; all of them with field glasses in their hands,
with which, since early morning, they had been watching every phase of
the death-struggle of the army of Chalons, as if they were at the play.
And the direful drama was drawing to its end.

From among the trees that clothed the summit of la Marfee King William
had just witnessed the junction of his armies. It was an accomplished
fact; the third army, under the leadership of his son, the Crown
Prince, advancing by the way of Saint-Menges and Fleigneux, had secured
possession of the plateau of Illy, while the fourth, commanded by the
Crown Prince of Saxony, turning the wood of la Garenne and, coming up
through Givonne and Daigny, had also reached its appointed rendezvous.
There, too, the XIth and Vth corps had joined hands with the XIIth corps
and the Guards. The gallant but ineffectual charge of Margueritte's
division in its supreme effort to break through the hostile lines at the
very moment when the circle was being rounded out had elicited from the
king the exclamation: "Ah, the brave fellows!" Now the great movement,
inexorable as fate, the details of which had been arranged with such
mathematical precision, was complete, the jaws of the vise had closed,
and stretching on his either hand far in the distance, a mighty wall of
adamant surrounding the army of the French, were the countless men
and guns that called him master. At the north the contracting lines
maintained a constantly increasing pressure on the vanquished, forcing
them back upon Sedan under the merciless fire of the batteries that
lined the horizon in an array without a break. Toward the south, at
Bazeilles, where the conflict had ceased to rage and the scene was one
of mournful desolation, great clouds of smoke were rising from the ruins
of what had once been happy homes, while the Bavarians, now masters of
Balan, had advanced their batteries to within three hundred yards of the
city gates. And the other batteries, those posted on the left bank at
Pont Maugis, Noyers, Frenois, Wadelincourt, completing the impenetrable
rampart of flame and bringing it around to the sovereign's feet on his
right, that had been spouting fire uninterruptedly for nearly twelve
hours, now thundered more loudly still.

But King William, to give his tired eyes a moment's rest, dropped his
glass to his side and continued his observations with unassisted vision.
The sun was slanting downward to the woods on his left, about to set i