By seven o’clock last night the 3d and 4th German Corps had completed their concentration at and near this place, and, after extending the lines of entrenchment begun by the 6th Division on capturing Alexandrovo, had gone into fireless bivouac on both sides of the railway line, their tents extending for about a couple of miles in either direction. Several reconnaissances executed by us during the day had elicited that the Russians were marshalling in great force at a place called Waganiek, and were receiving reinforcements from the right bank of the Vistula, by means of a pontoon bridge which had been thrown across the stream a little higher up, at Dobrowniki; but, owing to the dense masses of cavalry which hovered on their front, concealing their movements as a stage curtain hides from view the shifting of the scenes in a theatre, it was impossible for our scouts to bring back more definite information. One item, however, of their intelligence, gathered from a captured Cossack, had a special interest for us, to wit, that the Russian forces immediately in front of us consisted mainly of the 5th and 6th Corps, with part of the 4th (including the relics of Grodnovodsky’s Brigade), and were under the personal command of General Gourko, the hero of the Balkans. On the strength of this information it was decided to attack Gourko before he got his preparations complete, and for this purpose to break bivouac, and start in quest of him at the dawn of day, as Prince Frederick Charles had done with Benedek at Sadowa. I had spent the evening with a particular friend of mine, Captain von Jagdkönig, of Stülpnagel’s Brandenburg Infantry Regiment, and was just on the point of setting out with him on a visit of inspection among the fore-posts, when a Uhlan dashed up with the intelligence that there were signs of a mysterious commotion in front, and that something was audible in the otherwise noiseless night like the distant rumbling of waggon and cannon wheels. Anon other messengers from the front came spurring in with similar news, and as the general purport of all these ‘_Meldungen_’ could no longer be doubted, the bugles were at once set to work, and presently all the silent bivouacs, taking up the shrilling war-note one after the other, like the multiplication of a distant echo, were resonant with the thrilling call to arms; and thanks to the severe training in the discipline of ‘alarms’ which the German army has been put through by the present Emperor since his accession to the throne, the army of the Vistula had all started from its sleep and was standing in perfect battle array, with its face to the suspected foe, within ten minutes of the first trumpet summons.