The 16th of October broke upon the Flemish hills: the men who had endured that night-march along the front of the battlefield, the men who had received them among the positions of the extreme right, still drooped under the growing light and were invigorated by no sun. The mist of the evening and of the night from dripping and thin had grown dense and whitened with the morning, so that to every soldier a new despair and a new bewilderment were added from the very air, and the blind fog seemed to make yet more obscure the obscure designs of their commanders. The day of their unnatural vigil had dawned, and yet there came no orders nor any stirring of men. Before them slow schistous slopes went upwards and disappeared into the impenetrable weather which hid clogged ploughland and drenched brushwood of the rounded hill; hollow lanes led up through such a land to the summit of the little rise and the hamlet of Wattignies; this most humble and least of villages was waiting its turn for glory.

The downward slope which formed the eastern end of the Austrian line, the low rounded slope whose apex was the spire of the village, was but slightly defended, for it was but the extreme of a position, and who could imagine then—or who now—that march through the sleepless night, or that men so worn should yet be ready for new action with the morning? No reinforcement, Coburg knew, could come from behind that army: and how should he dream that Carnot had found the power to feed the fortunes of the French from their own vitals and to drag these shambling 7000, wrenched from West to East during the darkness: or how, if such a thing had been done, could any man believe that, such a torture suffered, the 7000 could still charge?

Yet, had Coburg known the desperate attempt he would have met it, he would have covered that ultimate flank of his long ridge and reinforced it from his large reserve. But the deep mist and the dead silence harshly enforced during the night-march had hidden all the game, and in front of Wattignies, holding that round of sloping fields and the low semicircular end of the ridge before the village, there were but 3000; the infantry of Klebek, of Hohenlohe, and of Stern; for their cavalry they had behind them and alongside of the village farms a few dragoons; certain Croatian battalions stood in a second line. These in that morning, expecting nothing but perhaps the few troops as they had met easily the day before, waited under the mist in formation and heard no sound. The morning broadened; the white vapour seemed lighter all around, but no voices could be heard, nor did there come up through its curtain any rumble of limber from the roads below.

As the Queen so lay disconsolate and weeping bitterly, stretched in her black gown upon the wretched bed and supporting her head upon her hand, there came in the humble girl who had served her faithfully and who was now almost distraught for what was to come. This child said:—

“You have not eaten all these hours.... What will you take now that it is morning?”

The Queen answered, still crying: “My child, I need nothing more: all is over now.” But the girl added: “Madam, I have kept warm upon the hob some soup and vermicelli. Let me bring it you.” The Queen, weeping yet more, assented.

She sat up a moment (but feebly—her mortal fatigue had come upon her—her loss of blood increased and was continued), she took one spoonful and another; soon she laid the nourishment aside, and the morning drew on to her death.

She must change for her last exit. So much did the Revolution fear to be cheated of its defiance to the Kings that the warders had orders not to lose sight of her for one moment: but she would change. She would go in white to her end.

The girl who had served her screened her a little, and in the space between the bed and the wall she crouched and put on fresh linen, and in place of her faded black a loose white muslin gown. Her widow’s head-dress also, in which she had stood proudly before her Judges, she stripped of its weeds, and kept her hair covered by no more than the linen cap.

Her Judges came in and read to her her sentence.

The executioner, awkward and tall, came in. He must bind her hands. “Why must you bind my hands? The King’s hands were not bound.” Yet were her hands bound and the end of the rope left loose that her gaoler might hold it: but she perhaps herself, before they bound her, cut off the poor locks of her hair.

They led her out past the door of the prison: she was “delivered” and signed for; on the steps before the archway she went up into the cart, hearing the crowd howling beyond the great iron gates of the Law Courts, and seeing seated beside her that forsworn priest to whom she would not turn.... Nor were these the last humiliations: but I will not write them here.

Up and down the passages of the prison a little dog whom she had cherished in her loneliness ran whining and disconsolate.

