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136 WITH THE GERMAN ARMIES IN THE WEST
Bijouterie (jeweller), and the like, might just as well have put
up their shutters. A school has been converted into an
intermediate base hospital, and the Place d’Alsace is the
" motor-vehicle hospital," or open-air workshop. This may
not be photographed, as the sentry informs me when I
approach with my camera. On one of the " patients " under-
going treatment here, the inscription " Mannheim Brewery
No. 6 " indicates its avocation in peace time. Even such
motor-lorries, then, are mobilised for service in war time
!
All is arranged and regulated beforehand with the utmost
forethought and exactitude. But, for this very reason, every-
thing goes like clockwork when the hour has come. The
honest brewer in Mannheim had no need to enquire what he
had to do when the mobilisation order was issued. He knew
it, and sent his motor-lorries to the prearranged spot.
Impavidus numero victus 1870 is the inscription engraved
on a memorial near a street still showing traces of the fighting,
to which indeed the marks of bullets on its houses bear witness.
Two bridges across the Meuse, one of stone, the other of iron,
have been blown up by the French and replaced by the
Germans.
We are now out in the open country and pass over the
scene of the hotly contested sanguinary fights of the 25th
and 26th of August. The entrenchments have not been filled
in, and the parapets and trenches are still in the same state,
though they have crumbled here and there. I was told that
many of them had been thrown up by the local population,
whose assistance thus gave the defenders an advantage over
the attack.
Near the village of Frénois we run up to the little chateau
of Bellevue, where after the great battle of the ist of Sep-
tember, 1870, the capitulation of the French Army was signed
on the morning of September 2nd, and where King William I.
of Prussia had his historic meeting with the Emperor of the
French, Napoleon III. The two monarchs met on the small
glass veranda on the ground floor, which forms a porch or
vestibule to the chateau.
The furniture which was there at the time has all dis-
appeared and there is no relic of those days remaining. Yet
there is one ! The aristocratic and venerable lady—who owns
Bellevue, is still there, bowed with age and grief, and is now
witnessing for the second time all the phases of a Franco-
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