They were Black Hussars.
A distant movement came to his ear at the same time, the soft shock of thousands of footfalls on the highway. He sprang up and started forward, but a trooper warned him back with a stern gesture, and he stood at the foot of the shrine, excited but outwardly cool, listening to the approaching trample.
He knew what it meant now; these passing videttes were the dust before the tempest, the prophecy of the deluge. For the sound on the distant highway was the sound of infantry, and a host was on the march, a host helmeted with steel and shod with steel, a vast live bulk, gigantic, scaled in mail, whose limbs were human, whose claws were lances and bayonets, whose red tongues were flame-jets from a thousand cannon.
The German army had entered France and the province of Lorraine was a name.
Like a hydra of three hideous heads the German army had pushed its course over the Saar, over the Rhine, over the Lauter; it sniffed at the frontier line; licked Wissembourg and the Spicheren with flaming tongues, shuddered, coiled, and glided over the boundary into the fair land of Lorraine. Then, like some dreadful ringed monster, it cast off two segments, north, south, and moved forward on its belly, while the two new segments, already turned to living bodies, with heads and eyes and contracted scales, struggled on alone, diverging to the north and south, creeping, squirming, undulating, penetrating villages and cities, stretching across hills and rivers, until all the land was shining with shed scales and the sky reeked with the smoke of flaming tongues. This was the invasion of France. Before it Frossard recoiled, leaving the Spicheren a smoking hell; before it Douay fell above the flames of Wissembourg; and yet Gravelotte had not been, and Vionville was a peaceful name, and Mars-la-Tour lay in the sunshine, mellow with harvests, gay with the scarlet of the Garde Impériale.
On the hill-sides of Lorraine were letters of fire, writing for all France to read, and every separate letter was a flaming village. The Emperor read it and bent his weary steps towards Châlons; Bazaine read it and said, "There is time;" MacMahon, Canrobert, Leboeuf, Ladmirault read it and wondered idly what it meant, till Vinoy turned a retreat into a triumph, and Gambetta, flabby, pompous, unbalanced, bawled platitudes from the Palais Bourbon.
In three splendid armies the tide of invasion set in; the Red Prince tearing a bloody path to Metz, the Crown Prince riding west by south, resting in Nancy, snubbing Toul, spreading out into the valley of the Marne to build three monuments of bloody bones--Saint-Marie, Amanvilliers, Saint-Privat.