The cart went lumbering on, past the Quay, over the bridge under the murky drizzle. The windows beyond the river were full of heads and faces; the edges of the quays were black with the crowd. The river Seine ran swollen with the rains; its tide and rolling made in such weather no mark upon the water-walls of stone. The cart went lumbering on over the rough wet paving of the northern bank. It turned into the Rue St. Honoré, where the narrow depth was full of noise. The long line of troops stood erect and close upon either side. The dense crowd still roared behind them: their prey sat upon the plank, diminished, as erect as the constraint of her bonds and her failing strength would allow. Her lips, for all their droop of agony, were still proud; her vesture was new; her delicate high shoes had been chosen with care for that journey—but her face might have satisfied them all. The painted red upon her cheeks was dreadful against her utter paleness: from beneath the linen of her cap a few whitened wisps of hair hung dank upon her hollowed temples: a Victim. Her eyes were sunken, and of these one dully watched her foes, one had lost its function in the damp half-darkness of the cells: it turned blank and blind upon the rabble that still followed the walking jolt of the two cart-horses and the broad wheels. At the head of those so following, an actor-fellow pranced upon a horse, thrusting at her by way of index a sword, and shouting to the people that they held the tigress here, the Austrian. In the midst of those so following, an American eager to see elbowed his way and would not lose his vantage. From the windows of the narrow gulf a continued noise of wonder, of jeers, and of imprecations reached her. She still sat motionless and without speech: the executioner standing behind her holding the loose end of the cord, the forsworn priest sitting on the plank beside her but hearing no words of hers.

It is said that as the tumbril passed certain masts whence limp tricolour pendants hung she glanced at them and murmured a word; it is to be believed that, a few yards further, at the turn into the Rue Royale, she gave way at the new sight of the Machine set up for her before the palace gardens.

This is known, that she went up the steps of the scaffold at liberty and stood for a bare moment seen by the great gathering in the square, a figure against the trees of what had been her gardens and the place where her child had played. It was but a moment, she was bound and thrown, and the steel fell.

On the low mud and slope of Wattignies the mist began to wreathe and thin as the hours approached high noon. Through gaps of it the three Austrian regiments could see trees now and then in the mid-distance, showing huge, and in a moment covered again by new whorls of vapour. But still there was no sound. In front of them towards Dimont, to their left round the corner of the slope in the valley of Glarges, with every lift of vapour the landscape became apparent, when suddenly, as the mist finally lifted, the wide plain showed below them rolling southwards, a vast space of wind and air, and at the same moment they heard first bugles, then the shouts of command, and lastly the rising of the Marseillaise: Gaul was upon them.

The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were full of them swarming upwards: the fields were ribbed with their open lines, and as they charged they sang.

Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of triumph, yet I have heard them singing: I know the place, and I have seen their faces as they cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck the 3000 upon every side.

These stood, wavered, fell back to re-form: then they saw new masses of the Republicans roaring up from Glarges behind their flank, broke and were scattered by the storm. The few heavy guns of the Austrians there emplaced were trained too late to check the onrush. The little pieces of the climbing and the surging men were dragged by laniards, unmasked behind gaps in the hurrying advance, crashed grape and were covered again for a moment by the living cover of the charge. The green at the hilltop was held, the poor yards and byres of Wattignies were scoured and thundered through, and Carnot, his hat upon his sword, and Duquesnoy his face half blood, and all the host gloried to find before them in their halting mid-day sweat when the great thrust was over, the level fields of the summit, the Austrian line turned, and an open way between them and Maubeuge.

Two charges disputed their certain victory. First the Hungarian cavalry galloped and swerved and broke against the dense and ever denser bodies that still swarmed up three ways at once and converged upon the crested edge of the upland plain; then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles, swept upon the French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely into death. They streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy above them, and on it the faint silver lilies, and from either rank the cries that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle fronts of Christendom.

These also failed: a symbol in name and in flag and in valour of that great, once good, and very ancient thing which God now disapproved.

The strong line of Coburg was turned. It was turned and must roll back upon itself. Its strict discipline preserved it, as did the loose order of the Republican advance and the maddened fatigue of the young men who had just conquered: for these could work a miracle but not yet achieve a plan. The enemy fell back in order, sombre, massed and regular, unharassed, towards the Sambre. The straggling French soldiery, wondering that the fighting had ceased (but wisely judged incapable of pursuit), possessed the main road unhindered; next day they drank with their comrades in Maubeuge.

In this way was accomplished what a principal critic of the art of war^[45] has called “The chief feat of arms of the Republic.”

It was somewhat past noon.

Upon that scaffold before the gardens which had been the gardens of her home and in which her child had played, the Executioner showed at deliberation and great length, this way and that on every side, the Queen’s head to the people.