72 Chapters on Animals. 



as a spectacle. I had almost written that the poetry of 

 warfare was to be best seen in a charge of the Life-guards 

 at a review, but there is a yet deeper poetry in some of 

 war's realities where the element of beauty is not so con- 

 spicuously present. The boy's ideal of the war-horse is 

 that coal-black, silken coated charger that bears the 

 helmeted cuirassier, and all those glittering arms and orna- 

 ments dazzle the imagination and fill the martial dreams of 

 youth. Well, it is very fine, very beautiful, and we like to 

 see the Royal Guards flashing past after the Court car- 

 riages ; but during the war between France and Germany 

 I saw another sight, and renounced the boy's ideal. 



The armies of Chanzy had been defeated on the Loire, 

 and their broken remnants passed as they could to join the 

 desperate enterprise of Bourbaki for the relief of Belfort. 

 In the depth of that terrible winter, the roads covered with 

 snow, with a bitter wind sweeping across the country from 

 the east, and every water-fall a pillar of massy ice, there 

 came two or three thousand horsemen from those disas- 

 trous battle-fields. Slowly they passed over the hills that 

 divide the eastern from the western rivers, an irregular 

 procession broken by great intervals, so that we always 

 thought no more were coming, yet others followed, strag- 

 gling in melancholy groups. What a contrast to the brill- 

 iance of a review ! How different from the marching-past 

 when the Emperor sat in his embroidery on the Champ-de- 

 Mars and the glittering hosts swept before him, saluting 

 with polished swords ! Ah, these horsemen came from 

 another and a bloodier field of Mars ; they had been doing 

 the rough work of the war-god and bore the signs of it ! 

 The brass of their helmets shone no more than the dull 

 leopard-skin beneath it, the lancers had poles without pen- 

 nons, the bits and stirrups were rusty, and the horses were 



