The French line was soon thrown back, and we filled our wagons with wounded and started for the city, the shells still falling unpleasantly thick and near.  One of them struck right under our coffee-pot, and, exploding, sent it in a hundred directions.  The horses which drew it did not happen to be hit, but they took fright and dashed off, wrecking what was left of the coffee-pot wagon.  We got back to town as fast as we knew how that day.  We tried to go out again at night, but could make no headway against the crowd of wagons, artillery and the retreating army on the roads.  It was an utterly demoralized mob.  We barely escaped massacre by a regiment of Belleville National Guards, who were mad, raving mad, accusing everybody of incapacity and treason.  The next day we went out with a burying-party, and found members of this same National Guard thickly strewn among the vines of Buzenval and Montretout, and we buried them.  In their new knap-sacks we found crested note-paper and many such things, showing their owners’ rank and want of military experience at the same time.  Some of these articles were stained with blood.  We saw out there the young lady who was soon to have married Henri Regnauit.  She was looking for his body among the dead, and found it during the day.  Young Regnault, it is claimed, was introducing a new school in French painting.  He had made some remarkable studies in Algiers, one of the results of which was the well-known picture of Salome in the Salon of 1870.  I have said we saw his betrothed searching for his body among the dead; and the memory of that sweet, brave girl in that awful scene has lent a pathos to the story of his life and death which I do not get out of the writers and painters who have since dwelt so much and so lovingly upon the subject.

George McFarland of New York and two other fellows got lost from our wagons the night before, when we left the field.  They took refuge in a tomb, where half a dozen poor wounded had crawled before them.  They remained there for three long hours, hearing the shells burst around them from a tremendous cross-fire of the Germans.  These three fellows, by the by, were the unlucky men of the ambulance.  Whenever, by any chance, any of us were missing late at night, it was always they.  When the wagons were full, the roads dusty or covered with sleet, it was they too who failed to get a seat, and had to walk to town.  When our eatables had disappeared, or we had no wine or drink of any kind, they were sure to come in hungry, thirsty and foot-sore from some distant part of the field.  At Champigny they slept on a billiard-table; upon the Plateau d’Avron they just happened around when the Prussians began the awful bombardment which obliged the French to scurry off, leaving guns and stores.  This, they said, was their worst day out, for they half ran, half rolled down the hillside through a rain of shells, about a hundred guns, they maintained, having been concentrated upon that particular plateau.  At Rueil one of them was just coming up to get a cup of coffee when the shell struck our coffee-pot.  I witnessed the escape that time, and it did truly seem miraculous.