Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 147.djvu/123

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1870, that, after many hours of correspondence, accounts, and business interviews, I left Sedan behind me, with my face turned towards Versailles.

For nearly three months I had been constantly engaged in administering the fund collected by the ‘Daily News’ for the relief of the numerous villages around Sedan, which were embraced in the area of that vast catastrophe.

Having organised a staff to continue the relief in my absence, I was setting out to investigate what necessity might exist for similar relief in the villages around Paris, the funds at my disposal having assumed proportions large enough to justify the extension of operations.

As I branched off from the main road leading from Sedan to Mezières, which follows the valley of the Meuse, and struck into the branch road leading to Chemery, over the Col between La Croix Piaux and the heights of La Marfée, the setting sun was shedding a flood of purple light over the forest-wall of the Ardennes, which rises up for several miles to the northern horizon behind Sedan. It was from the slopes of La Marfée, due south of Sedan, that the King of Prussia, and from La Croix Piaux on the south-west that the Crown-Prince, beheld the drama of the battle of Sedan unfold itself.

At the southern extremity of the boundless forest, the great mass of which is in Belgium, the French department of the Ardennes begins, with Sedan astride on the Meuse for a frontier fortress.

But Sedan paid too dearly for ranking among fortresses, and has been dismantled since, to the great satisfaction of the inhabitants. With Sedan France and brightness begins. All to the northward is comparative gloom and mystery. The vast forest of the Ardennes is still the haunt of the wild boar and the wolf, a fine specimen of which I myself encountered in 1870, as I was journeying to Sedan from Libramont, in Belgium. A very scant human population—a hardy frugal race—subsists in the clearances of the forest, where a thin and ungrateful soil hardly repays the labour of turning it over with the plough.

Many a time during the gloomy autumn of 1870, at all hours up to midnight, had I crossed and recrossed that forest-wall between Sedan and Bouillon, where Godfrey’s castle frowns down on the limpid Semoy, encircling the brown rocks out of which it rises.

For at the outset of our relief operations Bouillon, about six miles on the Belgium side of the frontier, had been the headquarters of the ‘Daily News’ Fund, whither military fourgons, placed at our disposal by the Belgian Minister of War, had conveyed provisions at that time most conveniently, purchasable in Belgium.

Into the deep recesses of the forest the terrified population of the frontier villages of the French department of the Ardennes had fled for their lives, to escape enclosure in the fatal circle of fire and steel drawn by the German armies around the doomed fortress