The crash is terrific; the Imperial phalanx is taken in flank. The contest is fierce, but it is soon over.

Brave Michel, in response to our officers, replies with glorious esprit de corps, “The Guard dies, and never surrenders!” his words instantly fulfilled, as he falls lifeless, sword in hand, while Cambronne, grown old in the service (to whom these words have been falsely attributed), gives up his weapon to William Halkett.

Halkett’s horse is shot, and Cambronne hastens away, but his captor is too quick for him, and seizing his gold aiguillette, hands him to a sergeant to be taken care of.

On presses the 52nd, driving the broken Guard before it: it is a sight probably never repeated in history—one regiment traversing the field alone, in sight of the army; sending the foe like sheep into the hollow; dispersing and pushing them relentlessly back, until they turn and fly, and other corps make haste to join in that glorious progress.

There is a movement along the ridge as the setting sun shines out in a burst of sinking splendour, and the Duke, with cocked hat raised above his head, gives the magic word, “The whole line will advance!” and then spurs down after the 52nd.

On the rising ground near La Haye Sainte, Napoleon sits on horseback, close to a small battalion which has formed square.

Jérôme, his brother, bleeding and exhausted, is with him, with honest old Drouot in his artillery uniform, in the pocket of which is a well-worn Bible; Soult and Gourgaud, Bertrand and brave young La Bédoyère are there, too: but the English Hussars are coming on at a fast trot.

All day long the waves of valour have been rolling northward, and breaking against an iron-bound shore; now the tide has turned, and rushes madly south again.

Nothing but confusion meets the eye: everywhere the French are in full retreat—solitary men, groups of three and four, ruined regiments, and the skeletons of squadrons.

Jérôme rides close to his brother, and says in a meaning tone—

“It were well for all who bear the name of Bonaparte to perish here!”

Napoleon orders some guns to open on the Hussars, and one shot hits Lord Uxbridge on the right knee as, mounted on a troop horse belonging to a sergeant-major of the 23rd Light Dragoons, he is leading the pursuit.

“Here we must die on the field of battle,” exclaims the Emperor, preparing to head the weak column; but Soult seizes his bridle, saying, “They will not kill you: you will be taken prisoner”; and, held up in the saddle by two faithful officers, for he is worn out, Napoleon is galloped away in the gathering darkness.

On the left of the Brussels road some Prussian guns had come up and fired on our men.

They were the sole representatives of Blücher’s force present before Mont St. Jean until after the retreat had begun; and they had been far better absent, as their pounding was cruelly felt by Mercer’s battery and several of our regiments.

They were induced, after some time, to change the direction of their range, and then all went well. The 52nd still pursued its march, halting for a moment near La Haye Sainte to face and charge some rallying squares, where a Belgian soldier was seen killing a wounded Frenchman, and was run through by an officer of the regiment.

Leeke, who carried the King’s colour, found a foot and a half of the pole wet with blood; Holman, the brother of the blind traveller, had three musket balls through his sword blade, and wore it for many years; Colborne and Major Rowan, being both dismounted, jumped on to two horses attached to an abandoned gun, calling to their men to cut the harness; but the advance continuing, they had to dismount with a hearty laugh and march on again on foot.

It was getting dark, and our Hussars were clearing the field in splendid style, the 10th, whose sabres were soon red as their scarlet cuffs, engaging with some strong remnants of the Old Guard and losing two officers.

Major Murray, of the dashing 18th, met a gun going at full speed, and leaped his charger over the traces, between the leaders and wheelers, while his men proceeded to cut the gunners down.

Colquhoun Grant, who had lost five horses and was then mounted on a magnificent chestnut, sent the gallant remains of his brigade at the retreating foe; and until it was impossible any longer to pick one’s way among the vast heaps of dead, disabled cannon, and miserable wounded—in short, the absolute wreck of an army—our light cavalry went wheeling and slashing right and left, hurrying on the veteran, the conscript, the artillery driver and the officer alike, all the French accounts doing justice to these light horsemen. It is only in private letters, hardly in the official documents, that England can learn the heroism of her Hussars at Waterloo.

Meanwhile the 52nd had crossed to the left of the road and scattered a column debouching from Planchenoit, behind the buildings of La Belle Alliance, in front of which a mass of guns had been left to their fate. The regiment passed on, and on its return found them marked with the numbers of other corps that had succeeded them.

All the causeway was crammed with flying troops: a terrible struggle for liberty took place, in which discipline gave way to terror. General officer and baggage waggon fled side by side; rifles and accoutrements were thrown away that their owners might hurry faster. The fields, the by-lanes, the woods, were all filled with fugitives—even the Emperor had to turn aside in order to get past.

