strife, the dead and wounded strewn thick on every side.

In the sunken road the carnage had been awful; men and horses having
been slaughtered there by hundreds, helpless before the murderous
fire delivered from behind a high stone wall impracticable to mounted
troops. The sight was sickening to an extreme, and we were not slow
to direct our course elsewhere, going up the glacis toward the French
line, the open ground over which we crossed being covered with
thousands of helmets, that had been thrown off by the Germans during
the fight and were still dotting the field, though details of
soldiers from the organizations which had been engaged here were
about to begin to gather up their abandoned headgear.

When we got inside the French works, I was astonished to observe how
little harm had been done the defenses by the German artillery, for
although I had not that serene faith in the effectiveness of their
guns held by German artillerists generally, yet I thought their
terrific cannonade must have left marked results. All I could
perceive, however, was a disabled gun, a broken mitrailleuse, and two
badly damaged caissons.

Everything else, except a little ammunition in the trenches, had been
carried away, and it was plain to see, from the good shape in which
the French left wing had retired to Metz, that its retreat had been
predetermined by the disasters to the right wing.

By this hour the German cavalry having been thrown out to the front
well over toward Metz, we, following it to get a look at the city,
rode to a neighboring summit, supposing it would be a safe point of
observation; but we shortly realized the contrary, for scarcely had
we reached the crest when some of the French pickets, lying concealed
about six hundred yards off, opened fire, making it so very hot for
us that, hugging the necks of our horses, we incontinently fled.
Observing what had taken place, a troop of German cavalry charged the
French outpost and drove it far enough away to make safe our return,
and we resumed possession of the point, but only to discover that the
country to the east was so broken and hilly that no satisfactory view
of Metz could be had.

Returning to Gravelotte, we next visited that part of the battlefield
to the northeast of the village, and before long Count Bismarck
discovered in a remote place about twenty men dreadfully wounded.
These poor fellows had had no attention whatever, having been
overlooked by the h