Well, we have had our glance at the wars of the century--a cursory glance enough, and attracted chiefly by the red coat of the British soldier; let us now turn over the leaves of our book, and pass from battle to battle. We shall “go as we please”--passing from Plevna to Austerlitz, from Bull Run to Gravelotte, just as the spirit moves us, and unfettered by sequence either of date or place. Now we shall follow the fortunes of the Great Napoleon, now of Napoleon “the Little”; now of Wellington, now of Roberts and Wolseley; now of Moltke, Skobeleff, MacMahon, Sherman, Garibaldi. At one moment we shall be listening to the thunder of a broadside from the _Victory_, at the next to the bombardment of Alexandria. We shall pass from the shots and shells of civilised warfare to the assegais and spears of the Zulu, the hatchets of the Maori, the knives of the Soudanese. We shall see all the glories of war, deeds of daring and heroism, acts of noble self-sacrifice and devotion; but we shall see also that reverse side of the picture which should indeed be engraved still deeper on our minds: we shall see that its glories are outweighed by its horrors, its sufferings, its pitifulness. [Illustration] [Illustration: Saarbrück The Baptism _of_ Fire By Archibald Forbes THE PRINCE IMPERIAL] The pleasant little frontier town of Saarbrück was a very interesting place at the beginning of the Franco-German war. Within the distance of a mile from the low heights covering Saarbrück towards the west, ran the frontier line dividing France from Germany. The place was being held “on the bounce,” for its garrison consisted merely of one battalion of the Hohenzollern infantry regiment and two squadrons of the 7th Rhineland Uhlans. All along this frontier line down in the broad smooth valley between the Saarbrück heights and the loftier and more abrupt Spicheren heights inside of the French border, the hostile piquets and videttes confronted each other. As one stood in front of the little “Bellevue” public-house on the Reppertsberg, one saw in the plain below among the trees a Prussian piquet of Uhlans and infantry; and on the little knolls further in advance the videttes circling singly, their lance-pennons fluttering in the wind. Several hundred yards further away, by the side of the Forbach road, was the frontier custom-house which the French now used as a piquet house. Outside of it the red-breeched linesmen were to be seen sitting or lounging about in considerable numbers. In their front was the chain of their videttes. All along the frontier line, to the right and left of this point, there ran this arrangement of outposts confronting each other. On the Spicheren upland a French force was gradually gathering until, by the end of July, the whole of Frossard’s army corps was massed on the Spicheren, within gunshot distance of the low heights covering Saarbrück.