Marshal Ney was one of the last to go. He had joined the army on the 15th, without money, without horses, almost without a uniform. He was to be found everywhere on that dreadful 18th, planting batteries, heading charges, rallying, raging, facing death at every stride, and when it was over he tottered exhausted away on foot, leaning on the shoulder of a compassionate corporal.

Now the Prussians have arrived in force. Planchenoit, its churchyard and crooked street, its orchards and barnyards, are full of French and Prussian slain.

The young Guard fought well, but they were outnumbered, and Blücher rides into the chaussée at La Belle Alliance.

A Uhlan band plays “God Save the King,” and farther along the road they meet the Duke returning on his way in the dark to write his despatches announcing the victory.

The two soldiers embrace, and sit talking for ten minutes while the stream goes hurrying by. Then the fiery old German follows up the retreat with a fury that is incredible.

At Genappe the Silesians have taken the Emperor’s baggage; Gneisenau mounts a drummer on one of the cream-coloured carriage horses, and away they go into the darkness after the fugitives, driving them from seven bivouacs, slaying, hacking, giving no rest, until the land is strewn for leagues with dead men, fallen under the Prussian steel.

Merciless it may seem to us, looking back with fourscore years between us and that moonlit night; but such was the vitality of the French that the most drastic steps were necessary to prevent their army mustering again.

What can I say of the battle-field, after the pursuit had rolled away, and it was left to the searcher and the plunderer?

If I could re-create one tithe of the horror those slopes and roads revealed you would sicken and turn away in disgust.

Prussian, Belgian, and British, there were, out on the plain that night, bent on no errand of mercy; stragglers and camp-followers creeping from group to group, tearing the rings from the fingers, and the teeth from the jaws!

Many a life was foully taken that tender nursing might have saved; but there were some groups who sought for a lost comrade or a favourite officer, and women there were, with woman’s gentle sympathy, soothing and tending as only they can soothe.

The bulk of the British force had gone to bivouac beyond and about Rosomme, which was behind the French position; but some detached portions remained where they had fought, too weary to advance with the others.

Mercer was one of these, and creeping under the cover of a waggon, worn out with slaughter, he slept—waking to find a dead man stark and stiff beneath him! His men came to him in the morning, and asked permission to bury one of their comrades.

“Why him in particular?” asked the captain, for many a bearskin-crested helmet was empty in “G Troop.”

Then they showed him the horror of it.

The whole of the man’s head had been carried away, leaving the fleshy mask of what had been a face, from which the eyes were still staring wildly.

“We have not slept a wink, sir,” they said. “Those eyes have haunted us all night!”

With daybreak men stood aghast at the spectacle of that battle-ground.

The losses have never been satisfactorily reckoned; but I have seen it stated, curiously, that of the redcoats 9,999 were actually killed there. The French loss for the four days’ campaign has been counted as 50,000; and you can tell off the survivors of both armies to-day, perhaps, on the fingers of one hand.

Every house in the neighbourhood was full of wounded. For three days, the doctors tell us, they were being brought in by the search parties, a sharp frost having congealed the wounds of many and so saved them, and lines of carts jolted the shrieking wretches over that dreadful causeway to Brussels in endless succession.

At Hougoumont, where the orange-trees were in blossom, they flung three hundred bodies down a well: it was a simple method, saving time and trouble; but a dark tradition lingers that voices were heard afterwards, faintly imploring, from the cavernous depths.

Wild strawberries hung their red clusters, and the little, blue forget-me-not peeped in the woods; birds of prey came croaking on the wing; and within twenty-four hours ten thousand horses had been flayed by the Flemish peasants, many of whom made fortunes by plunder!

Men gathered jewelled decorations and crosses by handfuls: it was impossible to take three strides without treading on a sword, a broken musket, a carbine, or a corpse!

Near La Haye Sainte they found a pretty French girl in hussar uniform, and the farm itself was encrusted with blood; tufts of hair adhered to the doorways, the yard presenting a sight never to be forgotten. A pole to which a scrap of torn silk clung was picked up under the body of Ensign Nettles: it was the King’s colour.

The remains of three French brothers named Angelet were among the slain, and the history of one was most romantic. Wounded in some of the Napoleonic wars, where he had lost a leg, he was taunted by a lady with the fact that he could only talk of what he had done for France—that he could do no more. The brave fellow seized his crutches, limped after the army, and met his fate at Waterloo.

Picton’s body—wounded at Quatre Bras, though none but his valet knew it—was taken to England, and by a strange coincidence was laid, at the Fountain Inn, Canterbury, on the very table at which he had dined, a fortnight before, on his way to join the army.

Byng of the Guards said to Sir John Colborne in Paris: “How do your fellows like our getting the credit of what you did at Waterloo? I could not advance because our ammunition was all done.”

