What I saw at Sedan.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 852, 29 June 1888, Page 8

What I saw at Sedan.

Cornhill Magazine.

What queer camp-following gentlemen tourists * turned ’ up ! One found himself ‘caught’ in the railway station at Sedan during the engagement. Of course he couldn’t go out except at the risk of his life. So he amused himself with the innermost doors of the office, and appeared to be absolutely unaffected by the awfulneas of the scenes around him. They were merely historic and entertaining in his eyes. ‘ Look here, ’ he said to me, opening a small bag full of railway tickets. ‘ I have got some souvenirs of Sedan.’ They were all marked ‘ Sedan, Sep. I,’ aud indicated an immense number of quite impossible journeys, such as that to Metz, as having been made on that day. While the storm was raging around he had stamped all the tickets he could lay hands on with the date of the battle, till the ink gave out. ‘ These will he curiosities,’ said he, adding, * and I have got money out of the-pocket of a dead soldier ; they say it’s lucky.’ He showed me some silver of which he had robbed a corpse. I met another Englishman (of a well-known name) who had been clapped into custody as suspicious, and had there caught a fever, He looked rather glum. ‘ I can’t speak German,’he said, ‘but I know four words of French and get along with them.’ ‘ What may these be ?’ I asked. ‘ Partant pour la Syrie,’ was his reply. One heard queer tales, the gossip of the war, with little incidents, too small to be reported, but significant enough. Among the oddest sensations I felt in those days was the going into an inn and helping myself to food without leave. One expected an arrest at The hands of a waiter, but nobody was there. The people of the house had’ vanished away—for a time. It was very difficult to get about, especially so as to see fighting. Making an essay one forenoon, and being smartly stopped by a grim German sentry, I tried to explain myself. Never was an attempt more fntile. He glowered at me in a bloodthirsty way, and lowering his rifle to the * charge ’ proceeded without a word of apology to poke at me with the sharp end of it. I withdrew myself speedily. Of course I was nervous. Some people wanted me to go into Metz with a load of surgical and toothsome things for

the sick. I helped to pack the waggon but declined the expedition as they said I should probably be shot as a spy or Frauc-tireur. The story of the battle of Sedan has hardlybeen told to the world yet. It is known that the march of the French army was delayed in order to give a ball to the ladies of Sedan, but none will ever say how many officers stayed in the town wbile the early E art of their engagement was going on. Men, eing disgusted, laid down their still loaded ‘ chassepots ’ in large numbers on the ground. There were printed notices put up in the city after the battle was over (I read them myself) bidding the inhabitants not to be alarmed at the firing which still went on in the fields, since it was caused only by the German fatigue parties who were discharging the Frenoh rifles as they gathered them up. Those were made into piles which at a little distance looked like stacks of rusty iron hurdles, waiting to be carted away. The sight of churches filled from the altar to the west end with wounded men (the dead being put hurriedly outside, like luggage at an inn door waiting for the station omnibus) was made familiar enough to all readers, of contemporary papers, but nothing written could convey a true idea of the bewildered pathos of some with whom life-long placid peaco had been suddenly replaced by wholly unrealised war. I remember a secluded cottage with honeysuckles about the porch and a velvet lawn across which a torrent of fighting had roared. .Its inmates had fled. The grass had been ‘out,’ not with a ‘mower, 1 but with caunou wheels. Nevertheless, the cat was asleep in the sunny bay window, through which one could see an opened piano, with mnsic set out before an empty stool. Sometimes the pathos was almost grotesque. In one place I came across an old family servant, a gardener, who still clung to his master’s house, and had to bury men among the flowerbeds. ‘The officers,’ said he, ‘will be dug up and-sent home into Saxony.’ The digging up of the dead was new to me, not having seen mention of it in any correspondent's letters. Sat, in fact, those of any rank, buried in the shallowest field graves (there is no time to make deep ones), are removed as soon as possible. It is more than embarrasing to a farmer to have fifty .or sixty dead bodies 8 inches below the surface in a wheat stnbble which he wants to plough. Thus the whole area over which a battle has been fought is presently searched for the dead who have been hastily covered with soil. I saw—indeed more than saw—gangs of men engaged in this awful malodorous work, and ceased to blame Hotspur’s fop. This was a little while after the battle ontside Saarbriicken.