of them had been buried, albeit the motives for this show of respect had been purely sanitary. As one contemplates now at leisure the relative positions of the forces which met on the field between Vionville and Gorze on August 16, it seems utterly unaccountable how things should have taken the course they did. Nothing would seem to be more certain than that the French could have retreated in the direction of Verdun and Paris, if they had to retreat, instead of in the contrary direction towards Metz. Though the French claimed a greater victory at Courcelles, eastward from Metz, on the 14th, than they had really won, yet it is certain that the Germans had received there a severe blow. This the French generals must have known, and they ought to have known how comparatively small was the force which attacked the full strength of their army on its first march towards Verdun. The assault begun by the 3rd Prussian Corps was no doubt ferocious, and it had to be borne by the troops (Frossard's) which had suffered so much at the storming of Spicheren. It must have been that these troops had not yet recovered from the mad panic of that day, and that they now multiplied in imagination the forces which were coming up from behind the long thick screen of woods which concealed the meagreness of the German vanguard. At any rate, with numbers vastly on their side, and with a position commanding completely the narrow pass through which the Germans had to defile and ascend, it remains the incomprehensible fact that the following morning found the French several miles back in the direction of Metz, and the Germans holding the great road to Paris, which had been the immediate object of the contest. I paused for a little at the dingy little village of Flavigny; dingy, VOL. VIII.-NO. XLVI. NEW SERIES. and with only a half-dozen houses in it; but it had been consecrated by one of those little deeds of kindness which, when found blooming amid the desolations of war, have a rare lustre not to be forgotten. Two girls, whose homes had been burnt over their heads, and whose friends had all fled, had there been seen scraping up, mingled with dust, handfuls of rice which had fallen from the sutlers' carts; silently weeping as they gleaned, they were seen by a small party of Bavarian soldiers who were passing by. The men emptied their haversacks-all their morning rations— into the girls' aprons, and hastened on. How many good-hearted fellows, who would have willingly shared with each other their last loaf instead of shooting each other, sleep beneath these sods! Now and then I saw, wandering about those parts of the field which were clear of grain, women in black, whose object could not be doubtful. In Metz, I was told that there have come to reside a considerable number of German widows and families, in order that they may be near the resting-place of their beloved, and that, week after week, they may be seen wandering about the battle-fields, with the hope that by some chance they may discover the spot where the lost one lies, or some little relic of him. One, indeed, I met, a widow who had come from Bavaria to live near the field on which her husband had found an undiscoverable grave. This widow, after some conversation, invited me to come to her humble home and examine some manuscripts and drawings which her late husband. had left; for as an artist he had made a large number of designs for the German illustrated papers, and as an author had printed many articles, and left some extended works in MS. which she believed to be important. I spent an evening examining these works, and was HH astonished at the ability displayed in them. Their author seemed to have been of an antiquarian turn. The pictures were chiefly sketches of old church windows and monuments, and copies of innumerable ancient specimens of German heraldry. The manuscripts were very extensive, and I could only examine a small portion of them, but those which I did look into were notes and investigations relating to old German superstitions, rhymes, and customs, written in the true spirit of philosophical enquiry, and such as I am quite sure might, if properly sifted, be of considerable value. Hans Weineger was the name of this artist and author for whom the year 1870 held nothing better than an unknown grave in a foreign land. At Rezonville the driver stopped his horses at a certain spot, and pointing to a house said, "There is the house in which the King slept on the night of the battle of Gravelotte.' I remarked that it was said he had only a piece of black bread for his supper and an ambulance for his bed, and I imagine Bazaine fared better on the same night. Ah, yes,' replied the driver -quite a philosopher in his way'Ah, yes, and the King is now master of Metz.' On entering the village of Gravelotte, we stopped at the one inn which the place affords the 'Cheval d'Or.' It is a miserable little inn, and Gravelotte is about as insignificant a place as ever gave name to a great event. At the door of the inn were old women and one or two children selling fragments of bombshells, chassepôt balls, spikes and brass eagles from German helmets, and other relics. This village preThis village presented one aspect which distinguished it from others that I had passed through, namely, the large number of children playing in its streets. At Gorze and other villages, when they were made German, nearly all the families which had children emigrated into French territory, it having been generally determined after much consultation that patriotism demanded that the children of French parents should be brought up French. Some of these villages, therefore-notably Gorze-are as childless as Hamelin town after the Pied Piper had taken