The Foot Guards got their bearskins as a well-merited reward, only the Grenadier companies wearing them during the battle. The 52nd, for their great share in the closing scene, received—nothing! and the Duke, when approached on the subject of that glaring injustice, said, “Oh, I know nothing of the services of particular regiments. There was glory enough for all!”

They are nearly all gathered to the “land o’ the leal” now. The last of Hougoumont’s defenders—Von Trovich of the Nassauers—died in 1882; Albemarle, who fought with the 14th Foot, passed away quite recently; while the Guards turned out to bury a veteran not long since who paraded for the last time in Caterham workhouse! In 1894 John Stacey, aged ninety-six, of the German Legion, walked from Yorkshire to London to see if his tenpence a day might not be increased.

For thirty years you could mark, by the deeper colour of the corn, where they had buried the dead in greatest numbers: they still find buttons in the plough-land after rain, with bullets cut in half against our sword-blades, and sometimes bones! Ten thousand people, on an average, visit the field each year; and, though the land lies dozing under its wealth of crops, and the lark trills his requiem where the guns once thundered, and the herdboy’s song rises in place of “Vive l’Empereur!”—never will the nations forget that fearful Sunday or the names of Wellington and Waterloo.

Not since the “Völkerschlacht,” or Armageddon of the nations at Leipzig, in 1813, when the allies overthrew the hosts of Napoleon, had Europe witnessed such a stupendous conflict as was fought near Königgrätz, on the Upper Elbe, in Bohemia, on the 3rd July, 1866. This battle was called of Königgrätz by the Prussians, of Sadowa by the Austrians; and, as a matter of topographical fact, the latter was the more correct title, just as the field of Waterloo is known as Mont Saint Jean to the French, and Belle Alliance to the Prussians—in both cases with more justice. At Leipzig about 430,000 men had mingled in fight, while at Königgrätz, as we shall call it in compliment to our ancient and honoured allies the Prussians, the total number of combatants was about 435,000, or close on half a million of men.

What had called these armed hosts into the field? Briefly put, it was the question which was to be the leading Power among the German-speaking peoples—Austria or Prussia. For centuries the former had asserted this position of proud pre-eminence, but there came a time when this claim of the Hapsburgs was no longer allowed by the great and growing monarchy of the Hohenzollerns. Austria wanted to have everything in Germany done after her particular way of thinking, and Prussia began to find it quite incompatible with her honour and her self-respect to be thus lorded over by a State which in many respects she deemed to be her inferior in point of light and leading. Thus it came to pass that these two rival Powers began to lead a very cat-and-dog life at the council-board of the Germanic Confederation of States; and Bismarck, who was the rising statesman of his time, prophesied that this condition of things could go on no longer, and that the only remedy for this eternal quarrelling between the two was a policy of “blood and iron” on the part of Prussia.

Once, however, they seemed to have suddenly become the best of friends. This was when they joined their forces, in 1864, to snatch Schleswig-Holstein, or the Elbe Duchies, as they were called, from the rule of the Danes. Bismarck was the great champion of “Germany for the Germans,” and he thought it scandalous and unreasonable that a foreign people like the Danes should continue to domineer over the Teutons in the Elbe Duchies. Prussia and Austria, therefore, at his far-seeing instigation, combined to oust the Danes from the Duchies, and this they finally did after storming the Danish redoubts at Düppel.

But the worst of it was that the conquerors could not agree as to their spoil. Prussia wanted to do one thing with the Duchies, and Austria another. It is a common enough thing for thieves to fall out over the distribution of their booty, and this was precisely what the rival German Powers did with regard to Schleswig-Holstein. Bismarck, the long-headed statesman that he was, clearly foresaw that they must and would do so, and this was the very thing he wanted. He wished to have a good pretext for going to war with Austria, in order that this Power might be altogether excluded from the German family of nations, and that Prussia, taking her place, might inaugurate a new and better era for the Teutonic peoples. Austria had fallen into the trap which he had laid for her, and she had no choice but to fight. Each, of course, claimed to be the injured party, and the old game of the wolf and the lamb was played over again to the amusement of all Europe. Some of the other German States sided with Austria, and some with Prussia, but the former were soon defeated and disarmed, and then Prussia was free to direct her whole strength against the Austrians.

