"Croat fellows, in this Farmstead of ours," says De Ligne, "had fallen to shooting pigeons." The night had been unusually dark; the Austrian Army had squatted into woods, into office-houses, farm-villages, over a wide space of country; and only as the day rose, began to dribble in.

By count, they are still 50,000; but heart-broken, beaten as men seldom were.

"What sound is that ?" men asked yesterday at Brieg, forty miles off; and nobody could say, except that it was some huge Battle, fateful of Silesia and the world.

Breslau had it louder; Breslau was still more anxious.

"What IS all that ?" asked somebody (might be Deblin the Shoemaker, for anything I know) of an Austrian sentry there: "That?
That is the Prussians giving us such a beating as we never had." What news for Deblin the Shoemaker, if he is still above ground!-- "Prince Karl, gathering his distracted fragments, put 17,000 into Breslau by way of ample garrison there; and with the rest made off circuitously for Schweidnitz; thence for Landshut, and down the Mountains, home to Konigsgratz,--self and Army in the most wrecked condition.