the 12th and 1st corps, looking like diminutive insects at that
distance and lost to sight at intervals in the dip of the narrow
valley in which the hamlets lay concealed; and beyond that valley rose
the further slope, an uninhabited, uncultivated heath, of which the
pale tints made the dark green of Chevalier's Wood look black by
contrast. To the north the 7th corps was more distinctly visible in
its position on the plateau of Floing, a broad belt of sere, dun
fields, that sloped downward from the little wood of la Garenne to the
verdant border of the stream. Further still were Floing, Saint-Menges,
Fleigneux, Illy, small villages that lay nestled in the hollows of
that billowing region where the landscape was a succession of hill and
dale. And there, too, to the left was the great bend of the Meuse,
where the sluggish stream, shimmering like molten silver in the bright
sunlight, swept lazily in a great horseshoe around the peninsula of
Iges and barred the road to Mezieres, leaving between its further
bank and the impassable forest but one single gateway, the defile of
Saint-Albert.

It was in that triangular space that the hundred thousand men and five
hundred guns of the French army had now been crowded and brought to
bay, and when His Prussian Majesty condescended to turn his gaze still
further to the westward he might perceive another plain, the plain of
Donchery, a succession of bare fields stretching away toward
Briancourt, Marancourt, and Vrigne-aux-Bois, a desolate expanse of
gray waste beneath the clear blue sky; and did he turn him to the
east, he again had before his eyes, facing the lines in which the
French were so closely hemmed, a vast level stretch of country in
which were numerous villages, first Douzy and Carignan, then more to
the north Rubecourt, Pourru-aux-Bois, Francheval, Villers-Cernay, and
last of all, near the frontier, Chapelle. All about him, far as he