is coming up! Bazaine is at hand!" Ever since
morning many had allowed themselves to be deluded by that hope;
each time that the Germans opened fire with a fresh battery it was
confidently asserted to be the guns of the army of Metz. In the
neighborhood of twelve hundred men were collected, soldiers of all arms,
from every corps, and the little column bravely advanced into the storm
of missiles that swept the road, at double time. It was a splendid
spectacle of heroism and endurance while it lasted; the numerous
casualties did not check the ardor of the survivors, nearly five hundred
yards were traversed with a courage and nerve that seemed almost like
madness; but soon there were great gaps in the ranks, the bravest began
to fall back. What could they do against overwhelming numbers? It was a
mad attempt, anyway; the desperate effort of a commander who could
not bring himself to acknowledge that he was defeated. And it ended by
General de Wimpffen finding himself and General Lebrun alone together on
the Bazeilles road, which they had to make up their mind to abandon to
the enemy, for good and all. All that remained for them to do was to
retreat and seek security under the walls of Sedan.

Upon losing sight of the general at the Minil gate Delaherche had
hurried back to the factory at the best speed he was capable of,
impelled by an irresistible longing to have another look from his
observatory at what was going on in the distance. Just as he reached
his door, however, his progress was arrested a moment by encountering
Colonel de Vineuil, who, with his blood-stained boot, was being brought
in for treatment in a condition of semi-consciousness, upon a bed of
straw that had been prepared for him on the floor of a market-gardener's
wagon. The colonel had persisted in his efforts to collect the scattered
fragments of his regiment until he dropped from his horse. He was
immediately carried upstairs and put to bed in a room on the first
floor, and Bouroche, who was summoned at once, finding the injury not
of a serious character, had only to apply a dressing to the wound,
from which he first extracted some bits of the leather of the boot.
The worthy doctor was wrought up to a high pitch of excitement; he
exclaimed, as he went downstairs, that he would rather cut off one of
his own legs than continue working in that unsatisfactory, slovenly way,
without a tithe of either the assistants or the appliances that he ought
to have.