n
a sky where there was not a cloud, and the golden light that lay upon
the landscape was so transcendently clear and limpid that the most
insignificant objects stood out with startling distinctness. He could
almost count the houses in Sedan, whose windows flashed back the level
rays of the departing day-star, and the ramparts and fortifications,
outlined in black against the eastern sky, had an unwonted aspect of
frowning massiveness. Then, scattered among the fields to right and
left, were the pretty, smiling villages, reminding one of the toy
villages that come packed in boxes for the little ones; to the west
Donchery, seated at the border of her broad plain; Douzy and Carignan
to the east, among the meadows. Shutting in the picture to the north was
the forest of the Ardennes, an ocean of sunlit verdure, while the Meuse,
loitering with sluggish current through the plain with many a bend and
curve, was like a stream of purest molten gold in that caressing light.
And seen from that height, with the sun's parting kiss resting on it,
the horrible battlefield, with its blood and smoke, became an exquisite
and highly finished miniature; the dead horsemen and disemboweled steeds
on the plateau of Floing were so many splashes of bright color; on
the right, in the direction of Givonne, those minute black specks that
whirled and eddied with such apparent lack of aim, like motes dancing in
the sunshine, were the retreating fragments of the beaten army; while on
the left a Bavarian battery on the peninsula of Iges, its guns the
size of matches, might have been taken for some mechanical toy as it
performed its evolutions with clockwork regularity. The victory was
crushing, exceeding all that the victor could have desired or hoped,
and the King felt no remorse in presence of all those corpses, of those
thousands of men that were as the dust upon the roads of that broad
valley where, notwithstanding the burning of Bazeilles, the slaughter
of Illy, the anguish of Sedan, impassive nature yet could don her gayest
robe and put on her brightest smile as the perfect day faded into the
tranquil evening.

But suddenly Delaherche descried a French officer climbing the steep
path up the flank of la Marfee; he was a general, wearing a blue tunic,
mounted on a black horse, and preceded by a hussar bearing a white
flag. It was General Reille, whom the Emperor had entrusted with this
communication for the King of Prussia: "My brother, as it has