After all those days of cold and deadly rain the dawn broke uncertainly through a dense mist that covered all the swellings of the tumbled land. The extreme right of the invaders’ line, the Prussian regiments with their king, reaching southward as far as the Paris road, was in the thick of that fog. Northward it lay somewhat more loosely and thinly where the Austrians formed the left extremity. But everywhere it was too dense for any observation. Such scouting as was attempted groped painfully yard by yard in that confusion, and there was at first no wind at all, nor any lifting of the mist. It was some two hours after sunrise before the first break in this veil appeared, and that but a slight one. We have the relation from the pen of a man who saw it. He was out with a small patrol of cavalry, feeling and groping thus beyond the Paris road to discover what the French might be doing under the cover of such white nothingness, when a momentary air raised the curtain for fifty yards or so, and he found himself point-blank against a battery of four guns, the French gunners standing idly by. Their position was such that, had the day been clear, they would have enfiladed the whole Prussian line. The young man set down in his diary this commonplace, of awful meaning to a man who had had one such glimpse in such a fog on such a morning: “Upon what threads of chance do not the fates of empires depend!” But this extreme battery of the French knew nothing of their opportunity. The fog closed again immediately. The vague, mounted figures that the gunners had seen were swallowed up at once, and the effect of that strange encounter was to make the officer in command of the guns withdraw them, fearing that in his feeling through the mist on to that little height he had pushed his pieces too far. The Prussian patrol _heard_, though they now could not see even so few yards away, the hoofs of the horses sogging up with the limber, the clanking of the hooked guns, and the retirement across the moist stubble. They heard the swish of the wheels and occasional commands fainter and fainter, and then nothing. As the morning advanced, however, the wind which had carried the rain of all those days--a wind from the south and east--began to blow again, and drove the mist before it into very low, scurrying clouds, so low that they covered the insignificant ridge of Argonne and so low that the steeple of Sainte-Menehould, the little county town at the foot of the hills, disappeared into them. But those low clouds left the rolls of land in the plain itself free from their mist, and at last the armies could see each other; and this is what the Prussian line drawn up upon the one ridge saw as it looked eastward to the other.