his famous revenge at not being paid for removing its rats by carrying off its children. But there would seem to be no danger of the population of Gravelotte, small as it is, dying out. An aged woman at the Cheval d'Or' pointed out a house just opposite as that in which Napoleon III. had passed the night of the 15th of August-that day which had for so many years been his fête day, but now witnessed no flag raised in his honour from one end of France to the other. "The Prince Imperial,' said the old woman, 'slept in a different house on this side of the street. I watched the Emperor as he came out in the morning to start on the Verdun road. He looked worn and sick-he looked dreadful. He walked about and around, and couldn't keep still while the horses were being hitched to the carriage, the Prince standing by, looking at him with a very sad face. All the party were pale and trembling, and after seeing them I made sure that it was all over with us.' The old woman said that when the battle began to rage about them no one expected to be alive the next hour, and most of the villagers fled to the woods. Over in the vicinity of Malmaison I observed a large new factory standing on the spot where I well remembered seeing a huge house burning, sending up a high column of jet black smoke, which contrasted curiously with the snowwhite smoke of battle. I little knew then that the picturesque column would remain in the memory of all who saw it as the most fearful monument of that day; for it was in that factory that the French had placed over two hundred wounded men, but having failed to raise the Geneva flag over it, it was not respected by the German artillery, and soon caught fire. The wounded Frenchmen all perished in the flames. I walked over to the little church. Beside and around its tower the battle had raged with the utmost fury. Its little graveyard faces the street, separated from it by a stone wall, which the French had perforated for their guns and used as a fortress. Indeed the western side of nearly every house in all the villages of this region was similarly perforated, the marks of the holes remaining. Behind the graveyard of the Gravelotte church is another wall, and, after a garden, a third one. The French had defended each of these walls with great resolution; and when I visited the spot on the day after the struggle, the graveyard and the garden behind it were literally filled with dead men. The church was filled with the wounded, whose shrieks and groans made the place too dreadful for one to linger near it. But now the graveyard was green and peaceful as ever, and in the church a few aged people were gathered about a priest who was going through his service, and the past of three years before appeared only as a frightful dream from which one has been relieved. If the failure of the French to hold what it would really seem they had gained on the 16th-the road at Vionville-seems unaccountable, their inability to hold the vast heights between Gravelotte and the Metz forts-St. Quentin, St. Julien, and Plappeville-appears even more unaccountable. Their retreat, as one now surveys the situation, seems simply astounding. Just beyond Gravelotte, hardly more than a hundred yards, the land sinks into a precipitous valley, which extends, for a mile or two. The other side of this valley, which was held by the French, is nearly a hundred feet higher than the side close to Gravelotte. The Germans had to descend into this valley and then climb the opposite side, more than two hundred feet, and take the French position in the face of a furious fire from the mitrailleuse, and from the hundreds of gravel pits in which the French had hid themselves. These heights were held by the men of Frossard, Montaudan, Nagel and Verge, but they only succeeded in making, their enemy pay a heavy price for his success in scaling and occupying them. Across one end of this valley, the great macadamised Verdun road, lined with trees, the possession of which was being so hotly contested, runs by a deep pass, the banks on each side being forty feet high. Along this cutting it was that during the battle the Westphalian Uhlans made a desperate dashing charge, intended probably to divert and bring upon themselves some of the terrible fire which the French were directing against the hosts that were filtering through Gravelotte. Nearly all of these gallant Uhlans perished. Next day the road was lined with their dead bodies and those of their horses, though many of them had been borne away to burial on the hill from which death had flamed down upon them. Upon that hill I now again stood recalling that beautiful day at whose dawn I had stood beside the vast pit in which hundreds of brave men (French and Germans side by side) were being covered, while a choir chanted over them the funeral hymns of the Fatherland. And while this went on, Moltke, and Bismarck, and other generals were standing on the brow of the hill, gazing through their field-glasses over upon the angry walls of Metz, and upon Fort St. Quentin, whose height was alive with the legions destined never to issue there from except as prisoners of war. Here, then, and on August 18, 1870, the issue of the great war between France and Germany was decided. All that came afterwards was the inevitable consequence of this battle. By it the great army of France had its back hopelessly broken, so that it could never again stir as an army, and the parts could never be knit together again. Undoubtedly, after this Bazaine could have made the final and complete victory of the Germans much more costly than it proved to be, had he held out a week or two longer at Metz. He certainly could not have broken through the terrible coil that was around