But in spite of Major von Pestel’s cordiality, it was rather a tedious time. Men asked each other if it were possible that the French on the Spicheren were not aware of the weakness of the land on the other side of the frontier. The Prussian infantrymen and Uhlans, it was true, were manipulated dexterously and assiduously to make a battalion seem a brigade and a couple of squadrons a powerful cavalry force; yet it was felt that the place was being held only by dint of sheer impudence--for there were no supports as yet nigh at hand--and that the bubble must burst summarily if Frossard should abandon his unaccountable inactivity. Why the soldiers in red breeches lay so long basking lazily in the sun on the Spicheren slopes the men of Saarbrück could not comprehend; but the day must surely be near now, they said one to the other, when the red-breeches would gird up their loins and roll their columns on over the Reppertsberg, the exercise-ground, and the Winterberg, and across the Saar into the Köllerthaler Wald or the Pfalz. In their path--surely they must have known it--there stood but an open town, a couple of bridges partially barricaded with barrels, a single battalion of infantry and two reasonably strong squadrons of Uhlans. The 1st of August, while the French on the Spicheren Berg were still supine, brought to near Saarbrück what all hoped was the earnest at last of a host, not alone of resistance, but also of invasion. On the afternoon of that day, the 1st and 3rd battalions of the Hohenzollern regiment, with a battery of artillery, reached the vicinity and bivouacked on the edge of the forest at Raschpfuhl, some two miles north-west of the town. General Gneisenau also arrived and assumed the command. [Illustration: LOCALITY of the Battle of SAARBRUCK] On the morning of the 2nd, when the Hohenzollerns were basking in their sunshiny bivouac, the French Emperor, with his son, was travelling by train from Metz to Forbach. The German videttes down the valley heard the gusts of cheering with which Frossard’s soldiers welcomed the Head of the State and his heir. Ignorant of the cause, some attributed the cheering to the announcement of a French success somewhere; others ascribed it to an extra issue of wine. How were the honest Uhlans to discern that the imperial parent had come to the frontier to make a military promenade wherewithal to throw dust in the eyes of his Parisians, and that “Lulu,” as they impertinently styled the heir of the dynasty, accompanied his father that he might receive his “baptism of fire”?