The Forest of Swords: A Story of Paris and the Marne by Joseph A. Altsheler (i like reading TXT) 📖

caught a glimpse of the burly general walking back and forth in the forest, his hands clasped behind him, and a frown on his broad, fighting face. He would walk occasionally to a little telephone station, improvised under the trees—John could see the wires stretching away through the forest—and listen long and attentively. But when he put down the receiver the same moody look was invariably on his face, and John was convinced as much by his expression as by the sound of the guns that affairs were not going well with the Germans.

Another long hour passed and the sun moved on toward noon, but a German army of perhaps a quarter of a million men lay idle in the forest of Sénouart, as John now called the whole region.

Presently the general walked down the line and John lost sight of him. But Weber reappeared, coming from the other side of the hillock, and John was glad to see him, since Fleury had gone back to attend to a wounded friend.

"There doesn't seem to be as much action here as I expected," said Weber, cheerfully, sitting down on the grass beside young Scott.

"But they're shaking the world there! and there!" said John, nodding to right and to left.

"So they are. This is a most extraordinary reversal, Mr. Scott, and I can't conceive how it was brought about. Some mysterious mind has made and carried through a plan that was superbly Napoleonic. I'd give much to know how it was done."

John shook his head.

"I know nothing of it," he said.

"But doubtless your friend Lannes does. What a wonderful thing it is to carry through the heavens the dispatches which may move forward a million armed men."

"I don't know anything about Lannes' dispatches."

"Nor do I, but I can make a close guess, just as you can. He's surely hovering over the battle field today, and as I said last night he certainly has some idea where you are, and sooner or later will come for you."

John looked up, but again the heavens were bare and clear. Then he looked down and saw walking near them a heavy, middle-aged, bearded man to whom all the German officers paid great deference. The man's manner was haughty and overbearing, and John understood at once that in the monarchical sense he was a personage.

"Do you know the big fellow there?" he said to Weber. "Have you heard anyone speak of him?"

"I saw him this morning, and one of the guards told us who he is. That is Prince Karl of Auersperg. The house of Auersperg is one of the oldest in Germany, much older than the Emperor's family, the Hohenzollerns. I don't suppose the world contains any royal blood more ancient than that of Prince Karl."

"Evidently he feels that it's so. I'm getting used to princes, but our heavy friend there must be something of a specialist in the princely line. I should judge from his manner that he is not only the oldest man on earth, speaking in terms of blood, but the owner of the earth as well."

"The Auerspergs have an immense pride."

"I can see it, but a lot of pride fell before Paris yesterday, and a lot more is falling among these hills and forests today. There seems to be a lot of difference between princes, the Arnheims and the Auerspergs, for instance."

Then a sudden thought struck John. It had the vaguest sort of basis, but it came home to him with all the power of conviction.

"I wonder if Prince Karl of Auersperg once owned a magnificent armored automobile," he said.

Weber looked puzzled, and then his eyes lightened.

"Ah, I know what you mean!" he exclaimed. "The one in which we took that flight with Carstairs the Englishman and Wharton the American. It belonged to a prince, without doubt, yes. But no, it couldn't have been Prince Karl of Auersperg who owned the machine."

"I'm not so sure. I've an intuition that it is he. Besides, he looks like just the kind of prince from whom I'd like to take his best automobile, also everything else good that he might happen to have. I shall feel much disappointed if this proves not to be our prince."

"You Americans are such democrats."

"I don't go so far as to say a man is necessarily bad because of his high rank, but as I reminded you a little while ago, there are princes and princes. The ancient house of Auersperg as it walks up and down, indicating its conviction of its own superiority to everything else on earth, does not please me."

"The Uhlans are coming back!" exclaimed Weber in tones of excitement.

"And that's von Boehlen at their head! I'd know his figure as far as I could see it! And they've had a brush, too! Look at the empty saddles and the wounded men! As sure as we live they've run into the French cavalry and then they've run out again!"

The Uhlans were returning at a gallop, and the German officers of high rank were crowding forward to meet them. It was obvious to every one that they had received a terrible handling, but John knew that von Boehlen was not a man to come at a panicky gallop. Some powerful motive must send him so fast.

He saw the Prussian captain spring from his horse and rush to a little group composed of the general, the prince and several others of high rank who had drawn closely together at his coming.

Von Boehlen was wounded slightly, but he stood erect as he saluted the commander and talked with him briefly and rapidly. John's busy and imaginative mind was at work at once with surmises, and he settled upon one which he was sure must be the truth. The French advance in the center was coming, and this German army also must soon go into action.

He was confirmed in his belief by a hurried order to the guards to go eastward with the prisoners. As the captives, the wounded and the unwounded, marched off through the forest of Sénouart they heard at a distance, but behind them, the opening of a huge artillery fire. It was so tremendous that they could feel the shaking of the earth as they walked, and despite the hurrying of their guards they stopped at the crest of a low ridge to look back.