him; but he might, by suffering on, have made it necessary to preserve that coil in its full vigour through a period that was trying the army before Paris to the utmost, and when the Germans needed more men there. The surrender of Metz enabled them to bring upon the beleaguered capital the one blow under which it had to succumb, and the curtain fell on the strangest, wildest drama of modern history. I found a deep pleasure in standing on this height and gazing upon the great battle-plains, and upon the woods from which I had seen issuing the interminable hosts of Germany. The woods were green and beautiful; the battle-fields were golden with ripe corn, and the peaceful reapers were alone to be seen there where the dreadful scythe of death had mowed down men like grass. The fields exhibit no red spots but the poppies, and in the distance even the groups of white crosses are like parterres of flowers. In the foreground were the cheerful gardens with their burning bushes-roses and fuchsias so large and deep-hued that it may bave been such that caused Nizami to say, 'Every flower in the garden of the earth is the heart's-blood of a man.' Sweet Nature has made haste to hide her scars with grass and grain, as if she would persuade her human children to forget theirs. The only thing that I missed from the cheerful scene which I remem bered then just before the battle had raged over it, was the songs of the birds. I well recall that in the clear morning the woods and meadows had been vocal with their songs, and how even in the intervals of the roar of artillery and the hurtling shot the air had been filled with their gentle music. It may have been partly a fancy, but now it seemed to me that the woods and meadows were strangely silent, and that the birds had followed the merry voices of children to other regions. In driving back through the village of Rozerieulles, I observed on certain large houses many boughs and bushes, and was told that this village had been famous in times past for the large flocks of pigeons which had roosted there, constituting the special merchandise of the place. But since the war had desolated the neighbourhood, comparatively few of these birds had returned there, and the inhabitants had hung out thus upon their walls certain boughs to lure them back again. I could only hope in passing on that among the boughs the olive may appear more plentifully, and that with the others the doves of peace may return, and the song of the turtle be once more heard in this sorely stricken land. THE INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE. WHAT is the nature of the pediency of largely employing the W Government of India? Is natives of India in the judicial and it a constitutional monarchy, or a despotism pure and simple? Is it a bureaucracy? Does English law prevail in India? If so, is it the English common law or the equity system that is administered? Are there any laws specially enacted for India? Who enacts them? What is the Civil Service? What are the duties of the Indian magistrates and revenue collectors? Who are the préfets and proconsuls of India that the Times newspaper descants on, and how came these un-English designations to apply to our Indian officers? Are the masses of the people well fed and generally in easy circumstances? If so, whence the destructiveness of the everrecurring famines? Are the Indian police a well-disciplined and efficient body of men? What is the secret of these torture cases that are heard of from time to time, and horrify the English public? What are the numbers approximately of Englishmen in India? Are the people satisfied with our rule? are they patriotic? What are the means of gauging popular opinion in India? We hear much of the 'mild Hindoos.' Are they generally mild? How, then, occurred the revolting horrors of Cawnpoor and the massacres of English elsewhere? What effect have Christian missions had on India? What is the present attitude of the Government towards Christianity and its professors and teachers? Is the old undisguised hostility of the Indian Government to Christian missions (as to all innovations) still apparent in official circles? What is the general verdict of competent persons as to the ex executive departments of Government? Are there any obvious limits to the propriety of such a measure? Are Wahabee conspiracies real dangers to our empire? Is Russian invasion probable-possible? We fear that there are few, indeed, even among well-educated Englishmen, who could reply with knowledge to even such comparatively simple questions as the above. And yet we assume to govern the many peoples and nations that we call India. Our honoured Queen's name is known and reverenced by them all. Her image and superscription are upon the coin they use, and to her Majesty in Council come in the last resort appeals from all the denizens of those vast regions. Finally, our Parliament is the ultimate and irresponsible fountain of all authority exercised in our territory from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. Little as we may estimate the dignity of the relations which we have assumed towards the natives of India, these relations exist as a solemn fact, and one to which they on their part respond by humble confidence in our justice and in our wisdom. Nothing, on the other hand, would so quickly sap the foundations of our power as the, to them, incredible revelation that their humble allegiance was hardly known of in England, and still less prized. The writer was once in camp in a district not far from the foot of the Himalayas, and overheard two countrymen disputing bitterly on a matter they were then litigating. The argument waxed hot and furious, and was at length wound up |