CHAPTER IV.
PRINCE XAVIER OF SAXONY.
The Light Troop had gone more than a mile from the field with the pursuing cavalry before it was ordered to return on the service just stated. When falling back, we passed through a hamlet where the baggage of our brigade was lying, and there we were surrounded by our soldiers' wives, clamorously inquiring for tidings of the past day.
"Oh, please your honour, gude sir," cried one, holding her baby to her bare breast with one hand, while the other clung to my stirrup-leather, her eyes streaming with tears the while; "can you tell us if the regiment has been engaged, for heavy has the firing been all day?"
"Have the Greys suffered—have the Greys suffered?"
"Did you see my puir gudeman—he is in the 1st troop—John Drummond, sir?"
"Shot—my poor Willie shot!" shrieked another. "Then God help his puir bairns and me in this waefu' country, for we ne'er shall see the bonnie Braes o' Angus again!"
Such were some of the cries I heard on all sides as we hurried through the hamlet at a trot, and returned to the field on which the moonlight had succeeded the long level flush of the set sun.
There lay all the usual amount of death and agony—the sad paraphernalia of war—and the pale dead in every variety of attitude and contortion, so close to each other that in some places one might have stepped from body to body.
Already had many been stripped nude as when they came into the world by those wretches who hover like carrion crows on the skirts of an army; and their pale marble skins gleamed horribly white with their black and gaping wounds in the cold moonlight.
Amid these many horrors—the dying and the dead, legs, arms, blood-gouts and spattered brains—some phlegmatic German infantry were quietly bivouacking and lighting fires to cook their supper. Others lay down weary and worn, their mouths parched with thirst, and their canteens empty, after twelve hours' marching and fighting.
As we rode slowly over the field to scare plunderers and protect the wounded, I heard, amid a group of officers whom we passed, one laughing loudly, and found him to be Major Shirley. A revulsion of feeling made the flow of this man's spirits extravagant; and here, amid the rows and piles of dead and wounded—amid the expiring on that solemn, harrowing, and moonlighted plain—he was joking and laughing, like a fool or a drunkard—he, the poltroon who could not articulate an order when under a fire at noon!
"His weird is no come yet," I heard old Sergeant Duff mutter as we rode on in extended order, our horses sometimes stumbling over what appeared to be a heap of freshly gathered grain or hemp. These had been uprooted by some kind hand, and spread over a dead comrade to protect or conceal his body from plunderers; and everywhere lay fragments of exploded shells and the half imbedded cannon-shot that had ploughed up the grass or corn in long furrows.
We sought for and interred, separately, in his cloak, the body of poor Keith, our young lieutenant. Elsewhere the dead were rapidly interred; some by lantern-light, and with them, undistinguished among the rank and file, Prince Xavier of Saxony.
One soldier of our 51st got his diamond star, and sold it to a Jew for some hundred pounds, which he spent in six months, keeping the regiment in an uproar while the money lasted; another got his purse, which was filled with louis d'ors; and a third 51st man got his watch, which was studded with brilliants. Some Westphalian boors then stripped the body, which was flung into a pit and interred with about twenty others.
All the churches in Minden and its vicinity were converted into hospitals. The interior of the old Cathedral—whither I rode to inquire after Hob Elliot and some others of ours—presented a very singular scene. It is a dark but stately edifice, said to have been formerly the palace of the Pagan King Wittikind, but was turned by him into a church after his conversion.
Along the high-arched Gothic aisles were rows of wounded soldiers—British, French, and Hanoverian—groaning, praying, cursing, and rustling fretfully among the bloody straw on which they lay. Knapsacks, haversacks, and accoutrements hung on every carved knob, and there was not a saint who did not bear a load of sword-belts, bridles, or canteens slung about his neck or piled within his niche, while, in the Gothic porch, the chapter-house, and the painted chapel of Our Lady of Minden, stood surgeons' blocks for operations; and there were Dr. Probe and all the medical men of the army busy in their shirt-sleeves with knife and saw, and up to their bared elbows in blood.
There was no time, nor was it then the fashion to reduce fractures; so around each military Æsculapius lay piles of legs, arms, hands, and feet, amputated as fast as their owners could be brought from the field; and these revolting fragments were cast into a corner until they could be carted away to the pits that were being dug by our working parties amid the harvest-fields on the plain of Todtenhausen.
But such is war, and such are its grim concomitants.
On the noon of the day after the battle I was returning from the visit to this hospital, or cathedral, and was proceeding to rejoin the Light Troop which was bivouacked in a hemp-field at some distance from the pits where the dead lay, when two French officers and a trumpeter, all mounted, and accompanied by six dragoons, came suddenly upon me at an angle of the road.
As one bore a white banner on a sergeant's pike, I recognised at once a flag of truce, so we simultaneously reined up and courteously saluted each other. One wore the gorgeous uniform of Colonel of the Regiment de Bretagne; the other was a French Hussar officer, in whom I recognised the Chevalier de Boisguiller.
"Peste! monsieur," said he, "you and I have the luck of meeting in strange places, but seldom under pleasant circumstances. We are in haste, for those we have left behind are not likely to wait for us, pressed as they now are by your cavalry; so, can you direct us to the quarters of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick?"
"With pleasure. You are the bearer——"
"Nay, my friend Monsieur le Comte is bearer of a letter from the Maréchal de Contades, our commander-in-chief, to the Prince, inquiring into the fate of Prince Xavier of Saxony."
"His fate?" I repeated, and shook my head.
"Oui, monsieur," said the officer, who bore the rank of count, with great earnestness; "if he is wounded we come to offer a suitable equivalent in exchange for him; if, unhappily, killed, to solicit the restoration of his remains, for he is the brother of her Majesty the Queen of France, and I had the honour to be his particular friend."
While we were speaking, a royal coach and six, accompanied by a squadron of French Household Troops, preceded by an officer bearing a white flag, and by four trumpeters, wheeled round the angle of the road and joined us.
"Here comes the Prince's carriage, with Monsieur Monjoy to receive him, whether dead or alive," said Boisguiller.
With some reluctance I informed these officers that I had seen the Prince cut down by one of our own troopers, and almost immediately afterwards pierced by a ball in front of the grenadier company of our 51st Foot; and that his body had been buried with others on the field.
This information filled the Frenchman with a sorrow that seemed genuine; and the colonel of the Regiment de Bretagne, a handsome, but stern-looking young man, actually wept aloud.
Prince Ferdinand, to whose quarters I conducted them, gave orders to open some of the pits in the field; so a working party was detailed, and a search instituted among the naked and mangled dead for the body of the unfortunate Prince.
No less than eighty of these horrid graves were unclosed, and their poor occupants pulled by the legs or arms from among the mould and examined before the discovery of the Prince's piebald charger in one hecatomb gave hope that his late rider's remains might be near; and accordingly, in one that was filled with Mousquetaires Gris et Noires, we found a nude and bloody corpse, which all the French officers at once declared to be Prince Xavier of Saxony, stripped even to his boots.
He had received a bullet in the left temple, which was his mortal wound. His right arm was found to be broken. This had been done by the sword of Hob Elliot. His fine hair was still neatly dressed, tied by a blue satin ribbon, and powdered with brown maréchale.
The poor remains were rolled in a large crimson velvet mantle, bearing a royal star, and placed in the coach, which was driven rapidly off, followed by its escort, to which all our guards, sentinels, and out-pickets presented arms.