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Updated: May 20, 2025
His last halt was at Puttingen, but Kameke has sent an aide back at the gallop to summon up all supports. The regiment stacks arms for ten minutes' breathing-time while the cannon-thunder is borne backward on the wind to the ears of the soldiers. In two hours more they will be across the French frontier, storming furiously up the Spicheren Berg.
Convinced that that post was too advanced and too weak in presence of the foremost divisions of the First and Second German Armies now advancing rapidly against it, General Frossard drew back his vanguard some mile and a half to the line of steep hills between Spicheren and Forbach, just within the French frontier.
This was the invasion of France. Before it Frossard recoiled, leaving the Spicheren a smoking hell; before it Douay fell above the flames of Wissembourg; and yet Gravelotte had not been, and Vionville was a peaceful name, and Mars-la-Tour lay in the sunshine, mellow with harvests, gay with the scarlet of the Garde Impériale.
Frossard and his whole corps were looking across at Saarbrück over the ridges of the Spicheren, and nobody had the means of knowing what everybody knows now, the reason, so discreditable to French organization, which prevented him from blowing out of his path the few pickets and patrols, and invading the territory which had its frontier only nominally guarded.
On the right was the First Army, under command of General Von Steinmetz, the victors, August 6, of Spicheren, near Saar, and, eight days later, of Colombey, to the east of Metz; while the centre and left were composed of the several corps of the Second Army, commanded by Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, a part of whose troops had just been engaged in the sanguinary battle of Mars-la-Tour, by which Bazaine was cut off from the Verdun road, and forced back toward Metz.
In the foggy China seas he thought a great deal of Nurkeed, and, when Elsass-Lothringen steamers lay in port with the Spicheren, inquired after him and found he had gone to England via the Cape, on the Gravelotte. Pambe came to England on the Worth. The Spicheren met her by the Nore Light. Nurkeed was going out with the Spicheren to the Calicut coast.
And up the heights of Alma and Spicheren, and wherever death has his red flag a-flying, and sounds his own potent tuck upon the cannons, there also must the drummer-boy, hurrying with white face over fallen comrades, batter and bemaul this slip of skin from the loins of peaceable donkeys. Generally a man is never more uselessly employed than when he is at this trick of bastinadoing asses' hide.
Like Banks, they neglected to reconnoitre; and when a weak detachment beyond the mountains was suddenly overwhelmed, they still refused to believe that attack was imminent. The crushing defeats of Worth and Spicheren were the result. The staff of a regular army is not always infallible.
It was the 62nd Field Battery, which had marched thirty-two miles in eight hours, and now, hearing the crash of battle in front of them, had with one last desperate effort thrown itself into the firing line. Great credit is due to Major Granet and his men. Not even those gallant German batteries who saved the infantry at Spicheren could boast of a finer feat.
In the large hall this lighting for room was general; and as for the noise and uproar of voices, the blockade of Spicheren must have been a symphony in comparison. I promised twenty francs to one of the servants of the establishment if he would fetch me Mr. X., my broker, from the coulisses. I handed him my card. It was an hour before the good man could emerge from the crowd.
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