watched narrowly every movement of the troops during the previous day,
and now, again, while the broad valley before him lay basking in the
radiant sunlight, his gaze reverted to the hills of the left bank,
where, for the space of all one day and all one night, his eyes had
beheld the black swarm of the Prussian hosts moving steadily onward to
some appointed end. A battery had opened fire from Remilly, over to
the left, but the one from which the shells were now beginning to
reach the French position was posted at Pont-Maugis, on the river
bank. He adjusted his binocle by folding the glasses over, the one
upon the other, to lengthen its range and enable him to discern what
was hidden among the recesses of the wooded slopes, but could
distinguish nothing save the white smoke-wreaths that rose momentarily
on the tranquil air and floated lazily away over the crests. That
human torrent that he had seen so lately streaming over those hills,
where was it now--where were massed those innumerable hosts? At last,
at the corner of a pine wood, above Noyers and Frenois, he succeeded
in making out a little cluster of mounted men in uniform--some general,
doubtless, and his staff. And off there to the west the Meuse curved
in a great loop, and in that direction lay their sole line of retreat
on Mezieres, a narrow road that traversed the pass of Saint-Albert,
between that loop and the dark forest of Ardennes. While
reconnoitering the day before he had met a general officer who, he
afterward learned, was Ducrot, commanding the 1st corps, on a by-road
in the valley of Givonne, and had made bold to call his attention to
the importance of that, their only line of retreat. If the army did
not retire at once by that road while it was still open to them, if it
waited until the Prussians should have crossed the Meuse at Donchery
and come up in force to occupy the pass, it would be hemmed in and
driven back on the Belgian frontier. As early even as the evening of
that day the movement would have been too late. It was asserted that