all looks very well now, with your smart new
uniform and bright helmet; but, when the one is ragged with bayonet cuts
and bloody and dirty, and the other doesn't preserve you from a leaden
headache, you will prefer, like me, barrack life--aye, even in
Coblentz!"

"Hush there! order in the ranks!" sang out an officer at this moment,
stopping Fritz's answer; and, the word of command being presently given
to march, the conversation was not renewed.

After the fearful loss they had suffered at Woerth, which battle was
followed up by the sanguinary defeat of Frossard at Forbach, to the left
of their line, on the same day, the French fell back on Metz as their
rallying point, hoping by means of the vast entrenched camp there and
its facilities of communication with Chalons and Verdun, to be able to
make a stand against the enemy, now pressing them so sore. Military
critics say that this was the greatest mistake made by the Emperor
Napoleon's advisers; and that, had the forces under Bazaine retreated
farther to the west--after throwing a sufficient garrison into Metz--
they might have been able to effect a junction with the defeated army of
Mcmahon, which that general was withdrawing into the interior and from
which they were now completely cut off.

Be that as it may, however, during this interval of inactivity, when the
shattered fragments of the magnificent French army--which had so proudly
assumed the offensive but a bare fortnight before along the frontiers of
the Rhine--were idling away precious moments that were fraught with
peril and disaster to the Gallic race, the huge German masses, animated
by a sense of victory and the consciousness of a superiority in arms as
well as in numbers, were sweeping forward like a whirlwind of
destruction. The Crown Prince, who had routed Mcmahon at Woerth and
driven the wedge in that separated him from Bazaine, continued his
onward march on the left of the German line through the passes of the
Vosges into the fertile plains of Champagne. At the same time, Prince
Frederick Charles, with the main portion of the second army, had crossed
the Moselle at Pont-a-Mousson; and, moving northwards, was already in a
position to threaten the line of the French retreat on Verdun, while the
remainder of the Red Prince's forces were advancing to the eastward of
Metz. The columns, too, of Steinmetz, moving with mathematical
regularity at an equal rate of progression, were also being echelonned