It was known that the latter were collecting all their strength in Bohemia, and King William, who had General von Moltke, the greatest soldier of his time, for his Chief of the Staff, or principal counsellor in affairs of war, resolved to make a dash into this province before its Austrian defenders knew where they were, and smite them, as David did the Philistines, hip and thigh. Accordingly, he divided the forces of his kingdom into three main armies, each composed of several Army Corps. The command of the First, or centre, Army, numbering about 93,000, was entrusted to the King’s nephew, Prince Frederick Charles, called by his soldiers the “Red Prince,” from the scarlet uniform of the Zieten Hussars which he generally wore; the Second, or left-hand Army, totalling 100,000 men, was given to the King’s high-souled and chivalrous son, the Crown Prince, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law; while the Third, or right-hand host, called of the Elbe, fell to General Herwarth von Bittenfeld, who fought throughout the campaign with a courage worthy of “Hereward, the last of the English.” But these three huge armies did not invade Bohemia in one overwhelming mass. Moltke, the great “battle-thinker,” the “Silent One in Seven Languages,” as his friends fondly called him, knew a trick worth two of that. His maxim was, “march separately, strike combined”; and yet it behoved him to keep the Austrians in perfect ignorance of where he meant to strike. The Crown Prince, on the left, started with his army from Silesia; the Red Prince set out from Lusatia, while Herwarth’s point of departure was Thuringia.

Did Moltke himself also take the field? No, not at once; for it meanwhile sufficed this great military chess-player, this mathematical planner of victory, to sit quietly among his maps and papers at the offices of the Grand General Staff in Berlin, with his hand on the telegraph wire, and direct the movements of the three armies of invasion. Take the following description that was penned by an English witness of the crossing of the frontier by the army of the Red Prince:—“It was here” (at a toll-house gate) “that Prince Frederick Charles took his stand to watch his troops march over the border. He had hardly arrived there before he gave the necessary orders, and in a few moments the Uhlans, or Lancers, who formed the advance guard of the regiments, were over the frontier. Then followed the infantry. As the leading ranks of each battalion arrived at the first point on the road from which they caught sight of the Austrian colours that showed the frontier, they raised a cheer, which was quickly caught up by those in the rear, and repeated again and again till, when the men came up to the toll-house and saw their soldier-prince standing on the border line, it swelled into a rapturous roar of delight, which only ceased to be replaced by a martial song that was caught up by each battalion as it poured into Bohemia. The chief himself stood calm and collected; but he gazed proudly on the passing sections, and never did an army cross an enemy’s frontier better equipped, better cared for, or with a higher courage than that which marched out of Saxony that day.”

Over the picturesque hills of Saxony, over the Giant Mountains into the fertile plains of Bohemia, swiftly sped the three superbly-organised armies like huge and shining serpents; and ever nearer did they converge on the point which, with mathematical accuracy, had been selected as the place where they would have to coil and deliver their fatal sting of fire. Hard did the Austrians try to block the path of the triune hosts and crush them in detail; but the terribly destructive needle-gun, with the forceful lance of the lunging Uhlan and the circling sabre of the ponderous Cuirassier, ever cleared the way, and a series of preliminary triumphs marked the progress of the three armies towards junction and final victory. By the 29th the Red Prince had reached Gitschin, the objective point of the invasion, while his cousin the Crown Prince lay at Königinhof, on the left, a long day’s march distant. Meanwhile the Austrians had all retired under the shelter of the guns of Königgrätz, a strongly fortressed town on the left bank of the Upper Elbe, there to take their final stand, with their backs, as ’twere, to the wall.

The Austrians were commanded by Feldzeugmeister Benedek, and their army had been reinforced by the troops of the King of Saxony, who had sided with the foes of Prussia in the impending conflict, and were sure to give a good account of themselves. An equally stubborn resistance was to be expected from the Hungarian subjects of the Emperor Francis Joseph, who were second to none in all his polyglot dominions in respect of that ancient valour and other chivalrous qualities which had caused this gallant people to be called the “English of the East.” Finer horsemen than the Hungarians existed in no army in all the world; and in this campaign, as in every other in which they had ever been engaged, the Austrians were particularly strong in cavalry. But, on the other hand, the Prussians were known to be armed with the lately-invented breech-loading needle-gun, while the Austrians still clung to the older-fashioned muzzle-loader, and professed to make light of their opponents’ new-fangled rifle. They were soon to be shown convincingly which was the better weapon.

It was not till June 30th that King William and his paladins, Moltke, Bismarck, and von Roon, left Berlin by rail for the seat of war. They had scorned to witness the preliminary heats, so to speak, and only wanted to be present at the grand final. On July 2nd, after reaching Gitschin, which was near the headquarters of the Red Prince, Bismarck wrote to his wife: “Just arrived from Sichrow. The field of battle there is still covered with corpses, horses, and arms. Our victories (so far) are greater than we thought. It appears that we have over 15,000 prisoners, while the loss on the Austrian side is still greater in dead and wounded, being no less than 20,000. Two of the Army Corps are utterly scattered, and some of the regiments are wiped out to the last man. I have, indeed, up till now seen more Austrian prisoners than Prussian soldiers.”

