreast, with no pretence at formation, and as the head of the column reached the valley it broke apart like spray, file after file dispersing into the trees, until an unbroken line of skirmishers was drawn up in front. Squadrons of cavalry poured down after them, then, forming line at the gallop, overtook them, passed through their intervals, reformed and covered the flanks.
As the tirailleurs opened a spattering volley, the German infantry retaliated and the whole French force began to fire.
‘I think we’d better get out of here,’ Colby said.
As a riderless horse went careering away, its tail over its back, and the bullets began to strike the trees above their heads, they bolted for the dip. As they reached the road beneath, one of the Prussians, hit in the back, came crashing down on the shrubs at their feet. The lancers, drawn up in the shelter formed by a bend of the road, began to retreat through Saarbrücken and a knot of fusiliers hurrying after them were caught by a shell which struck down a sergeant and five men at once. By this time, the French were on the heights and driving the Germans back. As they reached Saarbrücken, shells from French guns began to crash among the houses, and, though the side streets were safe, there was a constant shower of tiles and chimney pots.
