n the central foreground of the picture, and standing out in bold
relief against the venerable forests of the Ardennes, that stretched
away on either hand from right to left, filling the northern horizon
like a curtain of dark verdure, was the city of Sedan, with the
geometrical lines and angles of its fortifications, protected on the
south and west by the flooded meadows and the river. In Bazeilles houses
were already burning, and the dark cloud of war hung heavy over the
pretty village. Turning his eyes eastward he might discover, holding the
line between la Moncelle and Givonne, some regiments of the 12th and
1st corps, looking like diminutive insects at that distance and lost to
sight at intervals in the dip of the narrow valley in which the hamlets
lay concealed; and beyond that valley rose the further slope, an
uninhabited, uncultivated heath, of which the pale tints made the dark
green of Chevalier's Wood look black by contrast. To the north the 7th
corps was more distinctly visible in its position on the plateau of
Floing, a broad belt of sere, dun fields, that sloped downward from the
little wood of la Garenne to the verdant border of the stream. Further
still were Floing, Saint-Menges, Fleigneux, Illy, small villages that
lay nestled in the hollows of that billowing region where the landscape
was a succession of hill and dale. And there, too, to the left was the
great bend of the Meuse, where the sluggish stream, shimmering like
molten silver in the bright sunlight, swept lazily in a great horseshoe
around the peninsula of Iges and barred the road to Mezieres, leaving
between its further bank and the impassable forest but one single
gateway, the defile of Saint-Albert.

It was in that triangular space that the hundred thousand men and five
hundred guns of the French army had now been crowded and brought to
bay, and when His Prussian Majesty condescended to turn his gaze still
further to the westward he might perceive another plain, the plain of
Donchery, a succession of bare fields stretching away toward Briancourt,
Marancourt, and Vrigne-aux-Bois, a desolate expanse of gray waste
beneath the clear blue sky; and did he turn him to the east, he again
had before his eyes, facing the lines in which the French were so
closely hemmed, a vast level stretch of country in which were numerous
villages, first Douzy and Carignan, then more to the north Rubecourt,
Pourru-aux-Bois, Francheval, Villers-Cernay, and last of al