He was confirmed in his belief by a hurried order to the guards to go eastward with the prisoners.  As the captives, the wounded and the unwounded, marched off through the forest of Senouart they heard at a distance, but behind them, the opening of a huge artillery fire.  It was so tremendous that they could feel the shaking of the earth as they walked, and despite the hurrying of their guards they stopped at the crest of a low ridge to look back.

They gazed across a wide valley toward high green hills, along which they saw rapid and many flashes.  John longed now for the glasses which had been taken from him when he was captured, but he was quite sure that the flashes were made by French guns.  From a point perhaps a mile in front of the prisoners masked German batteries were replying.  Fleury with his extraordinary power of judging sound was able to locate these guns with some degree of approximation.

“Look! the aeroplanes!” said John, pointing toward the hills which he now called to himself the French line.

Numerous dark shapes, forty or fifty at least, appeared in the sky and hovered over the western edge of the wide, shallow basin.  John was sure that they were the French scouts of the blue, appearing almost in line like troops on the ground, and his heart gave a great throb.  No doubt could be left now, that this German army was being attacked in force and with the greatest violence.  It followed then that the entire German line was being assailed, and that the French victory was continuing its advance.  The Republic had rallied grandly and was hurling back the Empire in the most magnificent manner.

All those emotions of joy and exultation that he had felt the day before returned with increased force.  In daily contact he liked Germans as well as Frenchmen, but he thought that no punishment could ever be adequate for the gigantic crimes of kings.  Napoleon himself had been the champion of democracy and freedom, until he became an emperor and his head swelled so much with success that he thought of God and himself together, just as the Kaiser was now thinking.  It was a curious inversion that the French who were fighting then to dominate Europe were fighting now to prevent such a domination.  But it was now a great French republican nation remade and reinvigorated, as any one could see.

The guards hurried them on again.  Another mile and they stopped once more on the crest of a low hill, where it seemed that they would remain some time, as the Germans were too busy with a vast battle to think much about a few prisoners.  It was evident that the whole army was engaged.  The old general, the other generals, the princes and perhaps dukes and barons too, were in the thick of it.  John’s heart was filled with an intense hatred of the very name of royalty.  Kings and princes could be good men personally, but as he saw its work upon the huge battle fields of Europe he felt that the institution itself was the curse of the earth.