'They pass--they pass--they will never end. I have almost forgotten my fear. I am partly in front of my sheltering tree. The drums and the fifes cease to sound, and music replaces it from a band marching in front of a group of staff-officers. They play a warlike march, a battle-hymn, and all down the line of troops, from the foremost company which has reached the Chateau of Versailles, to the last which is leaving the Chesnay, shouts of triumph arise and drown the brazen voice of the cymbals. The victorious chant thunders down the wind. It is the _Marseillaise_--the _Marseillaise_ which our own troops played as they left for the frontier, the hymn which was to render every French soldier invincible, which I had sung myself when we had been so sure of supremacy, and when I had planted my little tricolour flags on the map, all along the route from Paris to Berlin in a Via Triumphalis! 'Now the artillery comes on; its black cannon on their blue gun-carriages, with their attendants on foot and in saddle, wearing helmets surmounted with brass balls. There are flowers in the mouths of the cannon, and they are garlanded with ivy and green boughs. The cavalry follow on the artillery; dragoons, cuirassiers, hussars with white facings and a death's-head on their shakoes. Then come the carriages, the waggons, the vehicles with ladders, the baggage-carts.... All at once my heart sickens and stands still. Behind the wheels of the last waggons I seem to see some red cloth. Yes, it is our red cloth--our soldiers. Between two rows of Prussians, who have their bayonets fixed, our prisoners march without arms, dirty, ragged, miserable, and ashamed. There are at least two hundred of them, and I strain my eyes after these, my countrymen, who are destined to rot in German fortresses.' It seems to me that in no contemporary fiction do we possess studies of spectacles, of sentiments, of street-life in a momentous hour, more accurate, more vivid, more simple in diction, more touching in suggestion, than in the above passages.