Meanwhile, our real object, which was the delivery of our main attack on the right flank of the Russians, was being successfully attained. It can scarcely be expected that I, or any other single eye-witness, should be able to detail the incidents and development of a battle which extended along a line of more than six miles, as the reasons which preclude a General from exercising anything like unity of command over so vast an area form an equal restraint upon the War Correspondent’s power of all-embracing observation. Even of conflicts like Königgrätz and Sedan, a pretty complete description of a general kind could always be given by one pen by reason of the smoke which betrayed the whereabouts of friend and foe and the fluctuations of the fight; but now that science has robbed war of one of its most picturesque appendages, a modern battle by day is a most bewildering spectacle. You hear the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry, but this incessant thunder is accompanied by no lightning-flash. You see men flinging up their arms and falling around you, but know not whence they received their death-wounds any more than if they had been stricken down by the invisible arrows of the Sun-God Apollo. Naturally enough this must have a most demoralising effect on all soldiers, and when Blücher at Lingy said: ‘My men like to see the enemy,’ he was only characterising the fighting men of most nations. Still, as far as I could discover, the German Infantry were less disconcerted by these unseen terrors of modern war than were their Russian foes, who are most dour and indomitable devils when they can fight shoulder to shoulder and in the mass, but lose much of their _morale_ and their dogged powers of resistance when each man has mainly to rely upon his own intelligence (not a very marked feature of the Slavonic soldier), his own initiative, and his own isolated sources of courage. Indeed, we thought we could now and then detect traces of panic among the soldiers of the Czar; and in one case, at least, we distinctly saw an officer draw his revolver on some of his men who would rather have fled than fallen before a foe whom they could neither see nor feel. In spite, however, of these demoralising influences which were at work among the scattered ranks of the Russians, they held their ground with singular tenacity; and the battle had thus raged for hours without our being able to carry out completely our main purpose, which was, under cover of the feint attack that we had directed against the enemy’s centre, to turn his right and roll him up—a manœuvre, as we knew, which Prince George of Saxony was equally fain to accomplish with the Russian left.