"And the greatest day for France in her history! What mighty calculations must have been made and what tremendous marchings and combats must have been carried out to achieve such a result."
"One of the decisive battles of history, like Platæa, or the Metaurus or Gettysburg. There go the Uhlans with Captain von Boehlen at their head. Now I wonder what they mean to do!"
A thousand men, splendidly mounted and armed, rode through the forest. The moonlight fell on von Boehlen's face and showed it set and grim. John felt that he was bound to recognize in him a stern and resolute man, carrying out his own conceptions of duty. Nor had von Boehlen been discourteous to him, although he might have felt cause for much resentment. The Prussian glanced at him as he passed, but said nothing. Soon he and his horsemen passed out of sight in the dusk.
John, wondering how late it might be, suddenly remembered that he had a watch and found it was eleven o'clock.
"An hour of midnight," he said to Fleury.
Most all the French stretched upon the ground were now in deep slumber, wounded and unwounded alike. The sounds of cannon fire were sinking away, but they did not die wholly. The faint thunder of the distant guns never ceased to come. But the campfire, where he knew the German generals slept or planned, went out, and darkness trailed its length over all this land which by night had become a wilderness.
John was able to trace dimly the sleeping figures of Germans in the dusk, sunk down upon the ground and buried in the sleep or stupor of exhaustion. As they lay near him so they lay in the same way in hundreds of thousands along the vast line. Men and horses, strained to their last nerve and muscle, were too tired to move. It seemed as if more than a million men lay dead in the fields and woods of Northeastern France.
John, who had been wide awake, suddenly dropped on the ground where the others were stretched. He collapsed all in a moment, as if every drop of blood had been drained suddenly from his body. Keyed high throughout the day, his whole system now gave way before the accumulated impact of events so tremendous. The silence save for the distant moaning that succeeded the roar of a million men or more in battle was like a powerful drug, and he slept like one dead, never moving hand or foot.