On the night of the same day (2nd July) King William, now in his seventieth year, had retired to rest in a little room of the “Golden Lion,” which overlooks the market-place of Gitschin—a quaint little old town nestling among the hills of Northern Bohemia, on the southern side of the Giant Mountains. Wearied out with the fatigues of the day, he had hardly closed his eyes in sleep when he was unceremoniously woke up. His Majesty opened his eyes, and found Moltke standing by his bedside, the bearer of most important news, which General Voigts-Rhetz had just brought in from the Red Prince, whose headquarters were some six miles further to the east, at the château of Kamenitz on the Königgrätz road. Voigts-Rhetz had first of all carried his momentous news to Moltke, who lodged on the opposite side of the square, and who was the real ruler of Prussia’s battles, now and after in the French war. The King did nothing without consulting Moltke, nor did his Majesty ever issue an order that was not based on the well-thought-out advice of his Chief of the Staff.

The message of the Red Prince was of the very highest importance, for it upset all the resolutions which had previously been taken at the Prussian headquarters. Early in the day the exact whereabouts of the Austrians was unknown. It was supposed that they were on the left, or eastern, side of the Elbe, furthest from the Prussians, with their right and left flanks resting on two strong fortresses—Josephstadt and Königgrätz, respectively—a position which it would have been terribly difficult, if not impossible, for their adversaries to assail; so that, pending the discovery of their real whereabouts, it had been resolved to let the Prussian troops rest on the 3rd, as they had been wearied out by their incredible feats of marching and fighting. Presently, however, “from information received,” this resolution was revoked and replaced by another which deprived the fagged-out Prussians of the prospect of their much-needed day’s rest; and a bold and rapid rider—Lieutenant von Norman—was despatched across country to the Crown Prince at Königinhof to ensure his co-operation with the Red Prince in a particular manner on the morrow.

But von Norman had barely started on his long and perilous ride when, lo and behold! another officer, Major von Ungar, came spurring in to the quarters of the Red Prince with a great piece of news. Attended by only a few dragoons, this officer had gone out scouting in the direction of Königgrätz, and discovered that the bulk of the Austrian army was without doubt on the right, or Prussian, side of the Elbe, holding a strong position on the further bank of the Bistritz brook, which ran very nearly parallel with the Elbe at a distance from it of some four miles. The position was strong, but not half so much so as the dreaded one beyond the Elbe, and the hearts of the Prussians jumped for joy. It seemed to them as if God had already delivered the Austrians into their hands, as Cromwell avowed of the Scots when they left their high ground at Dunbar and descended to meet his Ironsides on the plain. After gleaning this priceless intelligence, von Norman had to ride for his life. A squadron of Austrian cavalry made a dash to catch him, but he rode like an English fox-hunter, and only left behind him, as a souvenir of his audacious visit to the enemy’s lines, a part of his tunic which had been carried away by an Austrian lance-thrust.

This, then, was the news which Voigts-Rhetz had brought to Moltke and the King at Gitschin, and then the situation underwent an immediate and final change. It was resolved to assail the Austrian position early on the morrow with the whole force of the united Prussian armies, and another message to this effect, cancelling all previous ones, as a codicil does a will, was at midnight despatched to the Crown Prince on one hand and Herwarth on the other, informing them of the altered state of things, and desiring them on the morrow to assail the flanks of the Austrians as fast and furiously as ever they could; while the Red Prince would apply his battering-rams to their elevated and strongly entrenched centre. This urgent message was entrusted to Colonel von Finckenstein, who, after a very dark and dangerous ride of twenty miles, reached the Crown Prince’s quarters about four o’clock on the morning of the 3rd July.

That fateful morning was a very wet and raw one, pretty similar to that which, after a rainy night, had dawned upon the English at Waterloo. Long before midnight the troops had all been in motion to the front. The moon occasionally blinked out, but was mostly hidden behind clouds, and then could be distinctly seen the decaying bivouac fires in the places which had been occupied by the troops along the road from Gitschin to Sadowa and Königgrätz. These fires looked like large will-o’-the-wisps as their flames flickered about in the wind and stretched for many a mile, for the bivouacs of so large a force as that of the Red Prince’s army of nearly 100,000 men spread over a wide extent of country. With the first signs of dawn a drizzling rain came on, which lasted until late in the afternoon. The wind increased and blew coldly upon the soldiers, and they were short of both sleep and food, while frequent gusts bore down the water-laden corn on both sides of the ground along the way.

Moltke and his staff had left Gitschin by four o’clock, driving to Horitz, where, mounting their horses, they rode on to Dub and joined Prince Frederick Charles. For this was the centre point of assembly. “A few short words,” wrote the Times correspondent, “passed from the Commander of the First Army to his Chief of the Staff; a few aides-de-camp, mounting silently, rode away; and, as it were, by the utterance of a magician’s spell, one hundred thousand armed Prussian warriors, springing into sight as if from the bowels of the earth, swept over the southern edge of the Milowitz ravine towards the hill of Dub.”