They gazed across a wide valley toward high green hills, along which they saw rapid and many flashes. John longed now for the glasses which had been taken from him when he was captured, but he was quite sure that the flashes were made by French guns. From a point perhaps a mile in front of the prisoners masked German batteries were replying. Fleury with his extraordinary power of judging sound was able to locate these guns with some degree of approximation.

"Look! the aeroplanes!" said John, pointing toward the hills which he now called to himself the French line.

Numerous dark shapes, forty or fifty at least, appeared in the sky and hovered over the western edge of the wide, shallow basin. John was sure that they were the French scouts of the blue, appearing almost in line like troops on the ground, and his heart gave a great throb. No doubt could be left now, that this German army was being attacked in force and with the greatest violence. It followed then that the entire German line was being assailed, and that the French victory was continuing its advance. The Republic had rallied grandly and was hurling back the Empire in the most magnificent manner.

All those emotions of joy and exultation that he had felt the day before returned with increased force. In daily contact he liked Germans as well as Frenchmen, but he thought that no punishment could ever be adequate for the gigantic crimes of kings. Napoleon himself had been the champion of democracy and freedom, until he became an emperor and his head swelled so much with success that he thought of God and himself together, just as the Kaiser was now thinking. It was a curious inversion that the French who were fighting then to dominate Europe were fighting now to prevent such a domination. But it was now a great French republican nation remade and reinvigorated, as any one could see.

The guards hurried them on again. Another mile and they stopped once more on the crest of a low hill, where it seemed that they would remain some time, as the Germans were too busy with a vast battle to think much about a few prisoners. It was evident that the whole army was engaged. The old general, the other generals, the princes and perhaps dukes and barons too, were in the thick of it. John's heart was filled with an intense hatred of the very name of royalty. Kings and princes could be good men personally, but as he saw its work upon the huge battle fields of Europe he felt that the institution itself was the curse of the earth.

"We shall win again today," said Fleury, rousing him from his absorption. "Look across the fields, Scott, my friend, and see how those great masses of infantry charging our army have been repulsed."

It was a far look, and at the distance the German brigades seemed to be blended together, but the great gray mass was coming back slowly. He forgot all about himself and his own fate in his desire to see every act of the gigantic drama as it passed before him. He took no thought of escape at present, nor did Fleury, who stood beside him. The fire of the guns great and small had now blended into the usual steady thunder, beneath which human voices could be heard.

"We don't have the forty-two centimeters, nor the great siege guns," said Fleury, "but the French field artillery is the best in the world. It's undoubtedly holding back the German hosts and covering the French advance."

"That's my opinion, too," said John. "I saw its wonderful work in the retreat toward Paris. I think it saved the early French armies from destruction."

The German army was made of stern material. Having planted its feet here it refused to be driven back. Its cannon was a line of flaming volcanoes, its cavalry charged again and again into the face of death, and its infantry perished in masses, but the stern old general spared nothing. Passing up and down the lines, listening at the telephone and receiving the reports of air scouts and land scouts, he always hurled in fresh troops at the critical points and Fritz and Karl and Wilhelm and August, sober and honest men, went forward willingly, sometimes singing and sometimes in silence, to die for a false and outworn system. John as a prisoner had a better view than he would have had if with the French army. In a country open now he could see a full mile to right and left, where the German hosts marched again and again to attack, and while the French troops were too far away for his eyes he beheld the continuous flare of their fire, like a broad red ribbon across the whole western horizon.

The passing of time was nothing to him. He forgot all about it in his absorption. But the sun climbed on, afternoon came, and still the battle at this point raged, the French unable to drive the Germans farther and the Germans unable to stop the French attacks. John roused himself and endeavored to dissociate the thunder on their flanks from that in front, and, after long listening, he was able to make the separation, or at least he thought so. He knew now that the struggle there was no less fierce than the one before him.

The Kaiser himself must be present with one or the other of these armies, and a man who had talked for more than twenty years of his divine right, his shining armor, his invincible sword and his mailed fist must be raging with the bitterness of death to find that he was only a mortal like other mortals, and that simple French republicans were defeating the War Lord, his Grand Army and the host of kings, princes, dukes, barons, high-born, very high-born, and all the other relics of medievalism. Dipped to the heel and beyond in the fountain of democracy, John could not keep from feeling a fierce joy as he saw with his own eyes the Germans fighting in the utmost desperation, not to take Paris and destroy France, but to save themselves from destruction.

The afternoon, slow and bright, save for the battle, dragged on. Scott and Fleury kept together. Weber appeared once more and spoke rather despondently. He believed that the Germans would hold fast, and might even resume the offensive toward Paris again, but Fleury shook his head.

"Today is like yesterday," he said.

"How can you