or what it is, I dare not say--"

He said no more. He simply opened wide his arms, like the jaws of a
vise, then, turning to the north, brought his hands together, as if the
vise had closed suddenly upon some object there.

This was the fear that had filled his mind for the last twenty-four
hours, for he was thoroughly acquainted with the country and had watched
narrowly every movement of the troops during the previous day, and now,
again, while the broad valley before him lay basking in the radiant
sunlight, his gaze reverted to the hills of the left bank, where, for
the space of all one day and all one night, his eyes had beheld the
black swarm of the Prussian hosts moving steadily onward to some
appointed end. A battery had opened fire from Remilly, over to the left,
but the one from which the shells were now beginning to reach the French
position was posted at Pont-Maugis, on the river bank. He adjusted his
binocle by folding the glasses over, the one upon the other, to lengthen
its range and enable him to discern what was hidden among the recesses
of the wooded slopes, but could distinguish nothing save the white
smoke-wreaths that rose momentarily on the tranquil air and floated
lazily away over the crests. That human torrent that he had seen so
lately streaming over those hills, where was it now--where were massed
those innumerable hosts? At last, at the corner of a pine wood, above
Noyers and Frenois, he succeeded in making out a little cluster of
mounted men in uniform--some general, doubtless, and his staff. And
off there to the west the Meuse curved in a great loop, and in that
direction lay their sole line of retreat on Mezieres, a narrow road
that traversed the pass of Saint-Albert, between that loop and the dark
forest of Ardennes. While reconnoitering the day before he had met a
general officer who, he afterward learned, was Ducrot, commanding the
1st corps, on a by-road in the valley of Givonne, and had made bold
to call his attention to the importance of that, their only line of
retreat. If the army did not retire at once by that road while it was
still open to them, if it waited until the Prussians should have crossed
the Meuse at Donchery and come up in force to occupy the pass, it would
be hemmed in and driven back on the Belgian frontier. As early even as
the evening of that day the movement would have been too late. It was
asserted that the uhlans had possession of the bridge, another bridge
that