About eight o’clock, King William, with Bismarck and others of his great men, arrived upon the scene. Behind the King, besides his staff, were his royal guests, with their numerous retinues of adjutants and equerries, grooms and horses, in number equal unto about a couple of squadrons—making a fine mark for the shells of the Austrians. Before mounting his good mare “Fenella”—thenceforth to be called “Sadowa”—the King had got into his great-coat and put on goloshes over his boots. A wrong pair of spurs had been brought from Gitschin and would not fit. A groom whipped his off, and strapped them on over the royal goloshes; and thus equipped, with a field-glass slung round his neck by a long strap, the King rode away to view the course of the terrific fight, being everywhere received with tremendous cheering by his enthusiastic troops. For it touched their hearts to see so hoary a king come forth at the head of his “Volk in Waffen” or people in arms, to do strenuous battle with the alien. No roi fainéant, or stay-at-home monarch he, but one of the good old sort, like our own royal Edwards and Harries, under whose personal leadership the French were “beaten, bobbed, and thumped” at Crécy and at Agincourt.

It had been thought incredible by the Prussian leaders that the Austrians should have waived the advantages of a position behind the Elbe, and come forward several miles on its hither bank so as to meet their adversaries on the terms of the latter. But a closer inspection of their line of battle showed that it had been singularly well chosen. Along their front ran the boggy Bistritz brook, its banks dotted with farmsteads, villages, and clumps of wood, forming fine cover for infantry; while beyond this the ground rose in gentle undulations till it finally assumed the appearance of a commanding swell or ridge, from which Benedek’s batteries could pour down death and destruction on the advancing Prussians over the heads of his own infantry when engaging the helmeted wielders of the needle-gun. From the top of the slight elevation whereon stands the village of Dub the ground slopes gently down to the Bistritz, which the road crosses at the village of Sadowa, a mile and a quarter from Dub. From Sadowa the ground again rises beyond the Bistritz to the little village of Chlum (mark that village!), conspicuous by its church-tower crowning the gentle hill, a mile and a half beyond Sadowa—a beautiful bit of country not unlike some parts of England with its hill and dale, clustering cottages, peeping châteaux, hedgerows, groves, and waving grain-fields. Profiting to the full by the defensive advantages of this terraced terrain, the Austrians had seamed it with entrenched batteries, and palisaded their approaches with felled trees and intertwisted branches, making of the whole a natural fortress formidable to their assailants.

But nothing could daunt the hearts of the Prussians. They had got to beat Benedek and his 220,000 men, and the sooner the better. The Red Prince was afraid that, after all, Benedek might seek to retire behind the Elbe, and this had to be prevented at all costs and hazards. The Prince might not be able to beat him off-hand, but he could at least fasten on Benedek like a bulldog and hold him fast there till the arrival of the Crown Prince, when the bull could be altogether felled and laid upon its back. Bang, therefore, went the Prussian batteries, and presently the whole sinuous line of battle, extending about five miles from Cistowes (opposite Chlum) on the Prussian left, to Nechanitz on the right, began to be wrapped in wreathed cannon smoke. The Austrians returned shot for shot, and neither side either gained or lost ground. In the centre the Prussians pushed battery after battery into action, and kept up a tremendous fire on the Austrian guns; but these returned it with interest, knowing the ground well, and every shell fell true, heaping the ground with dead and wounded men and horses.

While this furious cannonade was going on, columns of Prussian infantry were moved down towards the Bistritz, with intent to storm the line of villages—Sadowa, Dohalitz, and Dohalicka—on the further side. Shortly before their preparations were complete, the village of Benatek, on the Austrian right, caught fire, and the 7th Prussian Division made a dash to secure it; yet the Austrians were not driven out by the flames, and here, for the first time in the battle, it came to desperate hand-to-hand fighting. But the bloody mêlée here was nothing to what was now mixing up the combatants in the wood of Sadowa, and converting it into a perfect slaughter-house and hell upon earth. Boldly the Prussians advanced upon this village and its wood, plying the rapid needle-gun with awful effect upon the wood’s defenders. But nothing could have exceeded the splendid courage with which the Austrian battalions clung to their cover, and their volleys, supplemented as they were by a truly infernal fire from the batteries behind and above, seemed to mow down whole ranks of their assailants. But neither bullets nor shells could decide the fierce struggle; the bayonet had to be called in to do this. And now ensued most horrible scenes of carnage, which ended, however, before eleven o’clock, in the capture by the Prussians of the aforesaid villages. And no wonder that the Austrians chose to call the tremendous battle after the village and wood where they had made so glorious but ineffectual a stand.

