General von Kettler knew that in spite of his momentary success, he could expect no further advance from his half-starved, cold, and weary brigade, and therefore he ordered them half a mile to the rear.  The Garibaldian troops, who thought victory could be gained by one strenuous effort, tried to arrest the departing troops, endeavoring to bring them back to another advance.  When they were at last distributed in the villages, the exhausted Germans found rest and refreshment for the first time for forty-eight hours.  They had lost a tenth part of their powers of endurance in those dreadful two days spent on the hills in sight of Dijon.

The brigade had retreated, as one who jumps goes a step or two backward to obtain more impetus.  The next morning, January 23, they ware again on the march to Dijon.  This time, however, they chose another way to avoid the batteries of Talant and Fontaine, and approached the town from the north instead of from the west.  Following the road and the railway embankment from Langres to Dijon, the German troops pressed forward without halting.  The French outposts and breastworks soon fell before the advancing Germans, and made no stand till they got to the Faubourg St. Nicholas, the northeast suburb of Dijon.  The greater number of the Germans stationed themselves on the embankment, but the walls of the vineyard, plentifully loopholed, pressed them hard with shot.  Toward evening the second battalion of the 61st, to which Wilhelm belonged, received the order to advance.  Over pleasure-gardens and vineyards they went, through poor people’s deserted houses the four companies of skirmishers worked their way to the entrance of the Rue St. Catherine, a long, narrow street.  Just at the end stood a large three-storied factory, whose front, filled with large high windows, looked like a framework of stone and iron.  At every window there was a crowd of soldiers; the whole front bristled with death-dealing weapons.  Sixteen windows were on each floor, and at every window at least three rows of four soldiers stood.  It was therefore easy to reckon the total number at six hundred at the very least.

As the points of the German bayonets came round the corner in sight of this fortress a terrible change took place:  in the twinkling of an eye all the openings blazed out at once, and the building seemed to shake from its foundations; forty-eight red tongues of flame blazed out suddenly to right and left, as if so many throats of Vulcan or abysses into hell had been opened, and soon the whole building was wrapped in a thick white smoke, through which the men were invisible.  Then a fresh roar and fresh bursts of flame, and fresh puffing out of white smoke, and so it went on, flash after flash, roar after roar came from that awful wall, whose windows were every now and then visible between the volleys of smoke.  Hardly one of the soldiers within the line of fire was left standing, numbers were crushed, many more