Moltke himself afterwards related that, while he was watching the progress of events in front of Sadowa wood some roe-deer, startled from their leafy glades by the infernal pother around them, came bounding out and past him; and also how, when he and his suite rode forward a little way along the Lissa road to reconnoitre the Austrian position, he encountered an ownerless ox plodding along, serenely indifferent to the shells that were bursting all around it. Opposite the Sadowa wood on the Lissa heights, the Austrians had planted a most formidable entrenched line of guns, and Moltke afterwards told how he succeeded in getting the King to counter-order a command to storm these entrenched batteries from the front, which could only have ended in the bloodiest of disasters to their assailants.

About this time Bismarck, seeing how little headway the Prussians were making, began to be rather apprehensive as to the general result, fearing even that, if the Crown Prince came not up soon, they might, after all, be beaten. But one little incident gave him fresh hope. Taking out his cigar-case he offered a weed to Moltke, who deliberately chose the best of the lot. “Oh,” thought Bismarck to himself, “if Moltke is calm enough to do that, we need have no fear after all.”

The coming of the Crown Prince, with his additional hundred thousand men, had been as anxiously looked for as the arrival of Blücher on the field of Waterloo, and in truth the two situations were closely alike. Suddenly Bismarck, who had been looking intently in the Crown Prince’s direction, lowered his glass and pointed to certain lines in the far distance, but these the others pronounced to be furrows. “No,” said Bismarck, looking again, “the spaces are not equal: they are advancing lines.” And so they were; and by eleven o’clock the smoke of some Austrian batteries furnished a convincing proof that their fire was directed, not against the Red Prince’s, but “Unser Fritz’s” army; and the words “The Crown Prince is coming!” passed from lip to lip. But, some time before his advance had thus been signalised, Moltke made answer to the King, who had been questioning him as to the prospects of the fight, “To-day your Majesty will win, not only the battle, but also the campaign.”

“The Prussian reserves,” wrote a correspondent with the Austrians, “were once more called upon; and from half-past twelve till nearly one o’clock there was an artillery fire from centre to left for six miles or more, which could not well have been exceeded by any action of which history makes mention. The battle was assuming a more awful and tremendous aspect, and the faint rays of sunshine which shot at intervals through the lifting clouds only gave the scene a greater terror.” About this time, also, “Benedek and his staff passed through the 6th Corps, which was in reserve. As the green plumes were seen rapidly advancing, the bands broke forth into the National Anthem, and the men cheered their commander with no uncertain note. Faces broke into broad smiles; Jäger hats were thrown into the air; all seemed joyous in the anticipation of an approaching triumph. Benedek, however, waved to them to cease shouting, saying, in his peculiar tone of voice, ‘Not now, my children: wait till to-morrow.’” And it was wise advice; for by this time Benedek had begun to suspect that he and his men would soon all have a very different song to sing.

The storm and stress of battle were now beginning to tell heavily on the Austrians. They were, it is true, still holding their own, or something like it, on the line of the Bistritz; but what is that which suddenly attracts the attention of Benedek and his staff behind the village of Chlum? They gallop away thither to inquire into the cause of all this new turmoil, and are greeted with a destructive volley from the needle-guns of “Unser Fritz,” who had by this time, after a forced march of frightful difficulty across the sodden country from Königinhof, come upon the scene with his Guards, and not only turned the flank, but positively fastened on the rear of the Austrian fighting line, at which he was now hammering away with might and main. But his path, so far, had been encumbered with corpses and mutilated bodies in sickening masses. “Around us,” he wrote in his Diary, “lay or hobbled about so many of the well-known figures of the Potsdam and Berlin garrisons. A shocking appearance was presented by those who were using their rifles as crutches, or were being led up the heights by some other unwounded comrades. The most horrid spectacle, however, was that of an Austrian battery, of which all the men and horses had been shot down.... It is a shocking thing to ride over a battle-field, and it is impossible to describe the hideous mutilations which present themselves. War is really something frightful, and those who create it with a stroke of the pen, sitting at a green-baize table, little dream of what horrors they are conjuring up.... In Rosberitz, where the fight must have been frightfully bitter, to judge from the masses of dead and wounded, I found my kinsman, Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, who had been shot in the leg by three balls,” and died of his wounds soon after.

With the turning of the Austrian right by the Crown Prince, the battle was virtually won. On the extreme left, Herwarth had played similar havoc with the Saxons, in spite of the heroic desperation with which they fought; and by four o’clock the Prussian line of attack resembled a huge semi-circle hemming in the masses of battered and broken Austrian troops. Half an hour later the latter, perceiving that victory had at last been snatched from their grasp, began to give way all along their line; and then, with drums beating and colours flying, the Red Prince’s men, with one accord, rose from their positions and began a general advance. Perceiving his opportunity, the King now gallantly placed himself at the head of the whole cavalry reserve of the First Army, which “charged and completely overthrew,” to quote his Majesty’s own words, a similar mass of Austrian horsemen.

The nature of the ground had hitherto prevented the cavalry of either army from acting in masses, but the country was more open on the line of retreat to Königgrätz, and it now became the scene of several splendid lance and sabre conflicts. As the squadrons of the 3rd Prussian Dragoons were rushing forward to charge some Austrian battalions near the village of Wiester, an Austrian Cuirassier brigade, led by an Englishman of the name of Beales, charged them in flank. They drove the Prussians back, and, smiting them heavily with their ponderous swords, nearly destroyed the dragoons; but Hohenlohe’s Prussian Uhlans, seeing their comrades worsted, charged with their lances couched against the Austrian flanks, and compelled them to retire. Pressed by the Lancers they fell back, fighting hard, but then the scarlet Zieten Hussars charged them in turn in the rear. A fierce combat ensued, and the gallant Beales himself was borne wounded to the ground.

But all would not avail. The Austrians were in full flight towards the fortress of Königgrätz, pursued by cavalry, volleyed at by infantry, and exposed to ever-increasing showers of shell-fire. Yet from some positions of advantage they continued to retaliate in kind; and it was while standing watching the pursuit that King William and his suite became exposed to a terrific counter-fire of shells. Bismarck, who was still with him, ventured to chide his Majesty for thus exposing his precious person so unnecessarily. “Does your Majesty, then, think they are swallows?” asked Bismarck, on the King affecting to make light of the whizzing of shells and bullets. “No one,” wrote Bismarck to his wife, “would have ventured to speak to the King as I did, when a whole mass of ten troopers and fifteen horses of a Cuirassier regiment lay wallowing in their blood close to us, and the shells whizzed in unpleasant proximity to the King, who remained just as quiet and composed as if he had been on the parade-ground at Berlin.” In spite of all remonstrances the King would not budge, so, edging up on his dark chestnut behind the King’s mare, Bismarck gave her a good sly kick with the point of his boot, and made her bound forward with her royal rider out of the zone of fire.

On coming up with the troops of the Crown Prince, the King had been nearly swallowed up by them for sheer joy. At sight of the venerable monarch, who had been exposing his person throughout the bloody fray like the most dutiful of his soldiers, battalion after battalion—some the mere shadows of their former selves—burst into frenzied cheering and rushed forward, officers and men, to kiss the hand, the boot, the stirrup of their beloved leader. But presently a scene more touching still was presented to the victorious Prussian troops, when the heroic Crown Prince rode up and met his father. “I reported to the King,” wrote the Crown Prince, “the presence of my army on the battle-field, and kissed his hand, on which he embraced me. Neither of us could speak for a time. He was the first to find words, and then he said he was pleased that I had been successful, and had proved my capacity for command, handing me at the same time the order ‘Pour le mérite’ (highest of Prussian war decorations) for my previous victories.” Earlier in the day “Unser Fritz” had met his cousin the Red Prince. “We waved our caps to one another from afar, and then fell into one another’s arms amid the cheering of the troops of my extreme right and his extreme left wing.... Two years ago I embraced him as victor at Düppel; to-day we were both victors: for, after the stubborn stand made by his troops, I had come to decide the day with my army.”

The battle had been won, but at what a terrible cost! Even the victors shuddered at the sight of the multitudes of bodies which heaped the bloody field. By superior arms, superior numbers, and superior strategy, Prussia, at the cost of 10,000 of her bravest sons, had won a crowning victory over her Austrian rival, who lost 40,000 men (including 18,000 prisoners), 11 standards, and 174 guns. “I have lost all,” exclaimed the defeated Benedek, “except, alas! my life!” The highest proportion of the Prussian loss of 10,000 had fallen on Franzecky’s Division, whereof 2,000, out of 15,000, had bitten the Bohemian dust. But “Franzecky vor!” (“Franzecky to the front!”) will always live in the Prussian soldier’s song as a memory of the ever-ready leader who bore the brunt of the awful struggle on the line of the Bistritz.

That same night the King slept at Horitz—not upon a bed, but on his carriage cushions spread out on a sofa. Bismarck’s couch was at first formed by a wisp of straw under the open colonnade of the same townlet, though afterwards he was invited to share the wretched room of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg. Moltke rode back to Gitschin, a distance of about twenty miles from the battle-field, where a cup of weak tea was all the refreshment that could be got for him; and then, in a fever of fatigue, he threw himself down to sleep in his clothes, as he had to be up betimes and return to Horitz to procure the King’s sanction for his further plans.